Web Analytic Tools for Impact Factor

I’m going to publish my web analytics data weekly on this site. WordPress has it’s own limited site stats. On top of that I linked my Google Analytics account to this notebook, and I’m looking to check out one more analytics software: either Piwik (which is a free open sourced software that you install on your server) or CrazyEgg (which was suggested to me by Alan Marnett of BenchFly fame). Ideally I’d like to do both, but the downfall of installing all these analytic software is that they may bog down the site and cause lengthy loading times which would drive away traffic. Maybe scientists are different and will wait to see content, but I don’t want to take that chance.

Why so many different analytics?

Well from what I can tell, the data that is generated isn’t consistent. I experienced this on my own personal blog which is hosted by Google (Blogger). There are site stats that are incorporated with the Blogger software itself and I initially setup Google Analytics to analyze this blog (before Blogger added analytics). Both sources reveal different information (hits, links, navigation, etc) and the strange thing is that both are Google Analytics. I can’t tell if they are different versions of Analytics or the same version, but the fact is that the same piece of software somehow generates two different results.

So far in my own experience here the same rule applies: Google Analytics tells me one thing and WordPress tells me another. So by adding at least one more piece of software I’ll hopefully be able to get a better account of how my notebook is being used by the public. After all having more data is better than not having enough!

I will publish various pieces of information from all sources like hits for the week, top visited page, relevant references, or whatever else I determine is useful to the cause. Since most of this data is presented to me as charts and graphs, I will upload those graphs here for you to enjoy as well!

This weeks should be particularly enjoyable since I published that ONS vs science infrastructure article. I bet you can’t wait to see the data!