Asymptomatic

There must be intelligent life down here

Statistics, Anyone?

Over the past couple months, and particularly over the last two days, it has become interesting to me what kinds of visitors I am getting to the site and where they’re coming from. There are a few stats packages, and I’ve been working out their benefits and flaws.

I was able to jump on the Google Analytics train before they closed their doors. I installed the required script in the necessary places and waited for stats to roll in. And I waited. And I waited.

Eventually they had enough data to play with (do I not even register in the Google Analytics world as anything but a blip?) and they started showing me some statistics. But. How do you use this thing? Even being a former Urchin 5.0 user, I was still somewhat confused by the interface. Suffice to say, I never really figured it out, and I started to suspect that using Analytics was affecting my AdSense adversely (though I can offer no evidence that this is anything but paranoia), so I simply removed the tags.

Isn’t there something that you can just push a button and get the stats you need? And exactly what stats do you need?