This Google Analytics thingy

..has me excited and I cannot wait till the weekend to write a little about it. Might be an old hat for the tech savvy among you, but this free Google service adds ability to track visits to my blog with far more capabilities than the default out-of-the-box Blogger settings (dashboard --> stats). Screenshot below is from the Blogger Stats page -

Its quite interesting to know Reader demographics for your Blog. For me, inquisitiveness is one primary reason; but, in the long run I view this ability as a means to identify the reading interests of my audience and also to get more visits. Right now I am not generating too much traffic and it's just been 1 day since I have Analytics monitoring my Blog.

The features seem to be interesting. One of them being the ability to track page visits by City/State within a country. May not be accurate (the one from Calcutta, is actually the ISP location of a reader in Guwahati) but it gives a very close approximation. Those Sunnyvale and San Jose visitors would be me, trying to generate traffic for researching on Analytics. I hope to be able to suppress these counts very soon as can be done with the OOTB Blogger Stats. Analytics also tells me about my traffic sources (which mostly are from FaceBook now). I'll soon be exploring the rest of the features as well and be writing about them.

To have this ability for your Blogger.com blog, you need to insert the Google Anaytics tracking code into the Blog template (Dashboard --> Design --> Edit HTML). It's a good idea to take a backup of your current template in case you do not want to lose any customizations you have already done. There are several articles on the web which tells you how to do it (here is one) and I am not going to repeat them here. Once done, give it 24 hours to start showing your first statistics. For any help with the code, let me know in the Comments section, and I am happy to assist.

Will wind up here today. Gotcha go back to work. Keep reading and have a good day ahead..!!

P.S. I hit upon this idea, looking at some Analytics screenshots of a fellow Buzzer. This dude is doing some really kewl shit in his Blog and Buzz stream. :)