After wanting to get fast information about my blog traffic I decided to purchase traffic facts from the company that I host my blog at. I paid six months in advance and it cost me around $20 for the entire package. Sounds like a good deal right? Yah, I thought so too until I started looking around and realized that I could get the same thing that they offered for free.
Google Analytics has pretty much everything that you need to know the traffic of your blog and I do mean everything. I called the company up and told them that I wanted to know their cancellation policy for the traffic facts. I was glad that I got most of my money back minus the amount that I was charged for the one month. I actually got somewhere around $17 back. I learned a valuable lesson from this; shop around before you purchase something no matter how good it sounds.
Google Analytics offers many features including information on visits to your blog, page views that a post or blog receives pages and visits to your blog, the bounce rate, the average time a visitor is on your blog, the percentage of new visitors, and much more.
I was truly impressed and sick to my stomach at the same time. Google has come up with some really cool stuff but I felt cheated by my host. It wasn’t the hosted fault though; they probably didn’t know that they were competing against a site like Google who has a tendency of offering free stuff just for bloggers.
If you want to know who is visiting your site and how much traffic you are receiving, I recommend you check them out and sign up.