Google Analytics

I've been trying out Google Analytics, and so far it's pretty cool.  It's geared toward webmasters who are trying to increase their AdWords/AdSense revenue, so there is a lot of stuff that doesn't apply to a small personal web site, but there are still some things I find useful.  Currently it's a free service, and it's not even marked 'Beta' (I guess Google expects that the increased AdSense revenue will cause it to pay for itself).

You just have to stick a small tag of javascript in your page template, and you get all kinds of cool stats about your pages.  It tracks the basic things like visits & pageviews, but also does more advanced things like plotting the search engine keywords people use to find your site, or their locations on a map of the earth. Here are a couple of screenshots after it had been running on this site for a couple of days:

Search keywords

Visitor location map

One downside (at least for a blog) is that it can't track visitors who read your site using RSS readers, since the RSS content doesn't contain the Analytics tracker tag and RSS readers usually don't run embedded javascript anyway.  So I mostly find it useful for seeing which Google keywords people are using to find my site.