When you are a startup, every minute counts. It makes complete sense to want analytic analysis of your website, however, it does not make sense to spend a lot of time building analytic databases/engines/reporting into your website. These things already exist, and are often free or very low cost.

I often recommend chartbeat.com for real time analysis. It tells you a lot of great stuff about how many people are on your site now, how they got there, and what they’re saying on twitter.

Google Analytics is great. Sometimes you want to know a little more than just url – like what are people searching on if you a custom search implemented in your site. This is easily added using the Event Tracking feature. With just a couple of javascript calls, you have a lot more data at very little cost. Best part, you don’t have to build any of it into your database or chew up database cycles reporting it.

If you want to see what people are searching on in your site use the Event Tracker from google analtyics like this:

pageTracker._trackEvent(“Search”, “HeaderSearch”, “{{search}}” );

Then simply slice and dice to your heart’s extent in analytics. No extra data stored in your database.