Google now has many services far and beyond simply a search engine they now have a bunch of in built tools and serivces like Google Mail and other services that they have been able to buy like Youtube.

When perusing the list of services I came across Google Analytics, and at first you'd think that it was some form of data analysis tool to rival Microsoft's Access or Excel. Well it isn't, in fact it is a really good tool for website owners or even hub page authors like yourself!

So now we know whatAnalytics is what can it do? What's it for exaclty? Well Analytics is an invaluable tool to website owners that's functionality is more likely to be found in some over-priced website author tool, best of all: It's FREE!

Analytics once set up with your webiste or Hubpage account can give you all the information you'd need to help make your site more popular but also find out more about your visitors if you are having trouble finding your key audience.

One facet of Analytics that I use a lot is finding out how people find my hubs on Hubpages.com, I know sometimes people's hubpages turn up in Google search results and would like to get my message out to as many people as possible.

By using Analytics to find out what people are searching for when they come across my sites or hubs I am able to see what my audience wants. I wrote a hub page about computers recnetly and found that a lot of people came to my hub searching for terms like "Firefox" and "useful tools". Once I knew this I wrote a hub about Firefox Add-ons that I found useful. Almost instantly I got a lot of views, comments and people wanting to follow me on hubpages.

Quite clearly I found what my readers liked and that I enjoyed writing about that subject was an added bonus! So you can see from this that you can use Google Analytics to find out things about your readership that you'd never know unless you went to every visitor and personally asked them how they found you!

As well as this you can track the popularity of your site in the form of a stock market-esque graph and see where people are linking to your site. If you are in to building popularity for your own site or practice in Search Engine Optimization then Analytics is a great way to find out who would be a good link partner or discover new leads.

Setting up Analytics is simple, all you need to have is a Google account. Chances are you'll already have one if you have a GMail account then you can simply select the My Account link in your main window or from your iGoogle page to see the list of services including Analytics.

Setting up your site is easy too,once you have activated your Google Analytics account you can begin adding sites, blogs and even your Hubpage or Squidoo accounts to it (Squidoo already iactively integrates Google Analytics into it's website so you don't even need to add it!).

You will need to place a small piece code on to your website that will act as a beacon to the Google Analytics service, this is normally a code that you are given to put on your page but doesn't show up on your site at all to the visitor. Placement of this code is important too, some people prefer to put it in the header of their code so the page loads after the analytics work.

Sometimes though I have found pages to hang for a short time if there are problems with the service, in which case you'll see "Transferring data fro mGoogle-analytics.com" in the status bar at the bottom of your browser. This could be annoying to poeple visiting your site and so if you find it's slowing your site's load times then maybe think about putting the tracking code in the footer of the page instead. That way your site's content will load first then the tracking data is transferred

Luckily Hubpages only needs the unique identifying piece of the code and can be added in the same menu as where you add your AdSense, Amazon and Ebay acocunt details.

At some point I will try and add a detailed guide to setitng up Adsense on sites and Hubpages as they are invaluable to website owners and hub-masters alike!