Google Analytics
Wether you are running a serious e-commerce site for living or you're a junkie for your blog you will find the new free service from Google a delight to use.
I have been using Statcounter for several months, but they only support sites with less than 9K page loads a day. I've been looking at Mint to replace Statcounter, but it doesn't have the graphical presentation I prefer. There are many open source solutions that one can install, but I didn't feel like spending time learning how to install and configure them. Luckily for us Google's new service outperforms them all in features and ease of use and installation.
Analytics has so many features that the average user will never use them all. If you're not into statistics, you'd have to rely on the comprehensive help to make sense of all the things that are available for you.
One of the most exciting part of Analytics, which is usually only available on professional services that cost hundreds of dollars is the conversion analysis. You can set-up so called goals for your website. For example if you run an online shop you may want to add the page that concludes the purchase as a goal for your website. Analytics will be able to track which activities bring you the most sales. Is it a certain keyword in Google? Is it a link from another site? Whatever the trigger — you may want to put more emphasis on developing that area of your operation.
What's in it for Google? Analytics is integrated with AdWords, Google's popular online advertising programme. Analytics helps webmasters fine tune their AdWords advertising campaigns, therefore increasing their returns on AdWords spending. Analytics gives more value for AdWords. For the rest of us not using Adwords, I guess Google expects us to return love for their free service.
It's Beta so you may expect changes in policies and operation. After you sign up you need to be patient. It took me almost 24 hours for the first results to appear after inserting the code into the pages.
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I'm in
That looks nice.
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www.truitt25.com
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Are Google getting too powerful?
I worship google's experiments and products like this (which looks awesome) but... Is anyone else worried that one day Google might have too much data on us?
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Online Portfolio - in progress
jammindesigns.co.uk
scrapbook.jammindesigns.co.uk
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Goo
Yes
Yes. I won't use gmail for that reason.
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www.truitt25.com
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www.truitt25.com
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me too
I recently installed shortstat (which is similar to mint)
One question though, when it prompts you to check status did Google detect the source code right away? It doesn't seem to detect it for some reason or another. It's there when I view my source code. However I only installed it on my header include file.
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Infinite Style
be patient
it will work, just takes time...
I had signed up for it when
I had signed up for it when I saw it on Slashdot.Looks nice up but have yet to upload the code snippets. Wonder if there is much of a performance penalty for running a lot of stats packages? I'd like to keep my AW Stats around for a month or two before I get comfortable with Google's version
afterglow.ie - Icons, interfaces, illustration
All I can say that it's
All I can say that it's really much faster than Statcounter was. Google uses a javascript. Statcounter uses a transparent gif in the best case. I don't think you should worry about performance if the server serving the js or gif is fast enough.
Measuremap
Is it any better than MeasureMap?
Apples to Oranges
After seeing Jeff's preso on MeasureMap, is more AJAX treatment to web stats than this. But I do think Google has more effective tools, especially if it remains free. Measure Map may have a trial period, but might be a fee-based service.
"Everything is Relative"
This thing is unbelievably slow
I added it, when you originally posted this entry. It took over 24 hours for google to see I inserted their code on my website. I've been waiting for the first report ever since.
I'm a little let down.
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true
They have tens of thousands of new members. It probably hit them as a surprise to have so many people intrested. It will speed up with time.
letter from Google