Google Analytics

November 23rd, 2005

If you are like me, you are a web stats junkie. As a professional in the web industry, this is the most basic of metrics to not only gauge success of a website, but to also make enhancements and fine tune the site based on actual usage. It is a fundamental measurement of a site’s effectiveness.

There are dozens of web stats analytics packages available on the market. Some are small and offer limited data collection and processing – usually for free. Then, some are expensive large pieces of software and hardware that collect and track every possible click imaginable.

In my experience, a web professional can never have enough stats. Administrators expect a website manager to have this critical information at a moment’s notice.

Guess who just got into the stats business. Google.

The recent launch of Google Analytics came with no fanfare and relatively no promotion. However, those of us that read the Google Blog caught word of this and quickly created profiles and added the snippets of tracking to code to our websites. There was a period of inactivity because Google got overloaded with requests and traffic spiked. It took about a week, but the reports now are fully functional and on-demand.

Google basically bought an established webstats product, changed it to be entirely web-based, and added the world-renown Google coolness to the product. Adding the code is easy. Give it about 12 hours and you have data.

Best part – it’s free. They give you 5 million page views a month. That is almost too good to be true.

I am testing this new service personally and professionally. In fact, Google is tracking you now. Does this make your mind wander like it does mine? Regardless of the fact that Google takes privacy and security extremely seriously, it makes me wonder what this sort of World Wide Web data collection symbolizes for this company. Apart from the natural privacy concerns, to me it seems like Google is playing virtual connect-the-dots. They have stats to track how their search engine is used; now they can see global trends to identify its real coverage of all virtual space.

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