Sunday, November 20, 2005

Review of Google Analytics

I set up Google Analytics to measure traffic to this blog . The problems this service had on the first few days have been well documented but have largely been solved by now (either by people giving up on it or better infrastructure). The price is right (free) and it doesn't have the "only in pay version" aspects of SiteMeter - clearly Analytics is designed to help you maximise your Google Adsense ads. You sign up and add some JavaScript to your blog template and it takes a few days to get any data collected. It's clearly geared towards large web site owners (i.e. AdSense customers) rather than bloggers. For example, I don't really have any executives - so I don't need an executive view - I just want the details. The whole thing seems to be lacking a lot of the usual polish of Google web apps. For example, on the dashboard page I see the following:
To track another website with Analytics, click the 'Add Website Profile' link.
Well I checked and there is no "Add Website Profile" link and apparently there is no way to add. It would be nice if it was better integrated into Google services - for example, why doesn't Blogger have integration of this? I could imagine a lot of improvements they could make (the standard complaint about any Google service is "How about an RSS feed for this?"). You can't really argue with free although I'm anxiously waiting to get a Measure Map invite because it's apparently geared to bloggers.

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