Much has been said about Google Analytics, I’ve put them on most of my sites the first day I learned of them. It’s been a few days hence, but for what it’s worth here’s my .02 cents.
- It’s slow. Molasses on a winter day slow, and while that’s ok sometimes, it’s surely not up to par for anything that comes out of Google’s labs. They need to fix that up plain and simple, which is probably why today, the ability to add sites isn’t available:
- Most of the data is available already. Via your standard Awstats or Webalizer, available via accessing one’s Cpanel interface, if you have access to it. Before one goes raving about Analytics, try those out first, or download the raw server logs and interpret them via any number of server log readers as these might give you what you’re looking for, without the wait.
- It’s confusing. Which is par for the course as far as understanding what’s going on on your server, so that can’t be helped. A little webmaster refresher course is necessary too, to understand things like “exit points” (the last page looked at before they leave for another site), or “/” (your index page aka home page), as well as define ‘organic’ as opposed to a ‘campaign’. If you don’t know what something means, Google up.
- Keywords are excellent. Coming from Google itself, if those keywords got visitors to your site, then that’s probably the last word there is as far as keywords are concerned. I’ll keep an eye out for that.
- Filter yourself out. Get your ip address and take yourself out, so you won’t be counted.
- Ads integration is what it’s all about, especially if you’re running a campaign. In fact Analytics is likely what Google offered to ad buyers for analysis, and now offered it for free on a ‘why not?’ whim. If it’s just stats you want, then like I said, there’re faster things.
- It’ll take forever. Well, actually more like a month before we can get really worthwhile reports from it. Right now stats like “returning visitors” against “new visitors” are useless, since it’s new so every visitor is new. So be patient.
- You’re gonna need to have Gmail to access it, which I don’t understand. Maybe there’ll be a future feature that necessitates a tie up, although I can’t imagine what. Adsense didn’t need that, so why this one?