Google Analytics…
This is quite old actually. The services have been there since I can remember using google. (That either means that I had very little knowledge back then, or I am no as ancient as you used to think I was 
).
So, coming back to the point, the services offered by google are really good. They have proved to be a very good source of information for me on my old blog. And I know that it is going to give the same for my this blog also.
Google Analytics
Google analytics is actually Urchin Software (well, google still used the name urchin in their tracking code… read entire post to know about tracking code). It was a paid service from Urchin but now it is free from google unless you have 5 million visitors a month. Then you have to subscribe to AdWords.
What you have to do is, sign in to your analytics accountusing your google ID and Password. The you have to submit your site. You will receive a code (The same one I was talking about earlier). You just have to put that code before the end of the </body> tag on all the pages you want to track. Once you have done that, google analytics will start receiving the data from your site. It can take upto 24 hours to finish the job.
The amount of information that you can receive is too much. You get the amount of visits, unique visits, user location, user browser, OS, java version, screen resolution, top quarries, top exit points, average time on site, pages visited per visit and much more.
You can receive the reports right to your mailbox having just the things you need. The reports are completely customizable.
A complete list of the features is available here…
Limitations
As good as is sounds, I am afraid that it might be too good for some people. I can remember the time when I had signed up. I was confused. As time went by I became more familiar with things (and google changed the layout, looks, format…).
Another limitation is that if the user has disallowed running javascripts in the browser, then you will not get any reports from that machine. This is a big problem. Maybe, if google can provide a server-side script, then this error can be removed. But for now, this being based on javascript, has the problem mentioned above.
Conclusion
With the ability to get all the information that is a dream of a webmsater and fully customizable reports, I think this is the best web analysis tool you can ever get for free. And I am sure that it will give many paid ones a run for their money. Go for it.
This entry was posted on Thursday, November 8th, 2007 at 9:24 pm and is filed under Article, Internet, Tools. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
