Google Analytics

10May07

If you haven’t tried Google Analytics, you should. It really makes you wonder why you should ever pay for tracking tools. Although Google Analytics isn’t a sexy 2.0 application, I felt that I should definitely include it in my list. For the past week, I have been testing it rigorously. For a tool that is free, it gives you so much, so intuitively.

In web 1.0, we had lots of analytical tools as well. Many were written in perl (does anyone still use perl?). To generate your statistics, you ran a perl script that would trawl through web logs and generate some nice looking statistics. You had to know programming (some level) to configure your perl scripts.

Then came WebTrends. WebTrends was the de facto application. The Enterprise edition had all these fancy things you could do to try and understand your visitors better. The company I worked for then, bought into it, hook-line-sinker.

But that wasn’t even enough! We needed to track conversion rates. We wanted to know “clickstreams” (i.e. how users navigated from page to page), so we acquired another application to do just that.

Both were installed for a hundreds of thousands onto our servers.

With Google Analytics, anyone can get a very impressive set of web statistics and conversion rates just by cutting and pasting some Google code into their websites. It’s a no brainer. Yes, I know. Because it’s javascript based, there are shortcomings and it can never be as accurate as the stuff you generate from your own logs.

But everyone knows, in today’s day and age, we really have very little time to meticulously comb through our own logs for insights. If you are not too fussed about exacting numbers, Google Analytics does the job just fine.

Google Analytics gives you the usual:

• pageviews
• unique visitors/return visitors
• exit pages/entry pages
• top content
• browser info
• geographical location of visitors
• referrers
• keywords

PLUS the following really neat features

• Conversion (whether users get to “thank you page”)
• Depth of content (how deep does each user go)
• Navigation path

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