Google announces analytics for web sites
Google has rolled out another free tool for site owners. Google Analytics was announced today. Using technology acquired from Urchin, this free service (limited to 5 million page views a month), sits on your webpage as a little javascript “bug” of sorts and tracks information on visitors to your site.
In order to work it must be on each page in your site and can give details such as which pages are most popular, where visitors are coming from. They’re integrating this into their adwords program, so if you advertise using adwords then you can see which adwords are the most valuable to you. Many of the values that can be tracked (location of browsers, where their coming from, which links get clicked) is something that other programs technically provide, however the interface for this is the slickest I’ve seen.
They for instance give a map overlay for placing of visitors, they can show a site overlay, so you can browse your own site with notes about what is clicked. Interesting.
Unfortunately at this time, this is big news and the analytics server is VERY slow, I’ve waited several minutes for the log in page to direct me to my account there. This does look to be a quite useful tool with some nice “eye candy” in the way of understandable and visually appealing ways to view the data they collect.
This is also making news at arstechnica, and the google blog, among others….
It may be me but adsense has seemed a bit sluggish in updating today as well. In reading some FAQ’s it appears that it may take as long as six hours for traffic to be logged in your analytics interface after putting the javascript on the pages.
You can sign up to track multiple sites, (still limited to 5 million page views a month.)
Sunbelt is covering this also. Hopefully over the next couple days I’ll have a chance to look at some real statistics in it. I’ve currently got 4 sites with the javascript and they should be collecting data. (Although now google is saying to expect 12 hours before reports are available.)