Google Analytics update
Well, I mentioned the release of Google Analytics yesterday which really looks promising. At this hour I can still say it looks promising. I had a funny thought after trying several times yesterday to get set up… it was a “good going, you just broke google” kind of thought. It was pretty clear that demand was VERY high for the service (what they’ll be providing for free used to be a fee service.) But it looks like Google has been really caught off-guard by the demand. As I don’t have any data yet, and it appears I’m not the only one.
Of course, the original FAQ suggested I’d have to wait 6 hours to see data, the help within Analytics suggested 12 hours. After about 12 hours I started wondering if I’d plopped the javascript in the wrong place. The directions say within the head tags, after any meta tags. I had placed them outside the head tags, but they seemed to be detected. I dutifuly put the javascript in their proper places and left it until morning. This morning, still nothing, so I wondered if there might be a compatibility issue with another javascript. (I recall having another stat-tracker that had problems along those lines.) So, I did a blank page, with some simple text and the javascript in the head. I visited it a few times and tonight on checking still no stats.
It’s unusual to see Google having such issues. I hope this isn’t a harbinger of things to come.
More coverage at techcrunch.com, micropersuasion.com, bradsblog.net, Techblog,… which adds this jewel…
Help Center: Supporting Google Analytics.
I have installed Google Analytics, but all or some of my data is missing from my reports.
Update: 5:22 PM PST. Tuesday, November 15th, 2005
Currently, report updating for Google Analytics is experiencing delays. As a result, you may not be seeing any data in your reports even after implementing the Analytics tracking code.
We are currently in the process of updating all reports. You should be able to see these updates in several hours. While this is going on, you may notice different reports updating at different rates. Once this process has completed, all data should be restored to your profiles. Please be assured that this update process has no effect on data collection.
We apologize for any inconvenience. This reporting delay is associated with unexpected demand for Google Analytics. Under normal circumstances, the data in your reports will be at most six hours old.
So, we may be seeing something by tomorrow.
In the meantime, there’s also a post from a customer of the Urchin $200/month hosted stats which Analytics now supercedes. They are ticked with the process, they weren’t notified the change was coming, just one day, they were logging in at the Urchin page that worked, the next they were redirected to the Google Analytics login. Further, they don’t have data for 24 hours. They also mentioned that they were lacking a window of data from several days back. It sounds as though Google has some “customer service maturing” to do. A troubled launch like this might actually help them long term.