Google Analytics

I just discovered Google Analytics. Of course I've heard of it before, but I've always been kind of lazy about tracking my sites' statistics, so never looked into it. But this past week, one of my clients asked for statistics info on his site, and since in this case I couldn't just send him to the host company's statistics pages, I asked around, and Google Analytics was recommended. Here's my experience with it so far, and some thoughts on it.

It's free, like many other Google applications. It was ridiculously easy to set up - maybe 30 seconds to create the account and another 30 seconds to add the code to every page on his site, since I use server-side includes. Within twenty-four hours, we had statistics available to us, and of course it continues to collect data.

I was also really pleased with how usable and readable the Google Analytics interface is. Like most of their web applications, it appears to have been designed by people who actually think about what works best for a user. Information and navigation really are intuitive. And I'm not using "intuitive" just as a buzzword, the way I hear it used all the time in this context. I mean that, when I'm looking for something in the interface, I can usually find it almost instantly, without having to read instructions or even think very much. I love that.

Those are the up-sides. The main down-side is my increasing discomfort with how much of my information I'm giving to Google, since I use quite a few of their online applications (GMail, Google Docs, Google Maps, Google Earth, Picasa, and now Google Analytics.) I don't know of anything unethical Google has done or seems to be threatening to do with that data, but as someone on a discussion forum pointed out, just the fact that they have control over so much information should be cause for concern.

Thanks to a couple of Dreamweaver forum posters, I'm now informed that Google puts lots of tracking cookies on my hard drive, and also informed that I can use Firefox to block some or all of them. I'm going to look into that next, and will report back here.

Meanwhile, I'm using it to track traffic on most of my other sites, and wishing that I hadn't been so lazy for so long, as I may very well be able to turn this information into more traffic and thus into more business. Even I have to admit that it's pretty interesting to know all about who comes to my sites, where they come from, what browser, operating system and monitor resolution they're using, and which pages they look at, for how many minutes each.