Google Analytics is very very very nice (now)
August 18, 2006 - by jason
Google Analytics, the result of Google’s acquisition of the San Diego-based Urchin Software Corporation, really really opened it’s doors to the world a couple of days ago, and it allows you to track up to 10 sites within a single google account (you sign in with your gmail account).
We were a good sized Urchin user before the acquisition and in many ways got screwed out of a site license after the acquistion. Combined with the first iteration of Google Analytics being largely unusable, I had a lot of choice words for them.
But.
I started using the new Google Analytics on a few of our sites on Tuesday just to see, and not only is data collection almost instant (well, actually about 2-3 hours behind) but as someone who used to pay $5-$198/domain for Urchin (depending on whether it was version 5 or 6, and how is was licensed), I’m absolutely thrilled with the fact that it’s free.
Yes it doesn’t do things like error tracking that can only come from log files but it’s great for 99% of the people out there.
Within our “circles” this both takes the pressure off of hosting companies to provide an analytics infrastructure (it’s not easy once you’re doing terabytes of log files) and I can see it doing to Mint what Google Calendar did to Kiko
So to the Google Analytics folks: Thank You for not sucking anymore.
And congratulations for knowing all about the traffic on my websites now. Everyday you get closer and closer to knowing everything don’t you? Just don’t get creepy