I finally got my Google Analytics account today - Google has been rationing accounts due to supply constraints - so I immediately added my tracking code to a couple of sites. One provides free training for newbies to internet marketing (and is doubtless despised therefore by many real-world marketers!), the other is a blog I run that simply sets out roughly what I do each day as a full-time internet marketer. (Run AdWords campaigns, sell products and services for other businesses on commission, sell my own information products and publish an AdSense newsletter with a circulation of 16,900.)

My initial reaction to the Analytics, like initial reactions to many websites, depended on the look and feel of the site. I could sense the richness of the data available and navigation also looked typical of Google: clean, tidy and straightforward.

So I loaded up a couple of pages on the 2 sites I'd added the tracking to but couldn't see any results coming through.  Then I started to wonder if the statistics were delayed just like they currently are with Google's AdWords and AdSense reporting systems.

Turns out they are and that I might have to wait up to 24 hours to see anything at all which is a major disappointment. In the long term this won't really matter but online you kind of learn to expect everything to be near-instantaneous.

I've also read that tracking AdSense clicks is not as straightforward with Google Analytics as you might expect it to be. I did find an interesting article about this online though - Tracking AdSense clicks with Google Analytics. Tomorrow I should have more information about this.

But let's put all this in perspective: this tracking service is free and could put an end to many online businesses that currently sell tracking software. After all, why pay when you can get something free backed up by one of the sharpest IT implementers in the business: Google.

Sorry Ashley, you are incorrect with your comment in point 2: "And Google don't support their analytics tool." as the fact is Google do support GA as with all Google products.

If you have a problem simply contact their support dept. by following the procedure at http://www.google.com/support/analytics/bin/request.py

However I suspect what you are actually referring to is support that provides client hand-holding help (i.e. implementation/setup) and consultancy (i.e. report interpretation). If so, this should be clarified...

If a client has a Google Account Manager, they can contact them directly wrt GA. What's more this help is available locally - from all the major Google offices and in 16 languages - that's pretty unique for a analytics vendor!

If the client does not have an Account Manager at Google - no problemo. There is a global network of Google Authorised Analytics Consultants (GAAC). For full disclosure we are one of them - see GA-Experts.co.uk

GAAC's are companies with a proven track record in analytics and SEM. They are recruited and trained by Google themselves to provide professional services around Google products. Of course GAAC's are commercial organisations and their services are paid for.

That brings me round to your first point: "if what they've got is working for them and it's only costing them, say, £3k a year and it's delivering them value then they may well stick with it." Well a 2005 Forester report surveyed a number of enterprises asking them:

"What is the most difficult aspect of analytics for your company?"

53% replied: interpretting the data!

So if you have a reporting tool for free, why don't you spend that £3k on the professional services to ensure you understand and get the most from it? As you know, simply looking at pretty graphs and tables of visitors using your web site is pointless in itself. You need to take action i.e. change your web site, based on what the report is actually telling you - and that takes skill and experience i.e. people such as GAAC's.

I agree with Avinash's blog about the which to paraphrase says, whatever a company spends on an analytics tool(s), they should spend 9x more on "intelligent resources" to interpret data and get the most from the tool i.e. staff. So if your fictional company is spending £3k/year on its tool, it should be spending £27k/year on it staff i.e. one full time person. That's quite a commitment and investment, £30k/year, when with GA you get the tool free and can buy only the services you need from a GAAC.

Of course that model doesn't fit everybody - some companies need full-time, in-house staff and require speciality features that GA does not currently provide. But lets put that into perspective... we find 90%+ of companies with analytics tools actually only use about 10% of the features - and these usually revolve around Search Engine Marketing reports.

For that GA just cannot be beaten :-)

The full list of Partners is on the GA web site in the Support section:
http://www.google.com/analytics/support_partner_provided.html

is the European manager for analytics. You can contact him for EMEA enquiries about becoming a GAAC.

You are right that GA does not report on individual user behaviour - but that is a deliberate decision. Back in Jan 2005 I did see some this in action for a beta of Urchin On-Demand. The technology is already in place -as with most vendors, its just a case of stringing together the unique id's on a per visitor basis. However doing this type of thing has huge privacy implications and Google took the decision not to do this - and rightly so IMHO.

In fact GA reports do not show any user identifiable information. Even the visitor's ip address is not shown. IP addresses are only used in the geo location reports - in aggregate and not shown. This really shows how important privacy is too Google - both for the end user and the GA client. For example access to a clients GA reports is locked down within Google and only available on a need-to-know basis i.e. Support staff, Engineers etc.

Of course a client can ask for a Google Account Strategist to help optimise their Adwords/Adsense campaigns, but that access is transparent to the client  i.e. the Google Account Strategist's email address will show in the GA Admin area of their account, which the client can remove at any time.

In my view, those vendors that do show per visitor behaviour have to look very closely at the privacy implication of what they are doing. Without the explicit visitors consent they may be in violation of EU privacy laws and Article 8 of the Human Rights Act: the right to respect for private and family life, home and correspondence.

Of course invoking such laws sounds extreme at the present time, but may not be so in a year or so when the public are much more aware of the tracking that is taking place online by certain vendors/websites...

On 10:41:23 19 June 2006 JonBov wrote:

Other important thing that GA is not capable of (and neither are many vendors..) is the ability to extract super granular level information about specific users.

For a lot of businesses (eCommerce mainly) the ability to collect and extract at a specific user level, detailed information about visit and navgiation habits is extremely important.
Usually this is via CSV or XML.

The more advanced vendors offer this type of service and functionlity. Usually at a cost.
I cant see Google Analytics offering this at the moment.

That said GA is a great tool and I agree that you need to commit resources to your web analytics program in order to derive any value.

Jon

Hi Joe Browns Ltd

Pretty much all GAACs offer some kind of training service. My company focuses on 1:1 training, that is only the client in question in small groups of 4-8 people. It is non-technical and aimed at marketers, content creator, PR/comms teams: http://www.ga-experts.com/google-analytics-training.php

Best regards, Brian