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Managing Director at Studio 24 Ltd
31 January 2006 10:05am
hi there,
What is your impression of the Google Analytics service? For a free service it seems very comprehensive, essentially tracking most things you can via JavaScript data collection. Can it really be as good as paid-for systems?
Simon, Studio 24 Ltd
Retired at Retired
31 January 2006 13:21pm
For licencing reasons I was stuck on Webtrends 7.0 log analysis so GA has been quite a revelation. I particularly love the ability to define goals and follow the steps leading up to the goal.
Also there is data here you can't get from traditional log analysis. For example screen resolution and download speed.
I don't know how it compares with the paid-for Urchin analysics but it seems very comprehensive to me. The only thing I miss is the graph showing traffic by search engine over time.
Bob
http://www.textor.com
Managing Director at Studio 24 Ltd
31 January 2006 14:49pm
thanks for the reply Bob, I will set up a couple of sites on GA and see how things go.
Simon
Director at Browser Media
01 February 2006 09:14am
Hi Simon,
The biggest problem you will have at the moment is the fact that new sign ups are restricted to invitees only due to their 'extremely strong demand'. If you try and sign up now via the adwords interface, you see the following message:
"Google Analytics has experienced extremely strong demand. We are sending invitations to new users to sign up as we add more capacity. If you would like to receive an invitation code, please enter your email address below and we will send you one as capacity becomes available. "
We did manage to set up a few sites before they closed it down to new sign ups and have been fairly impressed with the features, considering that it is free, and you should definitely have a look at it. There are some nice reports and it is visually fairly slick.
Perhaps the biggest single weakness, however, is that the stats are delayed. Typically, the delay is around a day but we have seen it go up to a couple of days (more so when we were first using it). This can be frustrating and we are still running other analytics solutions on the same sites for instant feedback / data.
The other issue that we have had is that it is not fully integrated with adwords, which is what we had hoped for. To be honest, this is our fault as we created a new account from the analytics homepage rather than from within adwords and I expect this will be resolved shortly. Theoretically, you should be able to link your adwords with an existing analytics account, but this hasn't worked when we have tried it. Again, teething problems rather than serious issues. This is, however, an area that we are keen to test as it will offer some very useful information.
Definitely give it a go if you can get an invitation!
Joe
Browser Media