On Google Analytics

Published on August 30th, 2006 at 2:14pm

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A couple months ago I managed to procure an invitation to beta test Google Analytics but I never really got into it. Before they opened the service up to the general public, you could only manage 5 profiles and the service was slow as sludge at times. Now that its wide open, accepts 10 profiles and is stupid fast, I can’t tear myself away from the site. It’s like crack, but for webmasters. Why?

I’ve been familiar with site statistics and have tried other analytics services in the past, but I was really attracted by the ability to see multiple sites in one location, rather than checking out every account’s cpanel awstats page. It should be noted that Google Analytics CANNOT do system wide analysis of all your sites, but the presence of the drop down tab makes switching between profiles very efficient. Should they decide to enable some kind of “compare against other profile” feature, I would never leave the site. Seriously. NEVER. Well, except for the occasional trip to Digg and Myspace. But thats it.

Lately I’ve become obsessed with stats. Since I design everything to work in wordpress, its fascinating to see where sites hemorrage (where visitors leave), what is the most popular page for that day, week, month, etc, and where visitors are coming from. I manage several large traffic sites along with a slew of tiny startups, so comparison is a big part of my exploration. If anything, its the little guys that need the extra TLC so you can fine tune and get their audience to start showing up. I’ve learned from experience that already recognized sites will maintain a vast percentage of their daily visitors even if there is no content available (i.e the site is down). This of course doesn’t last forever, but it does emphasize a sort of “persistence of vision” for the net. Even if nothing new is going on, the visitors still stare at the screen in anticipation of the next announcement of “bit of movement.”

If you’ve followed my posts for the past two weeks you probably know that I’ve grown “slightly” disenchanted with Google Adsense. After promoting the hell out of them and delivering a site that actually got page clicks, google deauthorized my account and confiscated the measly earnings without telling me why. Bleh. Despite the sour taste that this left in my mouth, I’m still interested in online advertising. The good that came out of this experience is that it opened up a world of sites that I would have never considered. Google’s ad layout has become the de facto standard for online ads. Competitive companies mimic their style, and any one that knows anything about web design has dabbled with the code. It is because of this that they have become INVISIBLE. Since they are everywhere, the average internet surfer’s eye just passes over them. The only people that click are tricked into doing so. SEO blogs spend pages describing the latest tricks (placing images, wrapping text around them) for getting clicks. What amazes me the most is that google gives you so little in return. They won’t tell you what percentage of the click you are earning, where the clicks are coming from. Nothing. They are big because the ads are targeted by content on the page. But even that is flawed. The brutal truth? There are better services out there. Really, there are. Don’t believe me? Check out this list of 84 adsense alternatives.

But I digress. I talked about Adsense because Analytics is designed specifically to help track your advertising campaigns, amongst other things. The fact that I still use the service religiously despite my bias for adsense is a testament to the service. I’m a sucker for pretty graphics. But lately, I’ve started to suspect that the numbers aren’t accurate.

Analytics works by inserting a snippet of code into the footer of your site. If you hit “view source” on this page, you will find at the very bottom a reference to “urchin analytics” that is currently stalking you. It reports the number of page views I get, which in turn boosts my online rating and helps me get advertising. Clearly this only works when the script is invoked: a visitor comes, loads the page, the page calls home to google, and they +1 my visitor tally. Except they don’t. My big sites seem to get preference over the small ones. I use a lot of computers during the day. Computers on difference networks with different IP’s. On a big site these visits blend in. But on a little site with flatline visitors should reflect my test visits. And they DON’T. Does the system give preference to big sites with real visitors? Is it not worth the CPU cycles to track the 10 visitors xx.com had last night when xyz.com had 200? Whatever the case, it has me suspicious.

But enough blather, lets get to the list. Here are the strengths (in my opinion of the service):