Google Analytics

**MarkB** · 11-15-2005, 02:36 AM

I signed up yesterday; unfortunately, it takes 12 hours to see reports (for the first time only?), so won't see all my purdy graphs until this afternoon. Awooo.

**Blue Cat Buxton** · 11-15-2005, 03:08 AM

OK, signed up now - you need to put the code between the Head tags though, so potentially time consuming to add to a lot of sites - not as easy as axs for example - but nicer presentation!

**dburdon** · 11-15-2005, 08:02 AM

Firstly, I'm not sure I want Google having all that information about my sites.
Secondly, I tried just to see. And despite following the instructions I couldn't make it work.

**Emancipator** · 11-15-2005, 08:44 AM

im still waiting for it to update, im well over 12 hours. I am just trying it out to test. I dont want google having that kinda info on my sites either. God knows who they will sell it to

**MarkB** · 11-15-2005, 09:25 AM

Yep, looks like Google's dropped the ball with this launch. HUGE delays on seeing the first set of stats with everyone I've seen (on blogs, etc) who have signed up. Sigh.

**Westech** · 11-15-2005, 09:56 AM

Yeah, I've never seen Google mess up like this. Usually even their "beta" stuff is rock solid. I wonder if anyone over at Gooooooooooooogle Analytics will be fiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiired over this?

**moonshield** · 11-15-2005, 12:29 PM

Same here. If I were paying for it and was having these problems I would be pissed but since its free I can be patient.

**Cutter** · 11-15-2005, 03:38 PM

No one getting stats yet? Its still showing 0 pageviews for me, and its been something like 24 hours now.

**Westech** · 11-15-2005, 03:44 PM

Same here. No stats for almost 24 hours. Status still shows "waiting for data."

**chromate** · 11-15-2005, 04:04 PM

Originally Posted by dburdon

Firstly, I'm not sure I want Google having all that information about my sites.

Agreed. It doesn't sit comfortably with me either. Probably being paranoid though.

**moonshield** · 11-15-2005, 04:14 PM

Originally Posted by chromate

Agreed. It doesn't sit comfortably with me either. Probably being paranoid though.

Yea, but as mentioned before, they (and all other advertisers) are likely recording all of this information already.

**Cutter** · 11-15-2005, 04:26 PM

I'm more annoyed by their change over to Google Accounts login. I don't know if Adsense accounts have had to do this yet, but I had to rollover my Adwords login into a Google Accounts login. Basically this means all my Google searches are now connected to my Adwords and Adsense accounts.

This is just too far, especially considering I now run a blog where I can say either positive and negative things about Google & their employees. Speaking of which, I'm going to be doing a big blog post on this whole issue when I have time -- which I hope I'll be able to get some good links and news coverage from.

**MarkB** · 11-16-2005, 02:00 AM

Stats showing now - very nice (including Geo). Not bad for free

**chromate** · 11-16-2005, 02:45 AM

Originally Posted by Cutter

I'm more annoyed by their change over to Google Accounts login. I don't know if Adsense accounts have had to do this yet, but I had to rollover my Adwords login into a Google Accounts login. Basically this means all my Google searches are now connected to my Adwords and Adsense accounts.

Yeah, i've had a few headaches over this. It got kind of complex, but without going into details, I updated the email and then found I could no longer change any of my campaigns. So I had a few reasonably expensive (for me at least) campaigns running that I had no way of stopping or altering until google replied to my mails. Scary.

**Westech** · 11-16-2005, 09:17 AM

I can see my stats now too. It's very nice! All of the report pages are now loading fairly quickly.

I'm still seeing 0 stats for today, and my numbers for yesterday look a little low compared to other tracking methods I'm using, so I assume they're around 12 hours or so behind in bringing in new stats.
EDIT: This is incorrect. I'm seeing stats for Monday and Tuesday, but not for Wednesday (yesterday) or today. This would mean that the reports are currently over 24 hours behind in updating. Sorry for the confusion. That's what I get for typing a post this long before my second cup of coffee.

It's a little hard to find your way around at first. They've given very confusing names to all of the reports. It seems that they've tried to skew the names of the reports towards webmasters using PPC advertising (to plug adwords), but once you find the right spot you can get pretty much any information you would want out of it.

Chris, your referral reporting is under Marketing Optimization -> Marketing Campaign Results -> Referral Conversion. You can expand the list of referrers to show up to 500 domains per page. You can page through the lists or search to see every last referral over any time period. You can expand each domain to see the exact page that the referrals came from.

After a lot of exploring, some of the more useful sections I've found so far are:

Marketing Optimization -> Serach Engine Marketing -> Overall Keyword Conversion.
This shows you the search engine keywords people are using to find your site (regardless of search engine.) You can expand each keyword set to see the breakdown of how many referrals for that keyword are coming from each search engine.

Marketing Optimization -> Search Engine Marketing -> CPC vs. Organic Conversion.
This report shows total referrals by search engine. It separates organic referrals vs. paid search engine referrals for each engine. Since I don't use PPC for the site I'm tracking I just use this report to track organic search engine referrals. All of the big ones seem to be included. You can expand each search engine to view the keywords for that search engine.

Marketing Optimization -> Visitor Segment Performance -> ......
There's a lot of good stuff under this section:

Geolocation shows a list of what countries your visitors are from (with percentage and number for each country.)

Geo Map Overlay shows a map of the world with dots over each city you've had visitors from. You can pan and zoom the map in and out. Mouse over each dot to see the name of the city and the number of visits from there over the time period you're viewing. This is a very cool feature, but the Flash interface they use for it is a little clunky. I'd really love to see them integrate this with their Google Maps interface!

Language shows the numbers and percentages for the languages of your visitors. (Meaning English vs. Spanish vs. Chinese... Not PHP vs. ASP vs. Java.

)

There's a ton of other cool stuff sprinkled throughout too, including reports on visits, pageviews, visitor loyalty, screen resolution sizes, browsers used, java enabled, flash version, etc. The only thing I wanted but couldn't find was a report on visitors and pageviews per hour (i.e. what times of the day are the busiest.) It could still be buried in there somewhere. I'll keep looking.

This really is an amazing service. I can speak from experience that to keep extremely detailed stats like this for even one moderately high traffic site requires a huge amount of storage space and processor usage. I had tried Urchin in the past but had given up on having detailed stats like this because it just wasn't worth the overhead of an additional dedicated server just to track stats. Getting it free and 100% managed by Google is wonderful!