After having my name on the waiting list for Google Analytics for a good 3 or 4 months, I got an email this morning inviting me to sign up. And 15 minutes later I was up and running!
Plenty has been written about Google Analytics, much of it in a breathless “Wow!” sort of tone. And, I’m afraid I’m yet another one! The thing that gets me is the sheer depth of information. I’ve just spent the last 15 minutes discovering that (in the first few hours of stats collection) that:
- Most of my audience has a screen resolution of 1280×1024
- About a third of my audience is using dialup
- All of my audience has Java enabled (well, this is a rather small sample at this stage
)
In addition, of course, there’s the more “standard” stuff - where in the world your clicks are coming from (although this is down to the State level, which is rare for us Aussies - plenty of tools give you US state info, but not Australian), which pages are most popular, etc.
Up till this point, I’ve been using AWStats in a static configuration - stats are generated in the form of static pages once per day. A great tool that gives me a lot of good summary information, but it just can’t touch the depth of Google Analytics stuff. That said, I’ll still be keeping it. AWStats runs on my PC, so I can always access it, even if I lose Net access. And, being static pages, its blindingly fast.
(Google Analytics is no slouch, by-the-by. I think we’ve all come to expect good performance from Google, be it search, mail, whatever, so this is probably no surprise. But there are noticeable pauses from time to time - only 2-3 seconds or so - as you navigate around)
Anyway, it looks like I can say goodbye to another 30 minutes of my life each day. So many graphs, so little time! 