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Google Launches Web Traffic Analysis Service
segphault writes to pass along that Ars Technica has an interesting article about the recently released Google Analytics. Analytics is Google's new traffic analysis service that helps you to know everything from "how your visitors found you [to] how they interact with your site." Analytics is also built to integrate with AdWords if you are already utilizing that service.
Analytics features an elegant user interface that leverages modern web technologies like Flash and DHTML. Although it seems a little rough around the edges (the Flash components don't display correctly in Firefox on my Linux system) the service is moderately impressive. It can export data in several formats, including XML and CSV. With Analytics, you can determine where your visitors are coming from, which links on your site are getting the most hits, how long the visitors spend on various pages of your site, and more:
Learn how visitors interact with your website and identify the navigational bottlenecks that keep them from completing your conversion goals. Find out how profitable your keywords are across search engines and campaigns. Pinpoint where your best customers come from and which markets are most profitable to you. Google Analytics gives you this and more through easy-to-understand visually enhanced reports.
It is still relatively difficult to get a good feel for the usefulness of the system at this point, but with over 80 pre-built reports, support for interactive report construction, and tracking for countless attributes, the amount of data it provides is downright prodigious. In addition to providing critical marketing data, it also tracks browser features so that web developers can make informed design decisions. Analytics will tell you the screen resolution and connection speed of your visitors, as well as whether or not their browsers support Flash and Java. Flash-rendered graphs are provided with each data collection so that you can get a quick visual overview.
Although it may not be especially useful compared to some of the critical features, the geographical map overlay is probably one of the coolest features. Analytics will generate a Flash-based map of the world that shows you which regions your traffic comes from. You can click individual regions to get additional statistics, and you can use Flash's built-in zoom feature to get a closer look at specific locations.
The site overlay mechanism is one of the other particularly interesting features. It will superimpose click statistics on top of your actual page so that you can (hypothetically) see what people are clicking just by browsing your site. During my experiments with Analytics, I had some trouble getting the site overlay feature to work correctly. Clicking the individual links in the site overlay caused the Analytics start page to load in the iframe rather than the actual content.
Analytics fits perfectly into Google's advertising platform and business model. Despite the bugs (which may be specific to Linux or Firefox) Google's newest service looks powerful and comprehensive. The value of the features and the benefits of AdWords integration will probably be more than enough to convince site owners to use AdWords rather than a competing service.
Don't anthropomorphize computers: they hate that.
Not only that. It's worse. The snippet of code is javascript.
This means that the added code has the ability to change the look of the page completely. If at any time Google decided that all web pages should have the word Microsoft replaced by Google, they could do this by adding an onload function to the javascript code that is added to all web pages using this service.
DNA is the ultimate spaghetti code.
Well this should be interesting. For years I used NedStat Basic (now WebStats4U, what a lame name). Anyhow, this last September they changed their name and quietly changed their TOS. The TOS changs were mentioned in small type at the bottom of an email announcing the 'exciting' changes. The biggest change is they now had the right to put pop-ups and other crap-tastic forms of advertising on your site.
NedStat always seemed to be one of the better free analytic sites out there, with them starting to pup pop-ups on sites, I'd imagine a lot of people will happily switch away from them. And since one of the choices is Google, I'd imagine a lot will switch to Google.
Personal Use Only The Google Services are made available for your personal, non-commercial use only. You may not use the Google Services to sell a product or service, or to increase traffic to your Web site for commercial reasons, such as advertising sales. You may not take the results from a Google search and reformat and display them, or mirror the Google home page or results pages on your Web site. You may not "meta-search" Google. If you want to make commercial use of the Google Services, you must enter into an agreement with Google to do so in advance. Please contact us for more information.
You hereby grant to Google and its wholly owned subsidiaries a limited license to use Your trade names, trademarks, service marks, logos, domain names and other distinctive brand features ("Brand Features") in presentations, marketing materials, customer lists, and financial reports. Further, Unless You notify Google otherwise in writing, Google and its wholly owned subsidiaries retain the right to identify You as a valued customer and optionally issue a press release that, at a minimum, discloses You have licensed the Product and that the Product is Your preferred web analytics package.
Hulk SMASH Celiac Disease
Yes. I believe the actually aquired them as far as I know back at least in early June. I was at a convention and saw both http://www.google.com/urchin/ and now http://www.urchin.com/ goes to Google's site as well. Of course we all now after the antics with Gmail name, Google is now going to stick with the names for product as follows.
Google ******
Where ****** is the product.
-- Brought to you by Carl's JR
You can load a javascript file from another domain, and send data to other domains via the ages-old image request piggyback. The javascriptfile in this case is loaded in the same domain and scope of the page itself. Most browsers have extra rules and conditions pertaining to cookies created by third-party resources like this. If anyone wanted to use the service but were concerned about the origins of the script, they could download it and host it on their own server while still sending the data back to Google. I think the previous poster was alluding to Web spyware, or behavior monitors.
You sure about that? I thought that javascript from another host isn't trusted and because of such won't be able to modify objects on the including page. Things like cookie modification is only allowed within the domain so unless google can spoof domains they'll only modify google.com cookies.
Nope. Javascript loaded using runs in the security context of the main browser (as opposed to an iframe). document.cookie, document.write, the referer, etc. are all available.
In fact, Google AdSense already does this. They write in an iframe that passes the number of plugins you have, the mime types you support, your resolution (screen, and window), if you have java installed, and the referer for every person who comes to the site. They use document.write() to write this IFRAME. There isn't really a lot they can't do through this.
Incorrect, the URL of the sign in box is: https://www.google.com/accounts/ServiceLoginBox?se rvice=analytics&nui= ...
No, the difference between 'utilize' and 'use' is that when you 'utilize' something, you attempt to gain profit from the action. Not necessarily so, when you 'use' something.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
There is nothing odd about this. These are the parameters the major search engines use to determine the keywords you searched for. Example:
This is a standard item that web analytic software looks for so that it can tell you what keywords, and what search engines people used to find your site.
Popisms.com - Connecting pop culture
This just looks like it's a method to track how people got to your page.
Google and MSN use q=search+terms+here in the referer, aol query=me+too, yahoo p=small+green+vegetable
This is no more than Google/Urchin (UCTM Urchin Capaign Tracking Module - We're Urchin software users at work) looking into the referer in the same way that your log analyser would.
Of course it means that they now have the ability to see what other people are searching for on other search engines and track people's search engine usage.
Matt Thompson - Actuality - Insert product here.