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.

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for the slashdotted crew

[0110011001110101]

Google has officially launched Analytics, a robust new web analysis system that provides site owners with traffic metrics and massive amounts of useful marketing data. Based on technology originally developed by a Californian company called Urchin that Google acquired in March, Analytics integrates with Google's popular AdWords system, and will vastly improve the quality and quantity of data provided to existing AdWords users. Those of you that don't use AdWords can still use Analytics by adding a simple javascript snippet to your web site.

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.

Re:Big Brother-esque (again)

[oever]

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.

From the TOS

[carguy84]

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.

Interesting tidbit in the TOS ...

[xmas2003]

Section 6 of the Terms of Service has some interesting wording that may cause some sites to think twice about deploying this.

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.

Re:No encryption here?

[slug359]

Incorrect, the URL of the sign in box is: https://www.google.com/accounts/ServiceLoginBox?se rvice=analytics&nui= ...