Google Re-Opens Analytics Service as Invite-Only

taboguilla writes "As of January 11, after freezing the Google Analytics new user subscriptions shortly after it first started, Google's snazzy web site hit counter is adding new users on an invitation-only basis. If you would like an invitation, you can submit your email address to on the Google Analytics home page and wait until they decide you are worthy."

Comments

What is Google analytics?

[jpolonsk]

It always helps when you explain what you are talking about?

Re:What is Google analytics?

[iogan]

Google's snazzy web site hit counter is adding new users
I would venture a guess that it's some kind of web site hit counter. But I'm not 100% on that..

__________
link yo blog/website with yo face http://www.doyoulikemyface.com/

Re:What is Google analytics?

[Michael Crutcher]

This page provides a much better starting point. "Snazzy web hit counter" doesn't even begin to describe what it is. A hit counter is extremely simple and doesn't require a lot of resources in terms of minds or hardware. What they've done requires both.

What they've apparently built (I wish I had access so I could check it out) is a standard analytics model based on click stream traffic for websites and an infrastructure to support distributed web reports. Click stream analyisis for websites is not a trivial problem. The hardware required to host this given the reports they're generating and the data sizes they're working with has got to be huge. What they've built is probably pretty simple since the type of data they're tracking about your customers (whether the page was clicked) is pretty limited. I'm curious as to what exactly their script does - is it solely clicks or is tracking users over a session?

Of course if you subscribe to the google really is evil (or they want to make money) what they're going to eventually do is merge all of their traffic data (including gmail, google videos, etc.) to provide analytics on the customer the clickstream stuff is definately interesting, but the customer profile would be a lot more valuable.

They may even provide the click stream data for free and offer all of their services as well as consultation for developing custom data models for the merchant. This is a stretch but given their areas of expertise would make some sort of sense.

Re:What is Google analytics?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's what I block using Ad-Block so that webpages load faster.

Re:What is Google analytics?

[Guspaz]

Google bought out Urchin. This is their replacement for Urchin.

Essentially it does what Urchin does, statistical analysis of traffic and visitors, broken down into all sorts of categories. How many people from Madrid, Montreal, New York, etc. How many people using WinXP, Linux, Firefox, Safari, etc. How many pages people load per visit. What the returns on your AdWords ads are (how many people coming from there are doing anything meaningful with the site). What pages people are visiting. How many are new visitors and how many are returning.

So, all that sort of stuff. The differences between Urchin and GA is that GA is way easier to set up. Urchin involved installing and configuring the software on your server, inserting code into web pages, and then TRYING to get Urchin to parse the Apache logs (I've had a great deal of trouble with that last part). With Google Analytics, you simply put the code on your site and that's it, google handles everything else.

Another difference is that Urchin supported HTML graphs and SVG. GA uses flash. While this is somewhat of a good thing (Not very many people have SVG capable browsers or plugins. Firefox 1.0.x crashed when the Adobe SVG plugin was installed), now that I'm using Firefox 1.5, I sort of wish that it was still SVG.

Google Analytics is doing some kind of fucking magic with city-tracking too. It shows my traffic to a site I'm developing as coming from "Pointe-Claire", the small city of 20,000 on the island of Montreal (Right above New York) where I live. How they figured this out, I have no clue. My IP's DNS identifies me as being in Toronto, 500 kilometers away from where I am. I wish I knew how they narrowed it down to Pointe-Claire considering that Pointe-Claire is just one tiny city in the middle of a cluster of dozens of other cities on the same small island.

Does Google have access to the Bell Sympatico DSL customer data? Do they know where the routers are and are placing me by the closest router to me (Does Bell even HAVE any routers in Pointe-Claire when Pointe-Claire is essentially part of Montreal)? This is a bit scary how they figured that out.

Re:What is Google analytics?

[kv9]

Google Analytics is doing some kind of fucking magic with city-tracking too.

yeah, magic.

This is a bit scary how they figured that out.

must be that conspiracy everyone is talking about

Pardon my ignorance

[matr0x_x]

but can someone please explain why Google is so big on the "invite only" idea. Isn't Gmail technically "invite only" right now - and everyone and their dog has an account there.

Re:Pardon my ignorance

[coolcold]

because it provides them publicity and server load control

Re:Pardon my ignorance

[abscissa]

Gmail is invite only to make it very difficult, if not impossible, for spammers to create a large volume of accounts to spam with. For any other normal user, it should be a joke to get an invite however. If you live in the US you can get Google to send you one via SMS.

Re:Pardon my ignorance

[hlh_nospam]

Gmail is invite only to make it very difficult, if not impossible, for spammers to create a large volume of accounts to spam with.

Huh? It would be trivially simple to get any number of gmail accounts to spam with. Each new signup get 100 invitations, and you can send them to your own email account. If you have a "catch-all", you could send 100 invitations to random-name@catch-all-account.com, and each of those gets 100 invitations to send, etc. Plus your original account will get refreshed with 100 invitations within a day or two. You could hire some minimum-wage grunt to do the work for you and have several thousand of these in a week.

Re:Pardon my ignorance

[Breakfast Pants]

And when they see spam coming out of it they can trace it all back to one account and ban the whole tree.

Worth a try...

[Critical_]

It seems like Google must be doing some sort of datamining on all the data its aquired through searches, sitemaps, email, and now a "hit counter." Is it really improving their results? I don't really think so because certain search terms are still marred by the typical commericial or SEO junk. I really think the next step for the search engines is to start work on creating a better way to index all those subject specific web forums on the internet that have massive amounts of good information but very poor searching capabilities.

Oh, if you have an invite send one my way so I can check this out for myself... is300fan "at" hotmail.com Thanks

What's the Deal?

[Anonymous Coward]

So, on top of its highly successful search and adsense, Google now wants to be the next DoubleClick. Well that's fine and I suppose that a lot of web monkeys want to have detailed statistics about their site. But, what is the deal with aggressive and forceful statistic collection? I'm speaking generally and not specifically about Google here.

I've noticed a marked increase in the use of Flash to track users. I've also noticed an annoying trend of scripts that request or post information to a tracker site every second. If you leave the page open it constantly hits the tracking site.

I find all this to be highly offensive. Web monkeys can slice and dice their logs in any way the like but stop trying to hijack my machine in persistent attempts to track my page viewing down to the second! When I come to your site, I want to view your site! I do not want your site causing my machine to load Google, DoubleClick, OLN or anyother pages. It's rude! It's dirty! It's like porn site popups! It makes me not want to come back to your site or your company. Ever!

The future of Google

[dada21]

Everyone who is anti-Google complains about how Google should stop trying new things and stick to what they're good at. The thing about Google is that they're not really "good" at anything -- they're great at finding new markets by continuously pushing the envelope of need.

I love the Analytics idea, and I hope I get chosen. Web site performance is one of the most complex dances I've ever seen, and I believe Google may be one of a very select few companies with a group of minds that can properly understand what we think is just a simple hit count.

I'm anti-stock market, and I believe the Google is way overvalued (more realistic would be 10 times earnings and even that is too much without a reasonable dividend), but I think they have the talent pool needed to finally move beyond the desktop, the operating system and the hardware. Whoever said that information was the PC was right -- but it isn't just access to information that makes it have any value. You need to be able to aggregate, sort and display that information in an understand fashion. The hit counter is one of the most important (and overlooked) piece of information when it comes to understanding how to make your website more valuable to your users and to your investors.

Adblock is your friend...

[Quixote]

Add
http://www.google-analytics.com/*
to your blocking rules, and all is well. :-)

Re:Adblock is your friend...

[sethadam1]

But why? Urchin is to help a webmaster. Do you want to hurt the websites you visit? I can understanding blocking annoying features - I block tons of JS and flash and cookies, but why not run this script?

Sometimes the ad blocking crowd are a little overzealous.

Re:Adblock is your friend...

[Quixote]

This lets Google track me everywhere on the WWW. A cookie set by Google-Analytics can be read by the script from every site that has the script; therefore they (Google) can track you as you jump from Slashdot to Digg to Bullzeye to RecipeCentral and so on (assuming these sites have the Urchin script). I don't like the idea of being tracked everywhere I go like this.

I am amazed that the Googleaid-drinking Slashdot crowd isn't up in arms about this tracking possibility.

Re:Adblock is your friend...

[slavemowgli]

Speak for yourself. Nobody's forcing you to block anything; in fact, the GP did not even say "OMG u h4v3 to block this now!!!111", he merely said "IF you want to block it, it's easy, as you just have to add the following filter to adblock". Whether people actually do that or not is up to them - not him, and not you either.

And as for "do you want to hurt the websites you visit", that's the same strawman that's used by those who're against any use of ad blocking whatsoever, too, but it's still a strawman. People's intention is not to hurt websites; it's to avoid getting tracked without their knowledge or consent, in ways that they cannot check or supervise even when they want to.

Besides, have you ever gone to the fridge to grab a can of soda or used the restroom while there was a commercial break on TV? If yes, then you should ask yourself the same thing - why do you hurt the channels you watch by not sitting there and taking notes about the products you're supposed to buy the next day?

Advertising is built on the idea that most people won't bother ignoring it, but that doesn't mean that there's something morally wrong with doing so. If someone says "hi, would you like a cookie?" and then, after I eat it, asks me to buy something or listen to him rant about religious or political matters or the like, I'm not obliged to do that just because he gave me a cookie - and if he gets pissy and said "but you took my cookie", I would just point it out to him that he chose to give it to me out of his own free will.

Advertising is the same. If you put up a website with advertising, don't expect people to feel obliged to look at it - and what's more, don't complain if they don't. If you absolutely want them to see it, don't let them in before sitting through it. Think that'll drive your visitors away? Tough luck, there's no constitutional right to having your business model work out.

And while most of the above was about advertising, the same goes for tracking and the like, too. Feel free to try, but don't tell me I'm under a moral obligation to let it happen - I'm not. And if you don't like me taking your free cookie without listening to you or signing your petition afterwards... don't offer free cookies.

Re:who cares? it sucks anyway

[Janek Kozicki]

it fails to count most traffic for no apparent reason.

it requires javascript turned on, in the visitor's browser. That skips from 5% to 30% of visitors (depending on the nature of your website - ie, homepage of links versus windoze wares site).

Got mine

[alta]

I got mine the first time around. It looks pretty sweet but I haven't gotten to deep into it. It gives some pretty nice metrics on browser type, country, resolution, well everything urchin did I suppose.

And everything comes across in executive friendly flash charts...

Slashdot and Sourcefoge should know better

[CMBologna]

I've been lucky to jump early on the analytics bandwagon. However it got very apparent that they are having some performance issues and the report generation was/is still very slow. That said I still like it very much as it gave me some nice data on where my visitors live.
However the thing that goes on my nerves is that now everybody has it including big names like slashdot, sourceforge, ati, etc. I wonder, if the service is free, shouldn't at least peple that make a lot of money from ads (slashdot, sourceforge, ati...) donate a percentage to the analytics service so that it doesn't interrupt/cripple the service for the rest of users.
Analytics in the end helps sites target better their content, thus making more revenue both for the site and google (if they use GoogleAd's), but what if they don't use GoogleAd's? What if google doesn't beef up or scale better analytics with that revenue? That will just cripple the benefit that this service brings.

I find the (free) service very useful

[MarkWatson]

There are some rough edges (availability and best with Internet Explorer [yuck]) but I use their service to track my main web site, my blog, and three J2EE-based web portals. I never thought that I needed the kind of user location and navigation information that Analytics provides, but now that I have access to this information I would not like to lose it! Knowing statistically how people navigate around your site gives you a better idea of what people like than simple web log statistics. For example, I give away all sorts of hopefully useful stuff on my main site, but to be honest, I am most keenly interested in people visiting my consulting services page. Analytics lets me see what site navigation paths lead to my consulting page.

Open source versions

[afd8856]

I don't know what's special about analytics, but if there's anything noteworthy, I hope the open source alternatives, such as awstats or webalizer will pick the ideas and offer versions that will not depend on a third party such as google.

And hell, why doesn't google releases this thing (or at least a lite version) as open source for the webmasters?

Re:Open source versions

[rainwater]

And hell, why doesn't google releases this thing (or at least a lite version) as open source for the webmasters?

Because Google wants the data. That's why they give it away for free. Google is an advertisement company first these days. Analytics is just another way for Google to collect data to use to improve their targetted ads.

Works via Javascript ... and Slashdot uses it ...

[xmas2003]

For those too lazy to RTFA, Google Analytics uses Javascript ... so obviousely you need that enabled for it to work correctly. So while most people/browsers have this enabled, it will undercount those that don't ... which incidentally includes most search engine robots.

BTW, Slashdot has been using this for a while ... if you have any doubt, do a view source and look about 20 lines down. Since they already have access to the raw log files (argueably better data), the tin-foil hat crowd shouldn't be too worried about this WRT /. ... but it is pretty interesting that web sites are (basically) allowing Google to collect (and potentially view) this data for them.

Achtung, babies.

[baudbarf]

Am I the only person who sees danger here? I've never heard it mentioned before, but Google gradually amassing the ability to track your every movement on the web.

Now, web servers have long been capable of logging every move that you make ON THEIR SERVER, but once you go to another server, they lose you. What Google is doing is (intentionally or not) bugging millions of web pages with Javascripts which are loaded from their own server.

For those who don't understand web technology, every time a resource is loaded from a server, your browser tells that server who you are (IP and any applicable cookies) and also what page sent you to fetch this resource (referer header). So, every time your browser loads an "Ads By Gooooooooogle" advertisement script, or a creative usage of the Google Maps API, or now a "Google Analytics" image/script; your browser checks in with Google's server and says "Hi! I'm browser #2j823 and I've just visited this URL."

As more Google resources are dumped onto web pages by enthusiastic webmasters, their "surveillance coverage" of the web grows, and, even now, it's considerable enough to give a good outline of each user's general habits and usual haunts.

So, Slashdot, is it a good thing that a private company is taking on an ability that would be terribly controversial for the government to take on; especially when the government is just a phone call away from requisitioning that data?

Googchelon

[dbzero]

Front company for the NSA?

Secret Relationship Between Analytics and AdSense?

[vtechpilot]

I don't know if anyone else has noticed but this is as good a place as any to throw out the question. I put my site on Google Analytics right after it was post on /. in November. I have also been using AdSense on the site since August or So. Oddly enough, shortly after adding Analytics to the site, AdSense revenue started dropping. Revenues are now less than half of what they were before Analytics.

Anyone else seen that behavior or is my site just a statistical outlier?

Very Exciting News!

[spyrral]

My Firefox tab says "Slashdot | Google Re-Opens Anal"

agreed

[mgkimsal2]

I agree, and I touched on this topic of Google's growing ownership of data and people seeming not to care about it here. It was more centered on the "google wifi" proposals in the news last fall, but the idea is the same. Many people really DON'T see any harm in it, or "so what, google should be rewarded for this" type of attitude. I've met very few people who understand the importance of how much control google will have over web metadata.

Will we see antitrust actions against google at some point? Maybe that's why they moved the analytics program to 'invite only' from 'free for all'? Imagine if MS had bought an industry leading application (urchin), rolled it in to the next Windows Update, and given it away for free. What would the reaction have been?

Re:Secret Relationship Between Analytics and AdSen

[manastungare]

I'm seeing my AdSense revenue increase after Analytics, and I've no reason to believe that the two things might be related at all. As before, I still see clicks worth really less, as well as those worth really more -- it's the number of clicks that has gone up, but the price per click is more or less the same as before Analytics.

I realize it was a joke...

[Evro]

... but calling Google Analytics a glorified hit counter is seriously misleading, and overlooks one of its main functions: it allows the advertiser to link ad performance to conversion rate. If a particular ad generates 20,000 clicks it may appear to be more effective than one that generates only 1000 clicks. But if the ad that generates 20,000 clicks only generates 100 conversions (orders) and the ad that generates 1000 clicks leads to 200 conversions, the second ad is obviously more valuable to the advertiser. That's the kind of metric a "hit counter" can't give you, but Google Analytics (and other SEM products) can.

Some firms that provide these types of services are listed here: http://www.sempo.org/home

Click stream not trivial?

[namespan]

Click stream analyisis for websites is not a trivial problem.

Um... why? What's different about "click stream analysis" than simply grabbing lists of requests from a given user out of the server logs?

Re:Click stream not trivial?

[DavidNWelton]

"What's different about "click stream analysis" than simply grabbing lists of requests from a given user out of the server logs?"

It's more "Web 2.0"!

Re:Theft of service?

[JesseMcDonald]

I take it you've never tried FlashBlock? It's a fairly popular extension which keeps Flash objects from running (or even loading) until they're clicked on.