May
17
2007
A Fresh New Look for Google Analytics
Posted by Jon Lee in Reviews, Web Development, tags: google, Google-AnalyticsEarlier this week, Google updated their popular Analytics front-end to give it a much prettier interface and more intuitive functions. Not everyone had access to it, but as of today, it is now available to everyone!
If you haven’t checked it out yet, log in and take a look. If you aren’t using Analytics… well you should! In my opinion, it is the best web stats program out there and probably better than anything your web host offers (although it requires you to put a small snippet of code in your footer).
Take the official feature tour or read what these bloggers are saying about version 2!
- EpikOne – Welcome to the New Google Analytics
- Avinash Kaushik – Google Analytics Is Re-Launched: Do These Five Things First in V2
- Jason Spence – Google Analytics Redesign
- Clickz – New Google Analytics: Built for Search Marketers
- Hongkiat – Google Analytics New Version
If you have your own writeup/review of the new features, let me know and I’ll add you to the list 
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I love the new look… it’s easier to get around and you can customize it!
Analytics probably is the best off server solution around, but I still wouldnt use it, its just one more call to an off site server I could do without, and dont really see anything of use that my server based stats dont already offer… looks pretty though.
If your server offers Urchin stats then you’re probably right since they’re pretty much the same, but if you server only has awstats or something similar then there are a lot of advanced features they don’t offer.
Plus google servers are generally fast and the call is at the end of your page so I don’t see it as being that big a performance hit.
Just checked it out and it looks really good. Maybe when I have some time I will actually see what it can do unless someone wants to write a post about the best features of analytics? *hint hint*
All of EpikOne’s posts about it are excellent.. check it out: http://www.epikone.com/blog/tag/v2
what do you guys think about paid tracking systems like WebTrends? they used that at a company i used to work for.
I’ll admit that Analytics looks nice, but it’s hard to validate the data against another source. I tried to do so after I noticed that the number of visitors from certain countries would never be consistent, and the page visits would be different from what FireStats and even the my raw access logs showed by a large margin.
I wrote a little something on it here: http://www.j2fi.net/2007/05/13/analytics-vs-firestats-vs-raw-access-logs/
What I’d really like to see from Analytics is a simple list of IP addresses and what they viewed. This would allow me to compare the data against what my own records shows. So long as it’s relatively in line with my expectations, then I can trust Google’s data a bit more.
You also have to keep in mind users that have javascript turned off and those that navigate away before the footer is loaded (which is where the analytics JS call is)
I’ve wondered about this. I check my server stats, Analytics, and even tried a few others, but they are all so different I don’t even know what to look for. I couldn’t tell you what my monthly traffic is with in 10 thousand…lol
Also, I can’t seem to find where they have your hour-by-hour breakdown of a single day…