So there has been a lot of buzz about Google Analytics, a new fancy-pants stats thingy. Because of this buzz, though, there have been real teething troubles. They ought to have learned by now. It reminds me of the first days of Google Reader — it was far too slow to use at first; I haven’t been back since even though it’s probably quite good.
Anyway, this Google Analytics is apparently just Urchin with a new name. And Urchin cost $199. Per month. And now it’s free. So smelly little people like me can play about with it. And it broke for everybody, including existing Urchin users. Oops.
Anyway, some data has appeared today so now I can blog about it. I don’t really think this is aimed at smelly little people like me. It’s a little bit weird; all about things like goals that I don’t have and funnels that I’ve never even heard of. It’s pretty clear that the main target user is the businessman, which would explain the old £199 per month price tag. But there is plenty of interesting stuff for a plain old blogger like me to look at.
It’s got all the usual things that you’d expect from stats: browsers, platforms, resolutions, all the rest of it. It isn’t real time though. At the moment I’ve only got data for up to halfway through Tuesday. Nevertheless, there are some interesting things to see. For instance, it comes as no surprise that a hefty amount of visitors to this blog come from Google — but 70%?! Only 7% of visitors came directly, which kind of shows how much of bubble I’m sitting on when I look at how many visits the blog gets. And 80.53% of visitors ‘bounce’ (i.e. they come to look at one page and then bugger straight back off again). Thanks a bunch!
Another interesting feature is the map overlay. I remember when this dot-on-a-map thing was revolutionary. It’s becoming a bit standard now. Anyway, it says, “Zoom in on any region by right-clicking and selecting “zoom in” in the Display menu.” Basically, you’re using Flash’s own zoom in feature. This results in the location names being unreadably large. A special hello to whoever my reader in Kinghorn is though.
The big disappointment for me, though, is the feature that everybody was going on about. Site Overlay appears not to be working at the moment. That was the feature that interested me most in Google Analytics aswell. Hopefully it will be fixed soon enough though.
Overall, I’m pretty impressed with Google Analytics, but I’ll continue to use Sitemeter et al as well, for the time being at least.
Now, can somebody explain to me what the hell Google Base actually is?