An Excellent post By: Matt Bailey (2010-01-08) for InternetFinacialNews. Could not agree more with Matts sentiments and his concise way of putting things. Google Rocks.
I know that there are a lot of people who are wondering if they should make the switch to Google Analytics, and I would say, yes. I was one of those people for…
…a long time. I used Clicktracks (now Lyris) since the day I started analytics, and always resisted GA. It has only been within the last few months that I have really started to use GA extensively, and not only that, to like it.
Google does bother me a little bit with the amount of information that it has on the millions of people using it. Giving Google access to my analytics only increases its knowledge, and we all know that knowledge equals power. This ties in with Matts recent post on the failure of search engines, the bigger and more powerful the search engine (Google), the more we have to design and analyze for that engine. This can take away somewhat from the user experience and the conversion of those users.
Matt goes on to post …
First, its free. You cant get a better price than that. Many people think that because it is free, it isnt worth it, but they are wrong. Google wants your site to perform well. GA is their way of helping you make your site better, so that they have better quality sites in their index. Kind of selfish on their part, but it works.
Second, Avinash Kaushik is their Analytics Evangelist. Avinash helps Google to shape the vision, direction and features of 13 different Google tools that provide data to customers. This is one of the biggest reasons for GAs success, it has top web analysts working to make it usable and actionable.
Thirdly, because they give out the API, anybody can create code for Google Analytics, and there are some fantastic scripts and add-ons out there. Here are a few that I use;
Enhanced Google Analytics – This was a script for Greasemonkey, but was later made into a FireFox add-on. This puts a little button on the top of the Referral report and Keyword report that show you the unusual traffic. It graphs out sites/keywords that brought 50% more traffic over the last 7 days, and those that had 50% less traffic over the last 7 days.
- Continue reading Matts full article
~ Bonn Appetite
