Google Analytics

Google has been at it again. As far as I know, they released it kind of silently, but they now offer statistics for your website.

After you’ve signed up for an account, you get a little javascript you have to add to every page. It then start to register visitors and follows them through the site, or registers them as returning visitors. And it registers or logs a lot, and provides all this information in many more reports then you and I can probably think of. And what I haven’t seen before with Google products, in a really nice and clean user interface, with small characters and (flash) graphics like pie-charts and the likes.

A great part is that you can view information as an executive, marketeer or webmaster. Executive don’t get to see which browser types are used, or what resolution your page is viewed with. As a webmaster, you can also view information like entry-points and much more information like that. When you’re for example seeing that default.aspx is a page a lot of people visit, you can dig deeper into the information. View data over time, or see some pie-chart about what countries those visitors come from. When looking at resolutions, I noticed the 1280×800 resolution. I assumed those all came from Chi Wai, who bought a nice screen a few months ago. But someone from England is also using that resolution. That’s really usefull information! 😉

But as far as I can tell, this is a really nice replacement for NedStat, who recently were sold to/taken over by some ugly company who’s doing a lot of ugly things to the once so nice NedStat. Nice about Google Analytics is also that you can add users (with a Google Account) who can then view your reports as well. A nice additional feature we can offer to our bloggers. Too bad Community Server has its MasterPages setup kind of weird, so I still have to alter every skin support at BloggingAbout.NET, to be able to register everything happening there. Scott Watermasysk immediatly added the feature to support Google Analytics. So when in december CommunityServer 2.0 is released, this is added a lot easier.