November 14th, 2005 | One Comment
Google Analytics
The website stats package that used to be Urchin, and is now Google Analytics, is now available for free. Yes, gratis.
The package used to cost $199 per month (hence the reason that I’ve only ever viewed the demo, rather than used the full thing), and it sees Google add yet another service that, if it proves to be reliable, will take away a lot of business from its rivals.
Just a couple of things to note. From the opinions I’ve heard it is a very powerful stats package, but, I’m led to believe that Urchin itself was quite slow to load, and this has not changed (and is likely to be made worse for the time-being with the amount of hammering it will get as new webmasters sign up). It is also not realtime, the stats will take a few hours to show up. You will also need a Google account to use it.
Rather than being a log analyser, Google Analytics requires Javascript to be added to all the pages you wish to track (similar to Mint and other stats packages). This can be a bit of a pain to add to every page if you have a large site, but on the plus side it means that you only get stats for the pages you are really interested in, and a lot of referral spam and the like will be ignored by it.
I suspect that for many bloggers it may prove to be too slow and suffer from just the sort of information overload that Mint was developed to beat. But it’s like having a new, expensive toy at the moment, so we’ll have to see if the novelty wears off.
WV4 is the online home of Rob Lewis, featuring a blog covering a variety of subjects, mainly web design, CSS and PHP, as well as featuring useful links to other websites.
[...] In my .htaccess I’ve got a long list of entries to reduce referrer spam, which include a load of keywords. I suspect the following line was triggering the permission problem one the page with the URL of http://wv4.co.uk/web/google-analytics: [...]