A long time ago, before I had a blog, or knew what one wast, I hollered
out loud in an empty room atop a swivel chair in my office, "Look out WebTrends, here comes
Urchin!". Well, back in March, Google acquired Urchin and nothing
happened for a long time, until an announcement last week that made me
pretty happy.
Google Analytics, formerly Urchin On Demand is
FREE (with a couple of
caveats)! This is great news for site builders who want detailed
information about the who what when where and how's of their site, and
want it on the cheap, Google Analytics is now most definitely the way
to go.
It may be free, but it's by no means a cheap solution. Back in the old
days when it used to be called Urchin, this app could cost thousands of
dollars.
Ok, there's a small limitation: to get Google Analytics for free your
site can't have more than 5 million monthly page views. That's a lot...
But if you do have more than the limit, buying into a Google Adwords
campaign gives you unlimited usage.
To make this work, you just need to add a small snippet of code to each page on your website (the xxxx-x is your account code).
< script src="http://www.google-analytics.com/urchin.js"
type="text/javascript" >
< /script >
< script
type="text/javascript" >
_uacct=”UA-xxxx-x”;
urchinTracker();
<
/script >
This isn't a complete replacement for live log analysis which is
what the Software version of Urchin does. The advantage of the
server side software is that you can report on non-web page
content like RSS feeds,
pdfs, etc,.The other downside is that you are required to make a change
to every page on your
site, but in many cases, this is worth the effort.
Look out WebTrends, here comes Google.