Google Makes Web Analytics Product Free -- Pretty Much

Earlier this year Google bought Urchin Software, which offered Web analytics. This week they announced that they are making the service free. Well, mostly free. Free if you're getting less than five million page views a month (this is the kind of problem you want to have!) If you're an active AdWords advertiser there is no page view limit. You'll need a Google account, but you can try it out at http://www.google.com/analytics/.

Signing up is a several-step process. After you're logged in you'll be asked to specify the URL of the site and the name of the site as it should appear in the reports. After that you'll be asked to provide a name, a phone number, and the country where your Web site is. After that, you'll have to go through a long TOS and agree to it.

After you go through all that you get -- ! A little snippet of JavaScript to include on the pages you want tracked. (All that for a little snippet?) The snippet goes in the HEAD part of your Web site.

Be sure to put this on the front page of your site first. You might decide, say, to just put it in the individual entry archive template first since single entries make up the bulk of your site. However apparently Google's "Track Status" tool only checks your home page, so add it there first.

Once you have added the code, Google will begin tracking your page traffic. Earlier today I tracked a Web site at 350 degrees.. Google does say it can take several hours for information to begin populating your report. So I can't assess a live report, but I can tell you what you'll get.

The report opens with an executive summary that shows you an overview of site activity, including pageviews, top referrals, and the cities from which you get most of your viewers. A menu on the left gives you ways to more extensively dive into the data, including viewing your top keywords and sources, geographical locations of your visitors, and this nifty thing called a "Site Overlay", which lets you navigate your site while viewing traffic and conversion data for each link.

Your account does have some settings, including the ability to allow other users to view the analytics and the ability to set up "Filters" for information. You can also integrate the Analytics account with your AdWords account; more details about that here.

I have been hearing swirls that Google Analytics has been slow/down parts of the day; I have had no problems with it aside from a little slugginess. Robert Hanson has a breakdown of the various reports offered, and Bogle's Blog has some more information along with some concerns about Google's TOS and news about a WordPress plugin for Google Analytics (that was quick!)

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