Google Analytics

Every several months or so, I find myself raving about the newest Google product. But for most of them, I stop using them because they are not that useful for me.

I’ve tried and uninstalled Google Desktop Search (it was blocking out a lot of space on my harddrive that refused to be defragmented and slowing everything down; uninstalling freed up something like 4-6GBs of space for me), Google Earth (it’s nice to look at once in a while, but I found myself hardly every firing it up), and Google Desktop (I kept overloading the number of widgets and them getting annoyed by the clutter, then stripping back, then adding some more, rinse, and repeat). I’ve tried Google Spreadsheets, but I’m not that excited about it because I only use spreadsheets once a year (for NaNoWriMo).

Google Analytics is something else though. It took maybe a minute to sign up (once they send you an invitation) and set up my various domains. Then it took maybe another minute to add the tracking info to my blogger templates so that each page of each website could be tracked.

It’s great! I love the little charts and graphs it produces. I, like many others, initally thought that you needed to run AdWords in order to take advantage of Google Analytics, but no.

Frankly, it’s not too different from Site Meter, which I know several of you use already, but it has a bunch of different types of reports and just looks a lot nicer. It can be used on any website or webpage (even if you just want to track a single page, for some reason). I recommend it.