Ignition Tech News

Like many others eager to try out Google’s new traffic-tracking service, I added the Google Analytics javascript to my sites yesterday, and was informed that I had added it correctly and my stats would begin to appear in twelve hours.
However, it’s now 27 hours later and I’m still seeing no stats, a problem a lot of people seem to be having.

G Analytics is one of the few new Google products to be released that doesn’t carry a ‘Beta’ label, but appears to be having some serious problems for an official product release.

The blogosphere’s reaction yesterday was initial excitement, followed by lots of questions about why the site was so slow and frustration at constantly seeing an “under maintenance” message when trying to log in.
Those problems appear to have been solved - the site seems zippy enough today, but myself and many others have witnessed a much longer delay than 12 hours in the system actually showing stats, and the Help system seems to be only half-complete, with lots of the pages throwing a 404.

I’m eager to try the service out properly - the Flash & DHTML-based piecharts and graphs look great, and there’s lots of different metrics to look at, but as of this posting, no actual data from my site.

In the meantime, I’ve been searching for more articles and opinion about the service, and came across an interesting one in the latest Axandra search newsletter, which focuses more on the privacy concerns surrounding the product and Google in general:

Google already knows a lot of things about you. If you also use their new tracking service, you will tell Google how much you earn, when you earn it, which products you sell, how often you sell them, how much you spend for ads on other sites and you will reveal much more information about your online business.

Ask yourself if you want Google to know that much about you and your company. Do you really want to share your revenue information with a company that also wants your advertising dollars? Do you want to share your revenue information with any other company at all?

Google officials have declined that they will use the data to better understand how much you are willing to pay for ads, based on conversions. They also claim that they do not plan to tap into the data as a means of improving regular search results or to identify bad sites. Nevertheless, these things are easily possible if you use Google Analytics.

Google engineer Matt Cutts even writes in his blog: “Blackhat SEOs may be leery of using Google for analytics, but regular site owners should be reassured.” That sounds as if Google might actually use the information for other purposes.

Google Analytics - is it worth its price?

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 15th, 2005 at 11:21 am and is filed under Google, Search, Internet. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.