Google is now giving webmasters a powerful analytics tool from Urchin. The tool is used to determine how many people are visits their sites, provides info about referrers to your site and also what they did on your site(s). Google Analytics is the latest version of Urchin On Demand that can also be used to track user clicks in Flash objects and Javascript.

Google Account is required to access Google Analytics. If you have an AdWords, you can sign up for Analytics from within your AdWords account. Analytics free version is limited to 5 million pageviews per month but there is no limit if you are an active AdWords publisher.

Google Analytics is a hosted web analytics service, and is not currently available as a software application. The Google Analytics software product is currently in development and a release date has not yet been set.

Once you submit your website details to them, Google Analytics will provide a small Javascript code snippet (like Google Adsense javascipt code) that you can insert anywhere in the webpages that you want to track after the head and meta tags.

Google Analytics will itself check to see that the tracking code has been installed correctly on the home page of your site - once you've created a new profile, the Tracking Status will display a warning, "Tracking status unknown," until the system detects the code. Google Analytics uses a first-party cookie and JavaScript code to collect information about visitors and to track your advertising campaign data.

Google Analytics will also put significant pricing pressure on vendors. Google Analytics could hurt companies like Statcounter, Tracksy, Web Trends, Web Side Story and Click Tracks, and others focusing on the small to medium-size business market. These vendors will only be able to compete with Google Analytics (Urchin) if they provide better professional services and consulting units.

Google Analytics is not just for Adwords advertisers, it is a complete website traffic monitoring tool. But it is painfully slow at the moment. Google Analytics reporting is currently undergoing maintenance and will be available shortly. Your site traffic is being logged and you will be able to see the data after system maintenance has concluded.


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