Google Analytics has been making waves in the blogosphere, and for good reason…it’s a very impressive offering from Google, and so far I’m very, well…impressed. I’ve refrained from mentioning it thusfar as I wanted to get a good sampling of data before jumping to conclusions (I installed my tracking code last Wednesday). I know the folks over at StatCounter can’t be happy about this (along with most other sites that offer a similar service for free); I’ve been one of their longstanding customers for about 2 years, and will continue to be so since they have all of my past data, but their offering pales in comparison feature-wise to Google’s, plus it looks like Analytics will track an unlimited number of page impressions for free, whereas with StatCounter you have to pay for anything over 100 hits (though I found a loophole around that, don’t tell them though…and if you want to know how to get around it email me and I’ll tell you).
I’m still wading through the wealth of reporting data available, but again I’m very impressed by what I’m seeing and am looking forward to figuring out all the options/jargon/etc. Nice one Google!
Installing the code on Community Server is a little unintuitive, so I’ll list the steps here:
- Sign up for your Analytics account on the Google website and get your tracking code.
- You’ll then need to paste this code into the <head> sections of the LayoutTemplate.ascx for the various CS applications, as well as the <head> section of the Master.ascx file in the Masters folder. It’s worth mentioning that CS 2.0 will have an option in the new Control Panel peice that allows you to add application specific and/or global header information via a GUI interface without having to resort to manually hacking individual web controls (a welcome touch).
As with some of the other recent offerings from Google, this one is seemingly a no-brainer and it was only a matter of time. Unlike some of their recent offerings (RSS reader anyone?), they have put quite a bit of thought/design/effort into Analytics, and I’ve yet to find any real gripes about it (well, a couple of small ones, such as the ability to drill a little deeper into specific page impressions geographically, but I’m probably just missing it somewhere…there are a ton of options, and it’s still in beta like most of their other stuff).
Sidenote: My site traffic is still only a fraction of what it was back in the .Text days, but it’s slowly climbing…I think I’ll be back to pre-CS levels in 4–6 months. I will never change domain names and blogging software at the same time ever again.
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