Google Analytics Open For Business

Google again took the covers off Google Analytics last week and opened the doors to the public. Analytics was formerly known as Urchin until Google bought it, hid it for a while and then re-released it to a flood of traffic which kept it closed to new accounts. Until last week, anyway. If you don’t currently do any sort of site traffic analysis on your site, Google Analytics is a great way to start better understanding not only where your visitors are coming from, but also what they’re doing once they find you. It is incredibly easy to set-up: one small chunk of code to add to your site, and it only requires a Google account to start.

The nicest thing about Google Analytics is the price, it’s free. Even nicer is that this isn’t one of those “you get what you pay for” deals. Analytics is a very nice product that can give you as little or as much feedback about your site as you want. Even if you don’t have the money to afford paying somebody to understand all the numbers and graphs, Google provides a great resource called Conversion University where you can “learn about marketing and content optimization and read web analytics tips from industry experts.” When the time comes for you to approach a web development company, you will look like a superstar when you can say yes to the always asked question, “do you have any analytics available?”

Google was quite active last week besides the Analytics activity. Blogger saw a new beta preview released (it’s about time Blogger was updated) and Writely — the online collaborative word processor &mdash also opened up for new accounts for the first time since Google bought them. Look for reviews of Blogger beta and Writely later this week. Exciting times for Googleholics!