Google Analytics Script Still Taken For Granted

As the saying goes…. If you’re not on Google you’re not “really” on the internet.

Forget Google Analytics, http://getclicky.com has a load more of features and it’s free. Google isn’t the solution to everything, and if you agree with bradleybradwell . you haven’t been on the web enough to accept other solutions that are far more intuitive.

Do you work for the Google Analytics team or did they pay you to write that post?

I disagree. Analytics has to do with metrics and review, which I really wouldn’t qualify under “Performance”. In terms of page performance, Analytics out-weighs competitors like Mint  haveamint.com) by over 15kb, and doesn’t necessarily provide much more useful info.

I think in my case it’s because I run analytics on over 30 websites.. so it’s a matter of finding time to see which ones are old and which ones aren’t.. lol

- paul

Wallace: No, it was a rising article that was mentioned in this post, that is the motivation - sorry, not tinfoil helmets here folks. ;)

I don’t usually make negative comments on posts but this article is flawed in several ways. Most glaringly you misquote another article.

Your article says that “40% of the webmasters out there NOT using the new Google Analytics script” and that statement is completely baseless given the article you link to as your source.

Your source article’s facts can be summarized as “In polling the top 10K sites, among those that use Urchin or GA, 40% use urchin.” This is not what you said.

What you said is wrong. Omniture is considered by many to be THE source for accurate numbers by advertising agencies and many of those top 10k sites are paying several 10s of thousands per yer for the privilege of having Omniture numbers available to provide the ad agencies. Additionally I would suspect that there are other tracking systems beyond the three we’ve mentioned. In short, that 40% has nothing to do with the total number of webmasters that use Urchin. Out of the 10K sites looked at, 6 could use GA and 4 use Urchin and the ratio would still be 40%.

Additionally, your source article goes off track by stating that those sites use a legacy Urchin.js, but shows nothing to back this up. It appears that they simply looked for urchin.js and assumed that the site was therefore using some outdated script that predated Google Analytics. A major release 3 months ago and a maintenence release just over 2 weeks ago prove that Urchin is still maintained developed and SOLD.

Perhaps it is the case that it fits some particular situations better than GA. For example, Urchin has a datacenter mode that allows various administrative priviledges to be assign (or not) that’s not available in GA AFAIK. There may be very good reasons for a particular organization to choose Urchin over GA.

Betting that the ppl that run the top 10k websites in the world made an oopsie and never realized that GA was out there, or are simply doing so well that we don’t care, seems foolish.

Actually this line from your source article:
“First of all, a full 50% of the top 10,000 sites on the Internet use [some form of] Google Analytics.”

Means that your statement of “40% of the webmasters out there NOT using the new Google Analytics script ” should actually be more like: “In a survey of the top 10K, we see 70% of the webmasters out there NOT using the new Google Analytics script ”

3000 use GA
2000 use Urchin
5000 use something else

Don’t get me wrong, I agree with the thrust of your post. GA is great. I also think that more people should use it. Just triple check your article’s wording before you post it.

[...] the Google Analytics script taken advantage [...]