Analytics, a week later
Well it’s now been over a week since Google Analytics was released free to anyone who wanted it, and although they experienced a rough start, they appear to now have it at least sort of under control. No new users can sign up, and existing users cannot currently add new profiles. Thankfully however, I managed to add all the profiles I wanted before the limit was imposed. With the data updating roughly once a day, I have had a chance to look at the results and develop an informed opinion on the usefulness of Google Analytics.
Update Frequency
While many people have complained that the update frequency is terrible and they wouldn’t be willing to use it unless it got closer to real time, I have been surprised at how I stopped missing my up-to-the-minute stats. Until Analytics got released, I used to check my stats far too regularly, and this resulted in me looking at the data in small chunks for short periods of time. This in turn created a situation where I didn’t notice patterns as much as numbers, and if you only have stats as a complicated hit counter, you are missing out on a lot.
What Analytics sucks at, is showing you who visited 2 minutes ago; but once you get over that and start to pay attention to the bigger picture, the information offered is considerable. Everything about it is aimed at helping you understand your visitors: what they like, what they don’t like and where you’d like them to go.
Usability
It seems what Google Analytics is going to be good at, is encouraging usability.
When all you ever worry about is the number of visitors, you are very likely to start thinking that creating your pages for the search engines only, packed to the brim with keywords, is a good idea.
Now given a more advanced stats program, that really should be referred to as a goals program, and the web master will suddenly see his traffic in a vastly different way. Suddenly he will see what users actually made it to the goal pages, and why; what pages had a terrible drop out rate, and which ones didn’t. Immediately, I hope (and I think Google hopes too), the web master will start paying a little more attention to usability.
Because that is what usability is, allowing the user to easily use and understand the web site, which are also requirements to getting your users to actually make it to your sales page.
Profit
And all this will lead to Profit.
More profit for the website, since the web master will now have a better idea of just how his users act; and of course more profit for Google, since the moment you are more confident in making your users spend money at your site, is the moment you are willing to start spending more on advertising.
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