« Previous post
Next post »

November 14, 2005

Google Analytics Swings at Measure Map

Michael Arrington

60 comments »

Google took the wrapper off Analytics today. It is a rebranding of their Urchin acquisition from earlier this year.

It works in much the same way as MeasureMap - using it requires the addition of javascript into a couple of files on your blog. It has deep integration into Adwords as well.

Google Analytics is mostly free (up to 5 million page views per month), or completely free if you are an adwords user.

Registration for Analytics is currently suspended but I’ll be doing a full side by side review against Measure Map in the next day or two. The screen shot provided by Google (to left) is encouraging.

One thing I’d like to understand is whether Google Analytics takes a holistic approach to blog analytics like Measure Map does, or whether it is a more generic application for measuring general website statistics. Measure Map is awesome at monitoring traffic at the post and comment level and has used flash and Ajax integration in a very intelligent way.

More on the Meme.

UPDATE: The site has been down all day and they have suspended registrations for now. The bigger problem appears to be that Google didn’t notify Urchin’s paid subscribers ($200/month) that the change was going to happen, and those subscribers have no access to their data right now. Ethan Stock tells the story and he is pissed off.

Google isn’t acting like a real business, they are acting like an over-enthusiastic Golden Retriever puppy. Oh, they just knocked the vase off the table with their tail, but aren’t they cute? Um, no. Google, grow up.

  • Sphere It

This entry was posted on Monday, November 14th, 2005 at 11:53 am and is filed under Company & Product Profiles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

Trackbacks/Pings (Trackback URL)

  1. DragonStyle

    November 14th, 2005 at 12:06 pm

  2. Google Analytics at Blogalistic

    November 14th, 2005 at 12:08 pm

  3. The English Guy

    November 14th, 2005 at 1:23 pm

  4. Core Dump

    November 14th, 2005 at 2:31 pm

  5. Just a Memo

    November 14th, 2005 at 2:48 pm

  6. Mashable*

    November 14th, 2005 at 3:59 pm

  7. Mashable* » Blog Archive » This Post is Being Tracked by Google Analytics! - Internet Entrepreneur Pete Cashmore on Web 2.0

    November 14th, 2005 at 4:09 pm

  8. Things That ... Make You Go Hmm

    November 14th, 2005 at 6:34 pm

  9. Web analytics at schwabe.be :: Adam Schwabe’s weblog

    November 14th, 2005 at 8:41 pm

  10. Pig Pen » On Google Analytics - its an adventure

    November 14th, 2005 at 8:54 pm

  11. Supr.c.ilio.us: The Blog » Google’s Random Number Generator

    November 14th, 2005 at 10:50 pm

  12. » Blog Archive » TechCrunch » Google Analytics Swings at Measure Map

    November 15th, 2005 at 6:55 am

  13. Make You Go Hmm: » Google paying customers didn’t get memo

    November 15th, 2005 at 7:03 am

  14. Robert Rainwater Presents

    November 15th, 2005 at 7:29 am

  15. Weblog Tools Collection » Google Analytics Swings at Measure Map

    November 15th, 2005 at 12:01 pm

  16. Tom Markiewicz

    November 15th, 2005 at 6:09 pm

  17. Mangas Verdes

    November 15th, 2005 at 6:29 pm

  18. Avery J. Parker - Web site hosting and computer service

    November 15th, 2005 at 9:33 pm

  19. TechCrunch » Google Buys MeasureMap

    February 14th, 2006 at 3:01 pm

  20. Mashable* » It’s Official…Google Buys MeasureMap

    February 14th, 2006 at 4:26 pm

  21. TechCrunch en français » Google rachète MeasureMap

    February 14th, 2006 at 5:00 pm

  22. justaddwater.dk | Google improves webstat by MeasureMap acquisition

    February 15th, 2006 at 1:25 am

  23. Blank Blabberings

    March 30th, 2006 at 8:46 am

  24. Only Passionate People Win : [ Migrated ] Google Analytics

    March 31st, 2006 at 3:18 am

  25. Soj

    April 8th, 2006 at 7:27 pm

  26. Oliver Thylmann’s Thoughts » Free Website Statistics

    October 3rd, 2006 at 6:59 am

  27. Google Urchin v.6 Rumored To Launch Today

    October 16th, 2007 at 2:00 am

  28. האם גוגל עומדת לשנות שוב את ענף הפרסום?

    March 17th, 2008 at 2:32 pm

  29. Google Relaunching Measure Map

    April 29th, 2008 at 6:21 pm

Comments

RSS feed for comments on this post.

  1. ethan

    November 14th, 2005 at 12:14 pm

    Analytics is the Urchin product reborn, and is more a direct competitor to Webtrends Live and Omniture than to MeasureMap.

    Measuremap is fine grained analytics specifically tailored to the needs of a blogger, tracking links in, links out and post reads as well as comments. Analytics, Webtrends, WebSideStory (Hitbox) and Omniture are all real-time “bug” based stats engines (which work with Ajax and Flash based sites) that are more suited toward generic analytics.

    So its not a “which is better” just a “what is better suited to your business need.”

  2. women

    November 14th, 2005 at 12:30 pm

    Google Analytics looks really great (and its servers are quite overloaded now:). Another huge success of Google.

  3. Lee

    November 14th, 2005 at 12:47 pm

    I am keen to give this a go on my web sites. Any word on when we can sign up and start using it?

  4. Eric T. Peterson

    November 14th, 2005 at 1:13 pm

    I think that when you put these products side-by-side you’ll see that they are actually pretty different in terms of the value they are able to provide directly and easily to bloggers. I’m using/trying both and while Google Analytics is a fairly powerful web analytics tool, MeasureMap is very appropriate for bloggers.

    I agree with Ethan, I think your comparison will only be valid because both applications are free solutions bloggers can use to get a handle on their readership. The comparison stops there because Google has given us a tool that is useful to a very broad audience (site operators, Internet marketers, product merchandisers) and MeasureMap provides a tool that is useful to a very narrow audience (albeit a large one, bloggers.)

    What I wonder is this: should/will Google (or Yahoo!, or MSN) buy MeasureMap?

  5. Yosef

    November 14th, 2005 at 1:50 pm

    Yes, I got in before accounts were suspended. I will leave my comments after I have tested it tonight. It takes 12 hours after logging in to compile stats.

  6. Kyle

    November 14th, 2005 at 3:50 pm

    This is great. I finally was able to login to my account after I posted briefly on the subject.

    I agree with what the others are saying here, I don’t see this as competitor to MeasureMap (haven’t used Mint, so I can’t comment on it). I’ll still use MeasureMap as my primary tool for monitoring traffic to my blog.

    That said, I hope Google Analytics pressures WebTrends to clean up their act. Most of the enterprise level analystics software is needlessly complex, and WebTrends is the worst offender(that I’ve used).

  7. women

    November 14th, 2005 at 4:51 pm

    Traffic seems to decrease, GAnalytics servers seems to speed up ;)

  8. eoino

    November 15th, 2005 at 12:50 am

    Managed to get in and create an account yesterday before the service was “moved to new servers” but it appears that Google’s sense of time is pretty similar to Microsofts of old.

    My account still says

    “Analytics has been successfully installed and data is being gathered now. Your first reports will be ready within twelve hours.”

    and we’re now around 16 hours and counting…

  9. Kord Davis

    November 15th, 2005 at 7:00 am

    Ditto on the waiting…

  10. Ethan

    November 15th, 2005 at 7:36 am

    I still can’t get it to recognize the code in my header (murmurs.com). Oh well, quite sad.

    This has to be the most bumbled launch Google has ever done? First pissing off paying customers, then pulling it, and now it doesn’t even seem to work (I’ve triple checked that the javascript hooks are in my page).

  11. Gord

    November 15th, 2005 at 9:46 am

    Well, I have it running — I signed up at midnight Sunday Pacific Time. It says I have reports, but the reports show no visitors, thus no data. I’m pretty sure I’ve had visitors - like me, and usually a lot more. I don’t know whether it is not working yet, or I have installed the script wrong.

  12. Aaron Hockley

    November 15th, 2005 at 12:59 pm

    I’m signed up, they’ve validated my headers, and my reports were supposed to be ready in 12 hours. We’re now at 27 hours and counting…

  13. Steve Simmonds

    November 15th, 2005 at 1:13 pm

    Came across this posting etc on ecademy.. see link http://www.ecademy.com/node.php?id=58967

    Interesting Microsoft + Google rant.

  14. James

    November 15th, 2005 at 5:54 pm

    “it appears that Google’s sense of time is pretty similar to Microsofts of old.

    My account still says

    “Analytics has been successfully installed and data is being gathered now. Your first reports will be ready within twelve hours.”

    and we’re now around 16 hours and counting…”

    I’m looking at 26 hours and counting…

  15. Nader

    November 16th, 2005 at 7:29 am

    the interface and data design looks awesome and very structured. easy to find everything. nice work!

    the only non-google-error which is kind of disillusioning:

    - GA shows half of the visitors my mediatemple’s urchin stats shows
    - GA shows 2/3 of the visitors AwStats shows

    So who’s “lying”? ;)
    Google, MediaTemple-Urchin or AwStats?

    I thought I had 800 visitors with http://www.brandinfection.com but it’s a lot less.

    How have your visitor numbers developed?

  16. Johan

    November 16th, 2005 at 9:23 am

    I still think Measure Map can survive this big blow. IMHO Google Analytics is much to complicated for the average weblogger.

    I hope that Measure Map will invent an innovative pricing structure and the possibility to consolidate various weblogs under one account. With Google Analytics you can do this, but it is not possible to do a side-by-side comparison of the basic stats of all websites that are set up for one account.

    Fortunately for Measure Map, the weblog-market is a enourmous niche market (contradictio in terminis!).

  17. Sam Jackon

    November 16th, 2005 at 2:59 pm

    Nader et al~ I’ve seen some interestingly fluctuating numbers out of Analytics so far, compared to the raw Analog logs. Likely it is handling networks and subnets differently, I might fiddle with its filters after some more data has come in to patch out those little bumps.

    the milliseconds urchin.js is taking up are frustrating, but no one else seems to really be bothered too much. looking forward to some interesting statistics from this baby.

    seems the general consensus is that data reports started being available something this afternoon, right? Mine late this morning.

  18. eoino

    November 17th, 2005 at 6:49 am

    And now I can’t get in at all.

    I log in at the Analytics page and get bounced back to google.ie - thought it may be an Irish thing but, when I changed my preferences to use google.com, I just get bounced to my google.com/ig page.

    Very frustrating.

  19. Sam Jackson

    November 17th, 2005 at 7:14 am

    I’m awesome–I spelled my name wrong before.

    Anyways, people the world over are getting bounced out like that, -but- you can still get to your reports. Just use the direct link.

    https://www.google.com/analytics/home/report

    of course, it’s not much consolation since no one seems to have weds’ stats…

  20. g

    November 17th, 2005 at 1:51 pm

    I got in also but it has only updated once and all we get is a message saying “Analytics has been successfully installed and data is being gathered now. Your first reports will be ready within twelve hours”

    well at least we got one days worth of info…jeez

    P.S. Techcrunch is a very informative site..keep up the good work

    http://www.illmethinks.com

    g

  21. Klim

    November 18th, 2005 at 10:51 am

    Is anybody else not getting their stats yet? I signed up the first instance they let me (3 days ago) and its been “gathering stats” ever since but showing me nothing. Bloody people… all signing up at once. ;)

  22. Ruth Kitt

    November 19th, 2005 at 12:19 pm

    I have major problems with the stats. Not only is Google gathering ever since. I get some hits listed. But in the executive overview they dropped out one day completely and I know that there have been visits.

    Well, it is Google and everybody goes for it.

  23. John

    November 21st, 2005 at 2:35 pm

    I don’t think that they need to grow up…They are now providing you with a service that you don’t have to pay for anymore…Basically giving you $200 a month. If you could say anything I think it would be more how much the web developers need to grow up because they rushed Google’s new release like puppies running for a dropped piece of cheese.

  24. alex

    December 14th, 2005 at 2:35 am

    If you are not sure that Google Analytics tracking code
    installed properly - try this new free tool to check that GA really
    works on your web page. http://ga.truwex.com/

  25. Paradigm Shift

    February 23rd, 2006 at 6:55 pm

    sannkouni narimasita

  26. tfYmviZaOe

    February 24th, 2006 at 5:51 am

    6dgcWv3TyRT9G 4P7ycwWmKzbMbg CqcsGJvCPrHcK

  27. Kumar Pandey

    March 23rd, 2006 at 1:19 pm

    what is the charting display technology here? Flash? JPEG?

  28. Workdrone

    July 29th, 2006 at 7:58 pm

    great tool alex, big thanks

  29. Master

    January 23rd, 2007 at 6:43 am

    Google analytics is the best free tracking software, recommend to use.

  30. G P

    January 26th, 2007 at 3:20 pm

    We use Analytics

  31. Jeff Lawrence

    March 5th, 2007 at 10:00 pm

    We do recommend using Google Analytics as it is a very robust analytics tool, and best of all its 100% free. Look for additions to the application once Microsoft releases their free analytics tool later this year.

« Previous post
Next post »