In this story the author has taken a look at his awstats logs after implementing Google Analytics. He has found that when he implements virtual pages for tracking in Analytics, suddenly they’re beeing crawled by the Google spider. I wonder what else they’re using the data for?
As a followup to an earlier posting, I came across this blog article discussing optimizing Adwords selections and viewing the results in Analytics.
Earlier this year, Google went ahead and purchased Urchin, a web site analysis service. A few days ago, they decided to roll out the service (now re-christened as ‘Google Analytics‘) for free. I’m sure glad I didn’t advise my employer to purchase the software a few months ago!
I had the pleasure of test-driving the package when it was still Urchin. It’s put together very well, and ties in to Adwords campaigns. When I saw that Google had released the service for free, I immediately signed on and created some tracking for a few web sites that I own. This was over 48 hours ago. It’s still not working! I wrote to Google asking for some help. This is what I got back:
From: "Analytics Support" <analytics-support@google.com> To: ian@platinum.net Subject: Re: [#38618476] Not tracking after 48 hours Hello, Thank you for your email. We understand that you aren't seeing data in your reports, even though you your tracking code has been set up for over six hours. We apologize for any inconvenience. We have collected your data since you installed the tracking code on your site, and are continuing to collect this data throughout the day. We are currently in the process of creating reports from your data. You should be able to see your reports populated with data later today. Please note that this reporting delay is associated with unexpected demand for Google Analytics. Under normal circumstances, the data in your reports will be at most six hours old. For additional questions, please visit the Analytics Help Center at http://www.google.com/support/analytics. If you're unable to find an answer to your question on our site, please feel free to reply to this email. Sincerely, Analytics Support
Well, it’s now ‘later today’ and it’s still not working. The reply I got from them sure felt like a canned answer. It looks like I’m not the only one with a problem. I hope they get it fixed soon!