As an Urchin cus­tomer who feels rather neglected, the launch of Google Ana­lyt­ics as a free ser­vice upsets me a little.

I’ve made that point already: Urchin, Google, and why I’m not thrilled. But I’m doing my best to be fair and bal­anced anyway.

Con­fes­sion time: I’m a sta­tis­tics junkie. Despite doing really badly at maths at school, I love graphs and plot­ted lines and tables filled with num­bers. As you always need to “know your enemy” — and the con­cept of too many sta­tis­tics is not some­thing I’m famil­iar with — I signed up for an account (last week, before they lim­ited new reg­is­tra­tions due to high load) to take it for a spin. Here’s what I think after using it for a week.

Can we trust Google?

I’ve read some arti­cles from peo­ple who don’t feel com­fort­able with Google being on both sides of the equa­tion — sell­ing the ads on one side (know­ing what you pay) and then pro­vid­ing sta­tis­tics on the other site (know­ing what you earn). That’s a bit uncom­fort­able for me too, but as I don’t have any pay per click ads for any of my own sites I fig­ure they’re not har­vest­ing too much use­ful data. I wouldn’t want to put Ana­lyt­ics on a site where I did have AdWords.

I put the Google Ana­lyt­ics code on this blog, which is on a server with­out the ben­e­fit of Urchin stand­alone. I have AWStats which is OK in a pinch, but not really a great solu­tion for a sta­tis­tics junkie like me. Firstly it took about 36 hours before stats start­ing show­ing up. I’m sur­prised that Google didn’t antic­i­pate the demand (and sub­se­quent ham­mer­ing of their servers) and roll out grad­u­ally, more like the Gmail beta “invi­ta­tion” sys­tem that’s work­ing so well for other ser­vices like WordPress.com and Mea­sure Map (which I’m also try­ing out, more on that later). I’m sure doing it that way would have increased the already con­sid­er­able buzz about the new ser­vice to a fever pitch.

The Ana­lyt­ics interface

Once you log in, there’s some quite pretty graphs includ­ing a nice world map over­lay that’s a bit of fun. On the whole I don’t think it looks as slick as the stand­alone Urchin inter­face, although it’s pos­si­bly a lit­tle more usable (the JavaScript win­dows that can’t be opened in a tab in the stand­alone Urchin drive me nuts).

On to my first com­plaint: not sur­pris­ingly, it’s very pay per click ori­ented. As I don’t PPC on any of my own sites, that means there’s lots of stuff I don’t really want or need to see clut­ter­ing up my view. One of the first things I did on our stand­alone Urchin install was to set all my cus­tomer accounts up with a sim­pli­fied report set — one that con­tains just the impor­tant infor­ma­tion, with­out the fluff. Most small busi­ness site own­ers don’t need to know sta­tis­tics about HTTP sta­tus codes, hits per request and other geeky stuff — they just need to know how many peo­ple are vis­it­ing their site, what they’re look­ing at and where they came from.

So far, the level of inter­face cus­tomi­sa­tion pos­si­ble with Ana­lyt­ics is quite lim­ited — you can turn off any of the five cat­e­gories of reports but that’s about it. I wouldn’t rec­om­mend it to any of my clients who were not run­ning PPC ads (that’s most of them) — there’s just too many unneeded things that get in the way of the use­ful information.

It ain’t log file analysis

The reports are good, but my main com­plaint is that it’s still not log file analy­sis. It can’t tell you about:

• Vis­i­tors to your site with JavaScript disabled
• PDF, code/zip file or exe­cutable downloads
• Peo­ple hotlink­ing to your images or other resources
• Bots

All of the above are use­ful things for any­one seri­ous about their stats to know. Urchin stand­alone ver­sion gives you the abil­ity to have stats from a (locally hosted) JavaScript bug, as well as crunch­ing your log files. That’s a much more com­plete solu­tion, in my opinion.

Let’s sum­ma­rize

If you’re run­ning pay per click ads, the abil­ity to set con­ver­sion goals and com­pare the suc­cess of dif­fer­ent cam­paigns is pretty sexy and Google Ana­lyt­ics will be right up your alley. For peo­ple like me, who are more inter­ested in organic search engine opti­mi­sa­tion cam­paigns, it’s not as good as I thought it would be.