Google Analytics - 20 Ways to Fix Analytics. Please Hurry?

http://ryanspoon.com/blog/2008/05/18/google-analytics-20-ways-to-fix-analytics-please-hurry/

by berecruited • 18 years ago

24 19 18 years ago

thorax2• 18 years ago

I'm leaning more towards live+historical analytic tools like Woopra and to some extent clicktale.

These have absolutely changed the way we look at our web visitors. Now hosting feels a bit like being a BBS sysop, especially on our medium-to-small sites.

Google Analytics still makes good quick reports that are useful when discussing traffic with investors/advertisers. Yet we're using their dashboard less and less now that the live tools provide us some decent statistics for our smaller sites.

I have to agree adding an API for Google Analytics would be great. Woopra has neat javascript tricks where you can add additional information about the user from your backend to be passed to woopra. So in the GUI interface we can tie traffic to actual usernames (avatar images, too) rather than IP addresses. This is hard to describe how useful it is--- nameless IP addresses and user-agent strings lead you to "guess" when users are the same and it doesn't help across machines. When you can see how a specific customer uses your site over a month or two, it can help a lot in understanding what you've done wrong and right with your site.

Quick advice: If you have a small website (50k-1k page views a day) and you're not using something like woopra and clicktale to understand what your users do when they visit your sites, you're losing a great opportunity to make your site better for customers.

Edit: A quick search turned up a few other live-analytic hybrids out there I hadn't seen before. Like whoson.com seems to have a self-hosted version. Might experiment with those, too.

_sgo45• 18 years ago

Clicky has an API and real time + historical data - http://getclicky.com

thorax2• 18 years ago

That's awesome. I didn't know clicky existed.

I really like your features as listed and shown in the demo. They're almost a match for the things Woopra is showing off in their current beta. Your prices sound awesome, so we may give you a shot, too, especially when the free beta ends.

I'll be watching to see what next features you guys add. I'm a huge fan of real-time visitor analysis and you look promising. Good luck!

tejava• 18 years ago

Great feedback. Ill try them out. Anyone tried hitwise?

jakewolf• 18 years ago

And for anyone paying over X $'s a month in Adwords we should definitely get free live stats.

tom_rath• 18 years ago

I'd add in "add a checkbox to remove weekends from displayed results".

Selling business software, we've found weekends are a dead-zone which throws the numbers off. It's not a huge issue, but it makes things a smidge more difficult to trend.

lux3• 18 years ago

You know, I would love an official API and several other features mentioned. But what I really want to see is faster serving of the Javascript included in my pages.

Several times recently, I've gone to my sites and it seems to never finish loading because Analytics is being slow again. It's at the foot of the page and installed correctly, but since it doesn't finish or close its connection it keeps the loading icon spinning forever which makes some users think there's still more to come. The last thing any analytics package should do is decrease the speed perception of your site.

Simple solution:

a) We download and install the Javascript on our end -- less for Google to serve, so they can focus on just saving the data.

b) They email us whenever a new version of the Javascript comes out, so we can update our copies.

That's not so hard, is it? Analytics is a nice stats interface, but it doesn't feel like it's been improved much (except for a new skin) in a long time. Expecting the above to be fixed, even just by improving the speed/stability of their JS serving, is the least we can hope for really.

ComputerGuru• 18 years ago

Number 1 is already possible and its even advised by Google. However, you don't get email updates.

I can't find the link that advises its use right now, but this link talks about hosting ga.js on your server: http://www.google.com/support/googleanalytics/bin/answer.py?...

lux3• 18 years ago

That page seems to only be talking about the switch from their old to their new javascript include, which is still hosted by them... But without email notices, hosting it yourself isn't really a viable or stable option unfortunately.

_sgo45• 18 years ago

That's EXACTLY what we do at Clicky - http://getclicky.com

We support the option to host the javascript yourself, but before you can do that, you must check a box that says "I am hosting it myself". This flags that user/site in our database, so whenever we release updates to the javascript, we can automatically notify all of the users that there is a new version available.

We make a lot of minor modifications to the code but usually only announce updates when there are new features in it, or if certain features of the old tracking code may no longer work for some reason (this has never happened so far but I can't guarantee it will always be that way)

PS: I'm the Clicky developer, so that's why I know all this.

lux3• 18 years ago

Sweet, and a nice API to boot!

For your site limits, how is that counted? We're launching a new service with lots of aliases to essentially the same site (sub domains for different users), but on our server it's just one physical site handling it all. Would that be considered multiple sites in your system? If so, that may not work out (we'd quickly exhaust the 20 in your mega plan), but if not then we may be able use it. Thanks for the link!

PS. Looking at your Roxr page, sounds like you guys are doing pretty well with Clicky -- right on! :)

auston2• 18 years ago

I'd like to suggest that you try to get these feature's implemented in getclicky. They're smaller. I feel like that make's them more susceptible to change. I think it's pretty apparent that Google isn't really listening to us here.

Plus they already has some of these features, which I think is awesome.

http://getclicky.com/

nextmoveone• 18 years ago

already have some

_sgo45• 18 years ago

Lucky for you, the developer of Clicky actually reads this web site. (Yeah, that'd be me).

#1 and #2 (API and real time) we have been doing at Clicky for a LOOOOOOOONG time. I still am in awe that Google hasn't released an API - that's just insane.

auston2• 18 years ago

Interesting, we've chatted before via email.

markbao• 18 years ago

It's not JUST Google Analytics that can use this list to improve their system... ANY analytics system should be listening to this.

Mystalic• 18 years ago

Someone's got to step up and become THE competition to Analytics. That's perhaps the only way to get a behemoth like Google to respond with better innovation,

Google Analytics - 20 Ways to Fix Analytics. Please Hurry?

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