Friday, October 06, 2006

Google Analytics

I just painlessly installed Google Analytics on this blog, as I couldn't stand being without statistics for any length of time. I've been a management by statistics fanatic for years now, as it's the only way to manage anything. Not by opinion (as is way to prevalent in marketing) but by cold, hard statistics. Again, I got the notion from an extremely good Scientology event, where I decided I'd stop using the crystal ball to try to decide my future, and instead use some proven Scientology management techniques.

As noted, this install was utterly painless. I worked for Webtrends for some time, and also worked as a Web Analytics consultant, and so I'm quite familiar with web stats programs - but I have to commend Google for how well they took Urchin's ASP analytics software and integrated it into their accounts system. It's extremely informative, and was an utter breeze to put in. Now, if you're looking at this, I can probably tell where you're from!

2 comments:

fastpagemode said...

As a note, the one part of this whole Google/Urchin thing that doesn't quite work right are the Flash statistics display. I have Fedora Core 5, and Flash 7 -- which unfortunately is the newest version of Flash for Linux. Flash 8 and Flash 9 for linux aren't anywhere yet -- though I'm hoping they're going to finish it soon.

Anyhow, a result of all this is graphics that look nice, but have no numbers or text on them -- as Flash 7 for linux doesn't support this.

Per Google's site: "A note for Linux users: the Flash implementation for Linux can be very problematic, and users of Debian and Ubuntu seem to be especially affected. We're aware of these issues, but due to the lack of updates and Flash plugin development for Linux, we may be unable to support your browser and operating system combination at this time."

fastpagemode said...

As a further note on same, Flash Player 9 beta for linux is currently out, and solved all of the problems I had with Google Analytics Flash showing up oddly in Fedora Core 5. Just for posterity's sake, that is the handling -- just update your Flash player.