Google Analytics

[SEO Voter]

Have any of you seen the stats from google analytics yet? There not bad at all! At least the reports show one of the things that I am looking for at the moment (browser versions). Great graphs and illustrations hey...

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The problem with the Google analytics is thw TOS. They say that you can not use it for commercial purposes

[SEO Voter]

You mean sell the reports to your clients or sell the service of providing these reports. No, I guess you cannot do that! At first I thought that you meant that we couldn't use it for commercial sites. You could probably sell a marketing package to a client and then throw in these great free reports?!

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I read here this :

The Google Services are made available for your personal, non-commercial use only. You may not use the Google Services to sell a product or service, or to increase traffic to your Web site for commercial reasons, such as advertising sales......

[SEO Voter]

The way I see that ... is that you can use it on any site for reporting, but you may not advertise that you can provide these reports or sell the reporting system. I could be wrong though... Google want to track every site now and they are not going to stop you from placing it on any site. They just don't want you to make any money from it.

TOS for Google Analytics is here .

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Yes but the first TOS is regarding all of their services including analytics.

Propably we should send an email to G to find out

[SEO Voter]

That is probaly a good idea! Don't know how quick the response will be though... LOL

[SEO Voter]

I have been reading http://www.sitepoint.com/forums/showthread.php?t=317219 a bit over the past couple of days. There are a lot of commerical sites using it.

Google Analytics even has marketing summaries and reports. Surely that is to do with commercial interests?

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To be honest I don't think so. But you never know....

Now about this service the only thing that I don't like, is that Google is taking over the web.

It is not strange that all of their services, including this are free. I mean they could charge this service,but they don't, and that's because they want to takeover the web.

At this point this is good for the user, but what is going to happen when every user will have their browser, their internet banking, their web mail, their ads on his/her site.....?

[SEO Voter]

Quite right there! They are definitely getting the upper hand in a lot of areas on the web. As long as everything that they offer stay free, I don't think that anyone is going to complain!

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By the way, I just visited the site of analytics, and it has some case studies from commercial companies, so I suppose that the general tos are propably wrong.

[SEO Voter]

Saweet... did you manage to get an account before they stopped new sites being added?

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No I didn't.

Does it worth after all?

I use awstats, and it is not so marketing oriented, but I like it much.

[SEO Voter]

I use awstats on the same sites too and I think that it is still good and simple. The analytics is more graphical, it seems to be ignoring non-human events (spiders and robots) and there are a lot more details in all the stats. I think that it is worth it and I know that some of my clients will love seeing the stats on their sites in this new way (for free of course!).

I am sure that they will open it up soon again!

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Good. I will wait to see it then.

Awstats is also ignoring non human traffic

I think this service is pretty..weird..stats not showing up!

This is a good program - I use it for many sites and now that there are more free signups almost anyone can use it.

The only problems I've run in to are integrating it with some shopping carts to track e-commerce transactions but other than that I find it very helpful.

Although the downside of this and other "realtime" analytics program is that they don't properly track SE crawlers.  So far I've only found that logfile analysis (using such things as AWStats) does that effectively.

I used to use an old version of WebTrends (before they went "live") to do the majority of my traffic analysis because of its abiltiy to harvest out spider traffic.  I found this quite useful to see where there were roadblocks to indexing (and ranking) etc.

I now do that with AWStats (mostly because the WebTrends was so out of date it wasn't tracking all the crawlers) and use Google Analytics for everything else.

Oh yeah, I do have it on commercial and personal sites and there hasn't been a problem.

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Although the downside of this and other "realtime" analytics program is that they don't properly track SE crawlers.  So far I've only found that logfile analysis (using such things as AWStats) does that effectively.

That's correct as they use javascript to gather the statistics, but there is not really a reason to know when you are crawled, as this has nothing to do with the time that you get indexed...

the fact that the stats only update at midnight is a bit of a pig I mean what self respecting geek would be up to check there stats at midnight oh wait its 1.30 in the morning...

[SEO Voter]

You can set the stats page in awstats to show a update link. If you don't direct control over your server, ask your hosting company to turn it on for you, then you can update at your free will...

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