Google Analytics: Major Upgrade
Long recommended Google Analytics is free, powerful tool for tracking your website statistics. In early May, Google raised the bar again, launching a major upgrade to Google Analytics, featuring a slick new user interface and vastly improved features for slicing and dicing data and making comparisons across time and between sections of your site. Not surprisingly bloggers showed up on the forum singing the “I need Google Analytics song“.
WordPress.com bloggers are sharing a multi-user blogging platform. Only one Google urchin script can be run on a any site at any time and WordPress already runs Google analytics on our blogs. This means Google analytics are a “no go” for wordpress.com bloggers; those who want this feature can move to self hosting or hiring a webhost and downloading a free blog template from http:wordpress.org as they run on different software.
Avinash Kaushik offers an enthusiastic rundown. -> Read more
I wish they’d let us claim with the Google webmaster tools though. There’s nothing preventing that.
Then we could mark our /feed, /tag, /page and /author archives as archives and not have our regular posts delisted from Google as duplicate content.
i dig google analytics, although up until now, tantan’s plugin has always been a better/quicker interface for it.
seth goodin’s post about the service is pretty well on. it’s overkill unless you’re selling something.
that said, automattic is running GA on our blogs, it would be cool if they could show us (okay, not me anymore) some of the cool “rising content” “rising sources” stuff that tantan is extracting.
@engtech
Frankly I don’t have a clue what you are referring to. Could you simplify that for me so I can understand what’s happening now and how it could be improved if we were allowed to have Google webmaster tools?
@sunburntkamel
As wordpress is already running the urchin script on our blogs I don’t understand why they do not simply share the information with us bloggers. Also I’m so non-technical that I don’t know what the information is and what I would do with it. Can you explain this to me please? What the heck is “rising content”?
google webmaster tools just requires putting a key in the head of your webpage, and it allows you to look at google’s reports for your page (on google’s site). shows you stuff like 404 errors, and allows you to tweak stuff like whether to use www or not in search results.
here’s a screenshot of the wordpress reports page, the rising/falling stuff just measures the current referrers/top posts against previous ones, so you can see when something new shows up.
@adam
Thanks for the information.