Free Website Statistics

Hosted web sites statistics services are a bandwidth intensive game, but Google obviously has bandwidth oozing out of their server ports. When buying Urchin it was only a question of time when a free service would emerge. Welcome Google Analystics, the re-birth of Urchin. It’s free up to 5 million pageviews a month, and continues to be free if you have an adwords account pushing traffic to your web site. Search Engine Roundtable has a good article on the move entitled Google Analytics (ex-Urchin) Delivers Web Analytics for FREE.

I already installed the code on the site and am looking forward to see the first reports. Sadly these will take 12 hours to appear, which I presume comes from the fact that they have a very efficient logging server that simply tracks hits. These optimized log files then still need to be analysed and pushed into the client accounts. More to come when I have a clearer view of the service offerings.

Update : Almost 24 hours later, no statistics collected yet. The system is still saying there is a problem and I should check the status and the status says all is fine. We’ll see. The site is still slow.

Update 2 : Just went through bloglines and read the TechCrunch post about Google Analytics. The update Michael posted is interesting. It seems that Google “forgot” to tell the old subscribers to Urchin who paid $200 per month for the service that the switch was happening. Just check Ethan’s post for what he experience, moving from a $200 (happily paid) working version of Urchin, to a totally unresponsive free version of Google Analytics.

Update 3 : Over 30 hours now and still not statistics, because people are starting to ask if I see something and no, I don’t, as does Jeremy from b5media. A well.

{Web Development, Google, Urchin, Google Analytics, Statistics}