Google recently rolled out their Analytics service free of charge. If you've been hoping for a stats package to track your website or blog site statistics, this just may be what you're looking for. The service is free if you either have a Google AdWords account in good standing, or if your site(s) get less than 5 million pageviews per month. (Ah, that'd be something wouldn't it? In this case, I'll have a while to wait before I have to worry about paying.)

I'll be honest in saying that I can't talk about the quality of the package, as I only just signed up. However, some of the features are:

1. A map of the world to show the origin of your traffic.
2. A chart of visits and pageviews.
3. Info about visits by new and returning readers, and more.
4. A calendar, which presumably can be used to quickly retrieve information for a particular day.
5. Export of data to three formats: tab-separated text, XML, and Microsoft Excel spreadsheet format (which can be imported into the OpenSource OpenOffice spreadsheet.)

Apparently, it takes about 12 hours to see reports after you first sign up. So I'll collect a few days worth of data on two of my sites (blog and website) and discuss some of the above features in more detail. If you do sign up, beware that as Google is updating AdWords accounts, there appears to be some delay for the Analytics sign-up process. It took me an entire day just to set up tracking for two domains.

(c) Copyright: 2005-present, Raj Kumar Dash, http://blogspinner.countwordula.com/

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