This is my third and final post in a short three-part series entitled “Watching Your Traffic” that focuses on stat tracking software. The first two posts were about Shaun Inman’s Mint and Stephen Wettone’s SlimStat. Today I’ll wrap this up with a look at Google Analytics.

Google Analytics

http://www.google.com/analytics

In March of 2005, Google bought the web analytics company Urchin. At the time Urchin was a realitively expensive but extremely powerful piece of software for tracking web site traffic. Eventually, Google renamed Urchin to Google Analytics and released it to the public for free.

My initial reaction to that first version of Google Analytics was stunned belief that anyone would have spent so much money on such a disorganized mess. The more you used it the more you understood just how much information they were hiding underneath one of the worst user interfaces of all time. At the time, Analytics was so hard to use I just didn’t see it as a viable solution for most of my clients and I moved on to Mint
and SlimStat.

Thankfully, Google realized the mess Analytics was and released a brand new interface for it this year. Now Google Analytics is the King of Kings when it comes to traffic monitoring software. The same depth of information from the days of Urchin are still there but now it’s presented in an easier to use interface that all of my clients can navigate.

Of the three solutions I’ve covered in this series, I would say Analytics is the “must have” of the bunch. While Analytics doesn’t offer real-time stats like the other two, it does beat SlimStat on presentation and Mint on price.