Trying Google Analytics

I usually don't jump on new stuff, but since I've been pondering 'client-side analytics' for my websites, I signed up for the new Google Analytics on Monday when I first heard about it.

I added this blog and my company site. The website was a little balky and took some time to show actual data, but I saw my first reports this AM. Some reports were essentially blank, so I had to go back to configure it to suit my needs:

1. Disallowed recording accesses from our office's IP address. They have these funny Posix regular expressions for controlling filters, which will take some getting used to. This is important because you need a backslash in front of periods if they are part of the expression, because periods are also Posix terms.

2. Had to go to my AdWords account to 'link' to the Analytics account. This is important for conversion tracking. There is a new tab in AdWords called Analytics where you can do this.

3. I had to create Goals. This is simply target URLs on the website that you want to measure traffic to. In my case, this is the main web-request form.

The reports you get are overwhelming and I'm not sure which ones are useful to me. Its always fun to look at you data in new ways though. I did find how to see more than the top 5 or 10 page accesses, which was my initial concern. Overall, it looks promising, but I need to pick a couple reports to track results. (Chart shown is for this blog.)