Google Analytics

If you're like most web developers, you collect logs of all your web traffic. Perhaps as the raw server logs, perhaps you log to Sql Server, and perhaps you've even done some reporting on those logs to analyze or categorize web traffic. I know I've been doing this for a number of years, coding simple ASP or .Net tools for navigating and aggrigating through the plethora of data.

Now Google Analytics has been around for quite some time now, and there's a ton of people who've been using it a long time. But as one who's always preferred to develop my own solutions, I've always had the opinion, I can do it better. But recently I had the itch to go see what GA is all about.

After setting up a small site with Analytics, using it for a few weeks, and exploring it's rich user interface, data drilling capapbilities, report export capabilities, report sharing, and so on I was simply amazed.

Analytics Accounts

The first thing I liked about Analytics was it's security model. You have three layers: Users, Analytics Accounts, and Web Sites. You can create any number of Analytics accounts to include groupings of websites. That is, say you design websites for three companies; two of which have a single website, and one has three websites. You can create an Analytics account for each company, adding however many sites each company has to their Analytics accounts, then grant any number of people access to each of those accounts, and you retain the ability to administer all the sites from your single login.

Setup

Once you create a Analytics account, and add a website to it, Google makes it very simple, to cut and paste a small piece of Javascript into your website. Ideally if your site(s) have programatic page templates (aka Masterpages in c#), you can simply add to Javascript to your template to streamline it's implementation into all your pages.

Once implemented, Google take about 24 hours to reaggrigate your results so you won't see any data until the day following implementation, and obviously several weeks to months before you have a good set of meaningful data to analyze.

Security

When you grant a new user access to an Analytics account, they can be granted one of two roles:

• Administrators can modify that Analytics account adding and modifying other users access to this collection of sites.


• Reports Only users can only view reports for the sites includes in this Analytics account.

A new account can be any existing e-mail address, or you can take it a step further and create a GMail account specifically for users of a particular Analytics account to view thier collection of websites.

For example, create a GMail account of CompanyA@gmail.com, then grant Reports Only access to that new account. You can then give out this username and password to anyong needing to view data for this account.