Ok first up I have to say that we are all fans of Google Analytics here, with good reason: it’s zero-cost, its rich array of features: brilliant reporting capabilities, the ability to slice and dice the data in almost every conceivable way, the slick ajax-ified interface, and the support for advanced stuff like advanced segmentation and something that I really love using on e-commerce sites – goals and funnels, and for the nerds among us – filters.
- The analytics data is not available in real-time, you have to wait until midnight passes the next day to see yesterday’s data
- The data is not yours – it’s Google’s – and for all of the clean image that Google has (”don’t be evil”), forgive me when I say that I prefer to have my own copy of my website trend and visitor data.
- Google Analytics works by including a JavaScript snippet in your pages, but search engine spiders (”crawlers”) don’t execute JavaScript when they load your site’s pages, so their visits aren’t logged by Google Analytics. So when spiders from GoogleBot, Inktomi (Yahoo), Bing (Microsoft’s new search engine), Ask and Baidu crawl your site, you know absolutely zero about it from looking at your GA reports.
