A couple of weeks ago Google announced a free web statistics service that it has named Google Analytics. Web analytics is the study of user activity on a web site or web application to understand how well it fulfills its objectives. The history of this move stems back to Google's purchase of Urchin, one of the web's leading web analytics companies. Google Analytics supports e-commerce analytics, which is great news for all online merchants. Many retailers have been paying anywhere between thirty to a thousand dollars per month for analytics. Google Analytics is available through the Google Adwords interface at no cost.

Merchants that are currently using one of the other analytics providers such as Load.com or Websidestory should consider running those programs side-by-side for a few weeks with Google Analytics to see which program they favor. Merchants not currently tracking analytics should definitely sign up and deploy Google Analytics. Because there has been such a huge demand for this service, Google is currently limiting the number of users that sign up for this service. However, web site owners can submit their email address to be notified when the Google Analytics is again available to new users.

Setting up Google Analytics is fairly easy. Webmasters must simply put a small snippet of code just before the tag on every page of their web site. This method of collecting data means that many webmasters will not longer need to deal with log files! Online retailers should be using a secure protocol (https) on many of their site's pages. Google has special code for those pages. There is also unique code for order confirmation screens for those merchants utilizing the e-commerce analytics.

Many web site owners may be hesitant to let Google track their statistics and conversions for fear of how the data might be used. Google has gone to great lengths to drive home the point that all data is protected under their privacy policy and is only used to provide reporting to customers. In other words, Google is releasing this tool with the best of intentions.

For the most part Google Analytics looks like an excellent program and offers robust reporting. Some people of criticized the fact that the reporting does show real-time data. There does seem to be a delay in the data that is reported, but unless you need to make up to the minute decisions, this may not be critical. The bottom line is that Google Analytics is a very solid program and something that all webmasters should try.

Google Sitemaps has recently been enhanced to provide web site owners with more information pertaining to how Google spiders their sites. In the past Google has given no feedback as to why it may or may not index specific pages. This is a significant break through for webmasters everywhere. To gain insight into these statistics, one must have a Google Sitemap account, however, it is not necessary to submit a sitemap. Sitemap accounts can be established here (https://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/login).

Once a webmaster confirms that he or she owns a website, different tabs will be present in the Site Overview section. Perhaps the most interesting tab is the one labeled “Errors.” This screen shows a list of URLs that Google failed to spider, a corresponding error message, and the date on which the error occurred. Site owners can also look at a list of unreachable URLs, URLs that are restricted by the robots.txt file, URLS that were not followed, and URLs that timed out. This data can be extremely useful in making a web site more search engine spider friendly.

Perhaps not quite as helpful, but interesting nonetheless is the Stats section. This displays both the top search queries per domain and the top search query clicks. Unfortunately Google doesn't display the time period that it uses when compiling this data. The Stats Section also includes a number of informative analysis tools. Using this service is free and well worth investigating for anyone serious about search engine marketing.

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