Google Analytics

A web analytics tool helps you understand how people found your site and how they used it. Of course, web analytics and performance software is old news. Products like WebTrends have been around a long time; they are capable and mature analytical tools. In this post, I want to discuss a relatively new offering from Google called Google Web Analytics. While it is full-featured, web based and free, it is the underlying technology I find interesting. Just like Google Ad Sense and syndication widgets everywhere, Google Analytics works by including the reference to a remote script in the source code of each page being tracked. A remove JavaScript function is effectively run every time the page is fetched which fetches local variables and headers (including an account number which is provided at registration time).

Remote scripting is becoming ubiquitous in the Web2 landscape and offers many possibilities for two way data exchange.