How amazing is it that Google Analytics is free?
 

Saw a related thread, and had to ask because it's been on my mind for a while now... :)

agreed.... GREAT tool!!

shush !! they are gonna read your post and start charging for it

its free unless you have a big site, then they ask you to buy advertising, or at least they used too, i believe there is some enhanced version as well that costs money

Also not exactly free, you are letting them see your entire business strategy, imagine the power of having access to the top million sites on the net.. lol
There would be no doubt in any move you make.. its kinda scary

very nice!

I would NEVER use it on any site of mine that I actually cared about.

This is how I feel as well. Google has never been a search engine company, they've always been a data mining company. Data and demographics are their primary business, so you are actually trading your private information in exchange for stats software :)

"Don't be evil"

PFFFFT

It's amazing... specially now that Mr.Codey hooked me up with a way to export thousands of keywords without going through the default page by page process.

Free or not, Analytics is awesome.

Google Analytics is not free. It doesn't cost you anything to use but in return you are sending information to Google about your site and how users including location, keywords, and how those users found your site as well as if they used another search engine besides Google.
They use all this information to become a better search engine.
So it may not cost you anything directly but you are paying Google back with information about your site so it's not really free. Call it exchange of information ;)

Fair deal.

Its wonderful with the exception that Google is aggregating user data like no tomorrow. I personally don't want Google knowing too much about my sites, especially when my sites are optimized to extract as much traffic from Google as possible ;)
WG

+1 :thumbsup

the information they are getting off their users is near invaulable.

I'm happy to give them information about my sites for the use of this amazing tool for free :thumbsup

:1orglaugh

that is funny but scary at the same time :upsidedow

Fuck Google and their Google Analytics :2 cents:

Im sure that they are going to use the information to rank sites, now they just use keywords and links (as far as I know) but by encouraging people to put analytics on their sites they can tell if people actually hang round on a site and they will eventually use that info to rank sites in searches, at least thats what I would do

would be more amazing if i can get exact referring url grrrrr

you are right, but its google, they have the full power anyway so whatever :)

Wasn't that Urchin before they bought it?

I'm not sure about this as well. It seems you are giving the whole game away to Google.

Never put it on your checkout page if you run adwords.

It's a good program for some sites. A terrible idea for others.

yeah its urchin, you can still buy licenses of urchin if you dont trust google data mining your sites traffic in exchange for the free statistics.

urchin was a major buy for them.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of...ions_by_Google