I wanted to give an update on our Google Analytics experience after we made such a fuss last week: after 6 days we managed to start getting PSFK stat reports through Google’s new stat system Analystics. Are we satisfied? No. Here is the next round of criticism:
Google is supposed to be all about simplicity and intant results. No? The ergonomics of the Google Search home page; the immediate return of search results; the clarity of AdSense. Simplicity and Instant Results, yes? So if this is true, the problem with GA is:
I’m back off to Statcounter. I promise you, I have tried to use GA and I’m sure GA has so many more features – but I suppose that’s what Yahoo said when they first saw Google search.
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Well, the 12 hour delay doesn’t bother me that much. If it updated much faster, I would waste even more time looking at stats :).
That said, I do feel the interface could use some work. It is kind of slow going between different views and the back button doesn’t work. After I drill down to say, a certain city, it is hard to get back up to just the region, the back button doesn’t seem to work. It would be nice if they could make the back button work and get some better navigation on the pages, besides just the things on left. Also, I don’t have any goals, so it would be nice if I could better customize the views that are shown. I am more interesting in search queries, referrals, and visitor stats. I’ll look around the options, but I thought you could only pick from one of the three default views.
November 29th, 2005 at 4:19 pm
12 hours is a lot less time than it took you to fix the link to Google “/analystics”
November 29th, 2005 at 6:02 pm
Link corrected – apologies.
OK. About the time thing – if a site that was probably built in somone’s garage can give me almost instant results, why can’t a site that was built by a company created in someone’s garage a few years ago?
12 hours is really 24 hours – by the time data is available, we’v e all gone to bed. It’s just not 2005.
The PSFK sites publish over 12 times a day and it’s important to see the interaction between PSFK content and other sites right away.
November 29th, 2005 at 6:16 pm