Google Analytics: Malkovich of the Internet?

If you’ve ever seen Being John Malkovich, you should remember what happens when Malkovich himself enters the Malkovich portal: everyone is John Malkovich and all they say is “Malkovich Malkovich.” On the Internet these days, I feel like it’s “Google Google.”

After months of waiting, I got my free Google Analytics invitation. I had set up Urchin reporting on a number of sites years ago, and I was disappointed that I couldn’t buy Urchin anymore because Google had swallowed them whole. Google Analytics is even better than Urchin was, and it includes Urchin’s campaign and e-commerce tracking modules. I also liked Urchin a lot more than Webtrends, which seems to have grown into bloatware since my first (positive) encounter with Webtrends in 1999. The trouble with Webtrends and Omniture is that they are focused on big business, because that’s where the big money is. Google Analytics is simple enough use on this blog, but can scale as large as is needed. GA gives me the same tools that the big guys have. Thus, Google will make its money scaling out rather than scaling up.

Unlike Urchin, Google Analytics doesn’t run on my server. The JavaScript script goes back to Google, and I’m sure they can also see how many people are visiting my sites. On the up side, I didn’t have to remember to reconfigure Apache logging.
This is what I used to have to enter as root into httpd.conf and hope that I didn't make any typos:

LogFormat "%h %v %u %t \"%r\" %>s %b \"%{Referer}i\" \"%{User-Agent}i\" \"%{Cookie}i\"" special 

Also, the Googlebot doesn’t show up in Analytics reports. Browsers that reject third-party cookies won’t be track-able. And Google will know a lot more about all of our browsing habits once more sites start implementing Google Analytics.

As far as the markets go, Google Analytics is a shot at other web analytics packages, and it may surpass them because Google can integrate your Google Adwords into your Google Analytics. (Malkovich Malkovich.) This is something that others can’t do, because Omniture and Overture are separate. Of course, Google Analytics, Adwords, and everything else Google integrates with your Gmail account. Before long, Google may be able to offer IP address resolution into Google Earth. (Malkovich Malkovich Malkovich)

I also recently created Google sitemaps for a couple of sites. Google uses sitemaps to find new pages and changed pages on sites faster. The sitemap generator is a python script that looks at your log files, your web file system and creates an XML file that the Googlebot can download. After creating the sitemaps, the two have now gotten a lot of hits from the Googlebot: 1671 for this site, and 5,000 or so for the other site, which gets a lot more traffic than mine. By getting me to do some of the work of indexing, Google indexing operates more efficiently.

Before long, Google will know more about traffic on the web than the NSA knows about traffic on the Public Switched Telephone Network.