On The Trail

A few months ago Google purchased Urchin — a very solid mid-level web analytics tool. This weekend Google released a re-packaged version of Urchin as Google Analytics . It’s a tag based system that is hosted at Google (so it requires no software installation, only the addition of a bit of HTML code to each web page) and, most importantly, it is free. Unfortunately the tool has been down all morning so I can’t tell you specifics about the available features, but by the descriptions I’ve seen it looks like a very robust offering. Eric Peterson (Jupiter Research’s web analytics analyst) has a good post on the features and some of the implications of this release. This is a big deal in web analytics and I’ll be posting more on it soon.