On the Web, it’s costly one day and free the next

By Peter Vogel

Almost two years ago, just before Christmas in fact, Internet juggernaut Google released a free service called Google Analytics to the world.

Analyzing web traffic to commercial web sites has become big business, all the more so as online transactions eat away at bricks and mortar establishments.

In a typical move for Google, it acquired a prospering company, Urchin Software, for its intellectual property, tracking software that could provide a wide variety of data about the origins and behaviour of visitors to web sites.

Urchin’s service was not cheap, several hundreds of dollars per month. It was well worth it, by many accounts in various forums, but then, suddenly, it was free. Gone was the Urchin brand, replaced by Google Analytics.

Hundreds of dollars a month one day, free the next.

Google’s move might be difficult to understand initially. Long term, however, it means exposure of analytics concepts to a much broader field. That translates into potential customers who’ve never given a thought to just how they might improve a corporate site with a view to increasing sales or tailoring their content for a specific type of visitor.

Underlying it all is the possibility that Analytics customers will incorporate advertising into their sites, and Google’s Adsense and AdWords programs are the lifeline of the multi-billion dollar behemoth.

When Google Analytics was first offered to the public I signed up within hours. So overwhelmed with applications was the company that it took weeks for the first data tracking to occur. The wait was worth it.

If you run a web site, or even a blog, you might benefit from the sort of data provided by a service like Google Analytics.

As some readers of this column may recall, servers at my school have provided free or low-cost web hosting to numerous organizations of the archdiocese for almost a decade. Among the sites on those servers are the main site of the archdiocese, www.rcav.org, and the site for this very newspaper, bcc.rcav.org.

Every now and then, before Google Analytics arrived, I would run a dedicated piece of software called FastStats Analyzer against the hundreds of megabytes of logfile data generated on our servers by sites such as rcav.org. It wasn’t a pleasant activity but it did return interesting data, although of a much more limited nature than that now provided by Google Analytics.

FastStats could provide a breakdown of visitor origins by country, keywords used to reach a site via search engine, and such parameters as time spent on a site, but it might take an hour or more to run an analysis.

Google Analytics takes the tracking of site visit data to a completely new plane, removing much of the drudgery from the task. The tradeoff is the need for a small code snippet in each web page and a consequent slight increase in page loading time.

Geographic data is taken down to the city level. For instance, a recent look at the data for rcav.org for the one-month period ending Nov. 16 shows these tidbits:

• 11,217 visits (to the main page).
• 6,145 unique visitors.
• 10,123 visits from Canada.
• 788 visits from Surrey.
• 326 visits from Richmond.
• 49 visits from Ottawa.
• 2 visits from Guelph, Ont.
• 24 visits from Italy.
• 2 visits from Cesena, Italy.
• 2 visits from Malta.
• 1 visit from Rwanda.

Geographic data is displayed visually on maps and in detailed tables, both of which can be “drilled” for further information. All the Analytics data can be exported for use in common spreadsheet programs. Recently the Google team added an e-mail feature which packages the data in the convenient PDF format.

Over the one-month period about 41 per cent of the visitors came to the site just once, 10 per cent twice, and about 30 per cent came to rcav.org 10 or more times. There were visits from 47 countries. Looking back further over a whole year we learn that there were visits from 115 countries, the most common languages of those visitors, besides English, being Korean, French, Spanish, and Italian. The language is determined from knowledge about the operating system setting on the visiting computer.

Internet Explorer was the favoured browser, 75 per cent of visitors using it when they visited the archdiocesan web site. Around 17 per cent used FireFox. Just 15 visitors, 0.13 per cent, used Opera as their browser.

Just over 90 per cent of visitors used a Windows operating system, about 8.5 per cent used a Macintosh O/S, just under 1 per cent used Linux, and there was one visit from an iPhone!

For graphic cards, a little over 90 per cent have 24- or 32-bit resolution. Just 0.40 per cent still have an old 8-bit graphic card.

Just under 50 per cent of visitors have their screens set at 1024x768 resolution. Other common settings, around the 10 per cent level each, are 800x600, 1280x1024 and 1280x800. About 100 well-heeled visitors were using “super” screens set at 2560x1600!

When it comes to connection method, almost 55 per cent are using cable and almost 30 per cent use ADSL. Just over 2 per cent continue to use dialup. A tiny number, 315 out of almost 140,000 visits over a year, were via ultra fast OC3 connections, presumably from universities or large corporations.

Among the more interesting visits from corporations and institutions over the past year were just under a thousand from UBC, 62 from VanCity Credit Union, 60 from ICBC, 59 from UNBC, 40 from SNC-Lavalin (general contractors on the RAV line), 25 from the Thrifty Rent-a-Car System, and 9 from eBay headquarters.

Looked at over the past year, traffic to rcav.org is typically on the order of 400 or so visitors per day. There have been four significant “spikes” just over or near the 1,000 per day mark: Christmas Eve (presumably for Mass times), the day the Telus boycott was announced, Holy Thursday (Mass times again?) and June 1, when the Vatican announced the appointment of a coadjutor bishop for Vancouver.

To sign up for a free Google Analytics account you’ll first need a Gmail account. Sign in at www.google.com/analytics. You’ll be able to track multiple web sites if you wish. For each one you’ll be provided a snippet of tracking code that you paste into your site’s source code. Track one page or track all the pages in your site. Tracking all the pages will give you insight into the behaviour of visitors: where they are drawn from, how long they spend on a site, and when they return.

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Gmail users: have you noticed a recent jump in the free message space you are allocated? It stands at just over five gigabytes as of mid November, surely a reflection of just how cheap disk storage space is becoming.

Peter Vogel is a Physics and Computer Sciences teacher at Notre Dame Regional Secondary School (www.ndrs.org). Suggestions and comments may be sent via e-mail to peterv@portal.ca.