Do not use it?
More seriously, what Google Analytics does that you can't do yourself when you have complete access to the logs of your web site?
More seriously, what Google Analytics does that you can't do yourself when you have complete access to the logs of your web site?
Things like unique visitor, unique referer, unique whatever tracking just explode when you have to compare each IP address you get with 20M-entry list.
If you try to do it on your webserver, you'll have a 3 hour window each day where a significant portion of your CPU and Memory is not available for serving web traffic. If you try to do it elsewhere, you get to ship 20gb daily logfiles around.
It's just not any fun. Which is why even Google has difficulty with it.
Running your own analytics is great for relatively small sites. For big ones it starts to bog down once you hit a certain size.
That, and the fact that I prefer to process my logs on my computers. As a matter of principle (decentralization, privacy, freedom, blah blah).
Now, I barely know Analytics. But it looks cool, so I'll check, and see if I can reap most of their benefits myself. (If I can't, I'll have a tough choice indeed.)
(Something about that bar not being updated until the first byte of the stream was read -- so if a static.foo.com was hanging connections, it would get stuck blaming whatever loaded right before it.)
GA now has asynchronous tracking though, which solves this pretty nicely. Though I'm not a JS guy, my understanding of it is that instead of sourcing the script and then issuing the tracking calls, you put some instructions into a global variable, and then source the script. Nothing blocks on the script's loading, so even if GA is down the rest of the page is supposed to load correctly. Once the GA script loads, it looks at the global and runs the tracking commands.
But still, I would have liked the analysis process to be completely invisible from the client.
Now I recognize that it is a complex question: If Google Analytics has some advantages that you can't reproduce even when you fully control your web server, I would like to know what it is. If it does not, then we may want to stop sending all our logs to Google right now.