Google Analytics Blog: What’s happening on your site right now? | Hacker News Reader

Google Analytics Blog: What’s happening on your site right now?

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125 pointsdpurp25 comments

What's interesting is if Google can offer this to webmasters, then somewhere inside Google they can tell about 90% of how many people are online in the internet and where they are.

Obviously not an exaggeration, it's just a mapreduce query of all that data from every service they own.

I don't have a single google service on my sites but I must be a super-tiny minority.

I don't think more than 10% of all sites have analytics installed.

But if you include other services and products like toolbar and adsense, Google can surely see a great deal of what's happening on the Internet.

It seems to be a lot more than that http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/06/02/google-is-top-track...

If you browse with Ghostery installed it seems like Google Adsense has massive penetration. Or it might be the sites I browse.

Oops I meant Analytics, not Adsense.

I can't cite anything as I don't remember where I read it, but there were articles back when Google announced its acquisition of DoubleClick that if you combine Analytics, DoubleClick and AdSense, Google's tracking reaches over 90% of web surfers.

"reach[ing] over 90% of web surfers" and being able to track 90% of sites are two very different things.

Blekko's new Grep tool shows that 1.3 Billion URLs on 12.4 million domains are using Google Analytics. http://blekko.com/webgrep?page=view&id=f6c212b83629fe094...

Not sure how big their index is right now, or how that compares to the entire web, but it is a big number regardless.

Edit: On their announcement of the Grep functionality, Blekko says they are running it against 4 billion pages. This is still only a portion of the web, but that puts it around 1 in 4 pages having Google Analytics installed.

My guess is the real time processing is only done if the real time view is open.

I wonder if people at startups like ChartBeat, mix panel, clicky feel like the market is validated or feel worried. Or just keep focusing on doing a better job than competitors.

I've been running W3Counter, a competing web stats service, since before Google Analytics. Before Google bought Urchin, that kind of web stats reporting was something businesses paid for. When Google released Analytics for free, I'm sure more than a few businesses were wiped out. Perception of the space changed forever and now I can't count on 1% of my users to pay for web stats, even for things GA doesn't provide.

Real-time dashboards were one of the features people were willing to pay for. Now Google does that for free as well. There's not much I can do about it. I'm sure Chartbeat and such will still find customers, but I'm sure many that may have been convinced to buy will now settle for Google's free option instead.

I don't think MixPanel's worried about it. They're not solving the same problems as Google Analytics and GA will never be a substitute for that kind of service.

Just do it better than Google does. Or target a specific niche. Not easy, I'm sure. But it can be done.

Visual Website Optimizer, Optimizely, and UnBounce all run paid A/B testing sites in spite of Google's presence in the market.

The examples provided are not relevant, because chartbeat also saw a hole in Google's offering, and filled it. That is exactly the same as all the sites you mentioned. The only difference is Google is now offering real time analytics.

A counter example would be a service that provided a missing feature for a google product, that was later filled by google, but managed to survive after google launched the feature.

Honestly, I think they're probably feeling validated. GA is a 2000 pound gorilla, but this offering is very light compared to what some of the other dedicated Real Time Analytics providers give. It's possible they'll build it out further, but for now, GA Real Time probably wouldn't satisfy people who are already willing to pay for the high quality dedicated real time tools.

Neither--We heavily plan to do what we did yesterday: keep our heads down and continue to work.

Neither? Thats surprising. So what do you feel? This has got to affect you in some way. Just keeping your head down reminds me of an ostrich.

I use quicklytics on my iPhone to view google analytics. I wonder if the new features will translate to this platform?

I've been using GoSquared for this and it has been working really well: http://www.gosquared.com/ It will be interesting to see how the new Google Analytics features compare. If they offer a GoSquared style API, that would be pretty fantastic.

It's official -- Chartbeat has Google as its competitor.

Does this mean that all reporting will be real-time? Not having to deal with the data lag in GA would be fantastic.

No. The real-time reporting is a separate section; this change doesn't mean anything for the data in the regular reporting sections. The data Real Time uses is unfiltered and raw, and only limited dimensions are available: Geographic source, traffic source, pageview name, and maybe one or two more things. I'm sure it'll be built out over time.

Nope. Only a few specific new reports (says the article).

Data lag is actually not bad in Analytics these days. You can choose the current day in the date range selector and, at least for my sites, get data which less than an hour old.

The part that sucks:

> Real-Time does not support profile filters.

This makes real-time pretty useless for intermediate+ users of GA.

WOW! Now THAT's scalability !!

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