19 Jul 2007

Analytics Revisited

I wasn’t at all impressed with Google Analytics when I first tried it, but I’ve been using the new version for a few weeks now, and I have to say they’ve done a cracking job. The clunky, Urchin-inherited interface is gone, replaced with a clean, fast-loading design that’s a lot easier to navigate.

The Site Overlay feature used to be embedded in a frame, and pages from your site were proxied through Google to add the click-through stats.

Now, your site is loaded directly in a pop-up, and the JavaScript normally used to collect data instead superimposes the information (data initially appended to the URL switches into this mode). It’s one of those techniques that’s fiendishly clever yet so obvious once you think about it.