In the not too distant future, we’ll be googling to google to do google with google. And if their stock price is any indication, we’ll be doing it all from Apple computers

Anyways, I recently installed Google’s latest web service, Google Analytics, onto tantannoodles.com to give it a test run. It’s basically a web based statistics program for your web site. The verdict? Great tool to get indepth stats about your site for free, though it may not necessarily be the most easy to use tool (there are a lot of options!).

As with most statistic programs, it gives you all the basic web statistic reports. Like how many visitors and page views your site received over a period of time, where your visitors are coming from, or even slightly more in-depth reports such as what’s the percentage of new vs returning visitors. And it plots all these different reports in pretty pie chart graphs for you to look at. Any decent stats program worth it’s weight will be able to generate all these basic reports.

Now I haven’t really used any ‘enterprise’ statistics packages since they’re all kind of expensive (such as WebTrends), but what really sets Google Analytics apart from the other more mature open source packages (such as Analog or AWStats) is that it mashes up all the different kinds data it collects into what it calls “cross segment” reports, to give you some really interesting insights into your web site. For example, I can tell you that yesterday (11/27) 75% of visitors to tantannoodles.com were first time visitors, that is they never visited this site before. That’s sorta neat. What’s even neater is this next tidbit. Of these first time visitors, 36% of them came from the United States, 7% came from Canada, and 6% came from Singapore¹. Neat-o. And you can do this kind of cross referencing and drill down analysis on almost every kind of data that Google collects, along with the ability to compare reports for one time period with the reports for another. That is pretty cool.

Like I said, it’s not exactly the easiest tool to use, I had to spend a couple days trying to figure it out, but once you know how to generate all the different kinds reports, it becomes a very powerful and useful tool. Much like Google’s other services, the best part about Google Analytics is that it is completely free². That is, if your site gets less than 5 million pageviews per month. And if your site is getting more than 5 million pageviews per month, then well… uh, you win.

Check it out: Linky.

¹ Getting something you made hearted from a hawt Singaporean web designer / blogger is not a bad thing

² Unfortunately, Google has stopped accepting new web site registrations for the time being, since it’s proving to be a little too popular and is bogging down their servers. I can’t even imagine what kind of load it would take to bog down a Google server.