Those of you in the thick of web analytics know what Google Analytics (affectionately or not, known as GA) has done for our industry. On the one hand, their free service may have put the future of some other analytics companies in question. On the other hand, Google has brought the issue of web analytics to the front and center, and has brought more publicity to this important area than, arguably, any other company could have.

I have a number of customers whom I’d like to see use GA. Sometimes, they are customers who really need Omniture or WebSideStory but don’t have the funding. Sometimes, they are just customers who need to prove their story to their management. And sometimes (like my blog) they/we aren’t going to spend money but just want to measure - it’s in our blood.

The Google team has started to send out more “invitations” to use their analytics, they say. They were so overwhelmed that they couldn’t handle the response at first, which seems reasonable — but — this is a company that just took .13 seconds to find 7.8 billion hits for me on the word “click.” What, they don’t scale?

Despite their claims, they now have a waiting list for their waiting list. It’s true - I just got the email from their Inside Analytics newsletter. Here’s how the newsletter ends, “f you’re interested in using Google Analytics but haven’t yet signed up to be notified when new accounts become available, you can do so here.” In other words, if you aren’t on the waiting list, click here so that you can find out when spots on the waiting list will become available.

How infuriating.

Robbin
LunaMetrics

I am probably the only woman around who is buying her husband Henckel knives for Valentine’s Day. But, having waiting until February 8 to do this, I had better purchase them from a website that is close enough to get them here in under a week.

So I started my search for Henckel knife websites and found that most are in California. Or, if they aren’t in California, they don’t do same day shipping because they are drop-shipping from cooking.com, a California company. (Gosh, I’d love those little colored paring knives, but no one has them unless they come from cooking.com.)

All of which takes me to my question — why are our websites only specific about when the product will arrive in December? Maybe we’re out there shopping for Valentine’s Day , a holiday on everyone’s calendar. Or maybe we’re out there shopping for a birthday. An anniversary. A congratulations gift. No matter what — timeliness is not just a Christmas phenomenon.

After I ditched the web-and-Henckel-knife problem and decided to drive to Williams-Sonoma, I realized that if only sites would tell you where they ship from and what their policy is (same day usually, same day always, etc.), they would have a chance to turn more browsers into buyers. At least, they would if they had great shipping policies and weren’t always located too far away.

Bye for now — I gotta go to Williams-Sonoma. At the mall.

Robbin
LunaMetrics

I completely forgot - here is a free tool to use to resolve an IP address, if by some chance your web analytic software doesn’t already provide that capability: http://www.webyield.net/domainquery.html#resolve

Most web analytics already have that built in — even the basic ones. This little tool is the most useful to find your own IP address, so that you can remove it from your statistics. (I haven’t found the hack to remove your address if you have a dynamic IP address.)

Robbin
LunaMetrics

Last week, I watched the CSI Miami team resolve a computer’s IP address to… an email address!

Now, there are often times that I, too, wish I could work this magic. Of course, I can’t, but I can come somewhat close. While IP addresses really can’t be mapped to email addresses, they can be resolved (mapped) to host names. Whether it’s a really helpful domain, like mysite.com, or an ISP, like comcast.net, is going to depend on how the user is connected, are they hosting the site themselves, etc.

In addition to resolving to the host name (helpful or not), most analytics packages also add other information. Usually, they tell you the computer operating system, the browser and the browser version. When you put all that information together (called a user agent, or a user agent string), you can distinguish between the various users who all have the same host name.

So last night, I looked at how users came to this blog by keyword, and found that one keyword phrase was “Robbin Steif blog.” I wondered who was interested in both my blog and me, so I drilled down one level to see where that was coming from. Lo and behold, the address it resolved to seemed to be me. It was my home’s host name. It was my home’s IP address. It was the same browser and browser version I use. But I use a PC, and it was a Mac operating system. This was the “Aha!” moment when I realized that my daughter, the proud new owner of an Apple laptop, actually cared enough to look at my blog.

So, this is how you keep track of your children, and of course, one of the ways that you learn about your other, non-related visitors.

Robbin
LunaMetrics