After waiting patiently for several months, I finally received my Google Analytics invitation code yesterday. There's a 24-hour lag in the reporting, so I don't have all that much traffic to look at yet, but what I see so far is cool! This goes way beyond the basic stuff I get with awstats or webalizer.

My favorite feature so far is called Site Overlay - it lets me surf through my entire site, except that google overlays a layer of statistics for which links get clicked and how often. I can follow a user path and see what the likelihood is that they will go to the Archives or follow some outbound link. There is also a wealth of tracking available if I ever ran ad campaigns through google Adwords - it will link up my ad performance and my site statistics, and then give me ROI and cost-per-click information broken down by page. I'd love them to take the next step and bring my Adsense performance into the mix.

At work we have entire departments dedicated to these type of metrics, so its amazing to see something so powerful available for even the littlest customer at no cost. All I had to do was put a little snippet of code at the bottom of all of my pages, and Google did the rest. If I ever get around to opening that online store I always talk about, this could be an invaluable tool.