funny that the site for a web analytics tool did not properly anticipate and prepare for its own web traffic…

Now that it is free you can't even complain! How do you launch a product that is an important tool and then have it not be available?

I just hope this is not a long term problem!

Urchin Live was never the fastest site, even when you had to pay a few hundred bucks a month to use it. Hopefully Google will not only get the site back spinning, but make it faster than it was before as a paid service.

I always had a easy time using Urchin Live.. This is what they get for making everything free. Urchin had a 30-day free trial too, so it technically was free as well. Fee's reduce traffic. Even if they made Google Analytics 5 cents a month, it would reduce the amount of people using it by a percentage or much more. Urchin was one of these services that just made sense. It paid for itself and it didn't really need to be free.. Now it is.. Now what. What is Google doing?

You get what you pay for!

Do those who paid for it so far get some kind of gift or something? I can understand if not, one could be angry. When I paid for Blogger Pro and they made made all their services available for free, I received a nice hooder from Google...

I honestly dont get it. when it happened to reader, like you said, it was understandable: beta, only linked off google labs. either they live in a whole and dont know how many fans they have or they're being stupid.....

Wow, GAnalytics looks pretty nice right now in my browser (I didn't turn off images in it!):

http://img360.imageshack.us/img360/3489/ganalytics1vi.jpg

:) I was lucky during the day and for a couple of times it worked OK. But once I received this message:

"Thanks for stopping by. We are currently migrating existing customers to the newly improved Google Analytics service. This process will be completed later this afternoon. Please come back then to sign up for Google Analytics."

Why not get the service online, migrate all the customers and only THEN open the services to users? :) Anyways, I hope this problems will be solved soon.

From what I've seen between Google Analytics and Urchin, there is no difference. I think if Urchin could have they would have dropped their price to get more customers.. but they couldn't. Because it's probably expensive to run Urchin and resource intensive. But Google laughs at these small costs that would cripple any other WebStats provider.

What Google did with Urchin is bought it and then put their name on it. This isn't really what i'd consider innovation or creative. it's kind of...... should I say it... EVIL!!!!

2 Justin Pfister:

But look at it from other point of view. Who benefits from google buying urchin and releasing it for free?

1) Urchin owners and developers. I'm sure they've received a good compensation for selling their product and probably are working right now in Google.

2) Google. A new way to attract more adwords clients and thus increase revenue. Also, the more services they have, the more power over NET they've got.

3) Users. Now everybody can use this great tool for free (with some limitations if they are not adwords clients).

So, I don't think it's evil. The only ones who lose in this case are companies providing web traffic analyzers, because there is no more reason to use their non-free tools :)

wow, it just got like 100 times faster for me. weird. its up to the speed i expect it should have been from the start. awesome, because before it was a POC

Maybe they didn't expect to get /.ed. I wonder how the resources get distributed in Google. Do they have to bring a couple new racks online, or can they just take some from a pool? If they have to acquire new machines, that could take a few hours. I wonder if these services take a little while to find their load-balanced 'groove' on the servers. It seems to be really fast now (where as before it didn't work and was then really slow), now if only I would have some data appear.

I have added my website to the system cca. 24 hours ago, but it still says that "Your first reports will be ready within twelve hours". Anybody with similar experience?

How is enabling Urchin to do what they wanted to do "evil"? Come on – they're bringing a great tool to -everyone-. The fact that performance sucked today is a negative, sure, but the goal here isn't evil at all.

my says "waiting for data" after hours too. someone mentioned earlier that JS code is supposed to be put between <HEAD> and </HEAD> ... can that be a problem? i have it at the end of my html code

GA didn't allow me to register due to "they were migrating data" (they disabled new registrations as they had not enough resources to) yesterday.

Today I've registered fine and was able to sign up for one of our sites. They promise to have some statistical data in 6 hours or so. And "Tracking Ststus Unknown".

So I predict that they provided enough servers to pover user interface already but not enough to do any calculations yet.

It look like Google likes prolonged (several days to several weeks) entrance to the market as people say more about evolving product then about perfect product. Especially bloggers ;)

You insert one line of code and get 17k of Javascript that adds 17k of code to your page.

You can see the code using the web developer tool in firefox.

See more here:

http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2005/11/13/Google-Analytics

Hanah, the same file will be used on everybody's site who uses it though and it should get cached, so I don't think 17k for the initial download is too bad really...

Firefox tells me it's 5k only, but when I download it it says 17K... maybe they use HTTP compression, so it will only be 5k. Yeah, could be less still...

Justin, why would that be evil? It's Google's problem how to make revenue, and if they think of becoming THE platform (and then stick their ads on it), let them give a try... it only benefits us, the user. Or what exactly did you mean?

> I wonder if these services take a little while
> to find their load-balanced ’groove’ on the servers.

Good point...

> ... can that be a problem? i have it at the
> end of my html code

Yeah, you should definitely put in the <Head>. I don't know if it works without but why tempt fate...

I'd say that there is nothing wrong with 5/17Kb of Javascript. Why? Because it loads once for every visitor of ANY GA-enabled site.

At the moment script lifetime is 55 minutes, so it will reload each hour, but I don't mind having extra 5/17Kb of script from Google each hour :) Additionally my browser will only HEAD it then and if none of Urchin engineers put his hands into the script (as it is 10 hours old already) the older version of the script will have another hour to live in my cache.

Life is beautiful ;)
P.S. I'm waiting for my account to pass the Status Check (another way to delay new GA users).

So has anyone actually got a report? My javascript went up over 24 hours ago and passed status check right away. Traffic by my stats was around 28K pages.

Mine has been enabled for 21 hours now and still no data :(Good thing I didn't try to wait up for it.

I put my code in the head for my main website, but my image gallery software doesn't support putting anything in there, so I put it right after the header.

maybe we'll get our stats by snail mail at the end of the month

I have no reporting data yet either. Guess they meant 12 hours + some unspecified amount. :D

it's been a long wait now.

32+ hours have passed but still "waiting for data"

website: http://labnol.blogspot.com

I was about to ask if anyone has seen any stats, but it looks like everybody is "Waiting for Data "

I think I will stick with old-fashioned (!) real-time stat tools.

From Google Analytics Support

hank you for your email.

We understand that you aren't seeing data in your reports, even though you your tracking code has been set up for over six hours. We apologize for any inconvenience. We have collected your data since you installed the tracking code on your site, and are continuing to collect this data throughout the day.

We are currently in the process of creating reports from your data. You should be able to see your reports populated with data later today. Please note that this reporting delay is associated with unexpected demand for Google Analytics. Under normal circumstances, the data in your reports will be at most six hours old.

This comes from my own personal Urchin experience.. Sometime the data doesn't come for over 48 hrs.(it's aweful!). But then.. 95% of the time it's 1-2 hours lagged. Please be patient though. It's completely worth it!!!!! I promise everyone. Don't remove the script yet.

I added a second website to monitor, but it doesn't see the script on the page (and so won't activate it). I confirmed that it is on the page by viewing source, but Analytics doesn't see it. Is this because they are trying to keep load down for now by not accepting new websites? It is a little frustrating.

Andrew, which URL?

http://liberalechochamber.blogspot.com

That is my political blog. The code is just above the </head> (as close as the template allowed me to place it).

Seems like the script is there fine Andrew.. Give it time everyone else.

to Ilya Baklanov

I think its short sighted to say it is a free service....

Someone must be giving big G Google Bucks somewhere... and someone must be paying the guys at Urchin.

You realise WE ARE paying for this service, by clicking on adwords, and searching the web and providing information to Google.

GA is a Google community financed service, and the Google community is very large (as is Google).

My point is that Google is not nescessarily evil, nor good... but big. Google does have the worlds consciousness at its finger tips, and its just grabbed some more with its other hand.

Its good to question where Google is heading, and it would be wrong to think free is doesnt come at a price.

I'm getting the itching fealing big G is just playing ball with MS, Ebay and AOL, and oblivious to those who get in its way, We've been on that road before.

For me Google is getting mighty fat and is loosing its shine.

I'm going to post this twice : Google Analytics is officially alive now. I'm getting nice neat data!! Woot!

Nothing here yet... and it still won't detect the javascript on my second page.

It's over 50 hrs – still dead.

I have the same detection problems.
Hopefully they will solve the problem very soon!

Nothing here either, and the script is correctly installed on all my sites.

Also the same problem........
Script installed correctly and no detection.

Maybe it will work properly in 2006.

It look like our account is yet on the queue to get its spare Google server to process or data still ;) We are at least 7 hours later in the GA for updates queue.

My account displays this notice...

"Analytics has been successfully installed and data is being gathered now. Your first reports will be ready within twelve hours."

but when i click on reports it actually gives me back some info. Not sure if it only sends back data in 12 hour chunks or whether it is actually gathering data still and provided an initial report to show it is working.

www.utills.com

It'd be nice to get some sort of word from Google on it...

Good tip! Same for me, there are stats now.

Oh wow, thank you. It does have some stats now. Also, overnight (in the last 6.5 hours), it confirmed my second website. I finally get a chance to look at which search queries are used to hit my website, and sure enough, it is some crazy shit. Who would have thought all these things would return my website? Haha, this is pretty neat now.