Folks: I won't spend much time talking about the myriad of wonderful changes that have occured since my last post way back in July.  Most notably, we've "survived" a huuuge wedding for my dear sister (11/12/05)!  I shall def get to that in later blogs.  Today I want to talk about Google's impressive offering, Google Analytics

http://www.google.com/analytics" title="http://www.google.com/analytics" target="_blank"http://www.google.com/analyti...

Wow, I should also mention I am starting to fall back in love with tblog.  Great job with the sleeker interface.  Nice touch adding a "Post Key" below so that those spammers are gone (or at least diminished).  I was seriously contemplating a move because tblog became such a haven for garbage. 

OK, back to analytics.  I learned about it on Monday via /. (slashdot.org) and signed my company's website right up (I refrain from listing it here for privacy reasons...however I have a feeling I'll throw our URL up one of these days to add to our inbound link rankings  :o )  Data was slower to arrive, and I had to get a tech dude ('Bo' with analytics support) to email me and say "due to higher than expected demand...blah blah" so basically we are swamped and have been caught with our proverbial pants around our ankles.  But data finally arrived, albeit 24hours late, and it is impressive.

There is a cool flash map of the world showing where your traffic comes from, there are keywords, search engine "entrance" maps, marketing campaign managers, and so much more.  I think next I'll set up the "goals" feature that allows me to define a specific goal (in our case it will be reaching the RFQ page) and seeing if visitors abandon their goal, and if so where they abandon, how they "funnel" to that goal, etc.

So for all you haters, hey... this is FREE, and there are growing pains, but you get a service that until Sunday cost $199 per month (Urchin).

My next blog: Google Base --> Craig's List meets Amazon/Ebay (w/out the purchasing...yet) meets Google.

Happy Surfing!

P.S. its COLD in Chi-town today.  Good thing I'm headed to warm and sunny LA tonight =)

JSK

KSB