I was recently invited to try out Google Analytics. Not that I'm anything special, as I'm sure thousands of people are beta testing it at the moment, but I have to say it is the most impressive web stats I've ever seen. It knocks the socks off everything else, even commercial packages. For my fun stuff like this blog (yes, it *is* fun!), I use the freeware bbclone, which you can have a nice nosey around here. It's set to show visitors, not hits, pageviews or robots, so if the numbers seem really tiny to you, perhaps you should check that your logs are really measuring what you think they're measuring (most sites can easily get several hundred bots a day, and none of them really care what you're writing about! Most visitors have several pageviews, and hits, well, just what is the point other than to make a really really big number...).

Admittedly, I've not been registered very long with google analytics, and my poor little blog doesn't really have that much traffic - although to everyone who does come here, I love you all! In fact, I especially love the 38.5% of you who are returning visitors! A regular readership! I must be writing something worth reading...

The geo data seems amazingly precise - I'm not saying it's accurate (it probably is), but most packages I've seen only seem to approximate where a person visits from, yet Google analytics provides some very snazzy maps.

I'm not sure whether I should be surprised that the majority of my visitors come from Paris and the surrounding area. I think probably I should be surprised - why would you all want to read my ramblings about Paris when you live here? It was nice to see a few people from Corsica, which is my parents favourite holiday destination. After Paris it looks like Seattle is the next hottest place. Is that because you are complete internet junkies, or because I slate Starbucks all the time?

Anyway, that's just the pretty stuff. The more amazing stats are where you can see how deep each person browses your site, where they enter and exit, visitor loyalty and all sorts of stuff like that. You can even see your site with the stats overlaid, so you can tell which links are the most effective, or most ignored.

Cool stuff. Google on their way to dominating the web world even more. I guess at some point we should in principle dislike them, but most of their stuff is just too good...