Google just announced that they are going to providing another service, called Google Analytics. The new service allows webmasters to have free web stats based on Google’s prior Urchin Stats service. All you have to do is signup with Google on their Google Analytics site, and signin using your Gmail, Adsense, or Adwords account.
Once you go through the signup process, you get a simple javascript to add to your html pages.
For WordPress users dt’s Blog.thedt.net site has a Google analytics plugin that gives you a simple text box for you to paste the script code into. I had to correct the plugin code, because for some reason it stripped out the php lines, so if you cannot correct the code from dt’s site, feel free to copy the Google Analytics plugin code from our WordPress forum.
Another WordPress plugin that is easier to use is Cavemonkey50’s Google Analyticator plugin. Unlike dt’s plugin, Analyticator just asks you for the user account code, and not the entire script.
However how does Google Analytics compete against the other web stats packages out there, well Eric Peterson gives us some of his thoughts on Google giving away web stats.