Google Blahnalytics
I was quite excited when I woke up yesterday and found that Google Analytics had finally been launched. There had been rumours of Google taking the Urchin product they bought a year ago and making it vastly free for most customers - and now that rumour is a reality.
Problem is that Google continues to mess up with its launches. Most people tend to be way overly forgiving with Google, partially because it’s a new and fun company and partially because it slaps “beta” on almost all of its products.
The problem is that the new and fun bit is starting to go by the wayside after an increasing number of useless or poorly executed launches (I won’t even say “beta” here, because beta is the new mega-launch). Anyone remember Orkut’s launch? Google Reader’s? Google Blog Search’s? Google Video’s?
All had massive issues, including (but not limited to) scaleability. There were also huge issues around the web whenever Google extends the Gmail login to a new service, especially if you already signed up for the service with a Gmail login.
Yesterday’s Analytics launch was probably the worst launch Google has ever had, though. Not only could thousands of people not download the software, not only could many folk on Safari or Opera not even GET to the software, but everyone who did get to the software found it to be incredibly, incredibly slow.
Like a dead dog trying to play ultimate frisbee kind of slow.
The biggest problem with this is that the new “customers” were on the same servers as all the tens of thousands of existing customers paying 200$/month. Google just screwed with nearly 20M$/month in income. The entire system is useless for everyone.
Oh, but some people managed to get in. Some managed to include the right code on their site to track stats. Only to be told that these “real-time analytics” took 12 hours to compile the first data set.
For me, that was 24 hours ago and no reports. For Darren it’s been almost 35.
We were actually quite looking forward to this application for b5media because it would allow us not only to track stats per site (and globally), but also to allow each blogger to login to just their stats. Which is cool. Very cool.
I’m sure that Google will sort this out in a week or two, but you’d think for a company who’s main technological resource is the ability to scale to mind-blowing levels, scaleability by having 10K new customers join in a day would be a non-issue.
And, no, Google Analytics is not a “beta” product. It’s Google’s first real “final” product in a very, very long time (and they just bought it and re-labelled it). No excuses this time boys. Fix this, fix your internal process for launching projects and get this right both for your existing customers and your new ones.
POSTED IN: Blogging, Business, IT News & Thoughts
15 opinions for Google Blahnalytics
Vinnie Garcia
Nov 15, 2005 at 11:25 am
I signed up but never made it to the part where they give me the Javascript code. I’ll deal with my host-provided Analog stats until the omgoogle hype wears off…
Chris Garrett
Nov 15, 2005 at 12:08 pm
Got to agree with you here :O( Urchin was a good product too!
Bart
Nov 15, 2005 at 12:30 pm
I was probably one of the first to register for the service and I too have been waiting for about 36 houres to see my first stats. The thing that pisses me off is that there’s no notice or anything that let’s us know that there is something wrong.
Jeremy Wright
Nov 15, 2005 at 12:50 pm
Yeah, I was actually quite surprised by how bad it’s been. The fact that current PAYING customers are also experiencing this blows my mind. As TDavid notes, Google should have put the new customers on a different set of servers so that current ones weren’t affected in any way.
David
Nov 15, 2005 at 12:54 pm
The fact that people are paying that much and having their information hosted on someone else’s servers (and not their own) is beyond me. This is one of the times I’m glad I’m a control freak when it comes to that stuff.
Jesse
Nov 15, 2005 at 1:20 pm
Just like Google to put out all that hype about a broken product.
Darren
Nov 15, 2005 at 9:17 pm
48 hours and counting….
Jon Gales
Nov 15, 2005 at 11:57 pm
David: Almost all larger sites outsource statistic services for a few reasons. First, really popular sites don’t have the server space/power to keep logs let alone crunch them. If you get 400 million page views a month the log files get reeeaaaaly big and the hard drives can’t spin fast enough. Crunching stats even for a smaller site can be very CPU intensive, especially for the kind of stats Urchin or Omniture provide. Add in things like doing stats across server clusters and what not and outsourcing starts to look really good. There’s a reason why co’s like Omniture charge $10s of thousands monthly for it.
Duncan
Nov 16, 2005 at 12:29 am
Good, its not just me who is waiting, I started to think I must have stuffed something up.
Zoli Erdos
Nov 16, 2005 at 1:02 am
Jeremy, give MeasureMap a try instead… it’s blog-specific.
barry bell
Nov 16, 2005 at 8:01 am
Yep, 48 hours here, too.
David
Nov 16, 2005 at 2:09 pm
Jon: I have no doubt about how big the log files get (if you maintain heavy logs, I’d estimate 400MM views a month can be 1.5-2gb log file per day) - however, if you have a site that big, there’s no reason you shouldn’t have your own stats server(s). It’s more cost effective, even if you have to hire a contractor to set it up and maintain it for you.
Jeremy Wright
Nov 16, 2005 at 2:12 pm
David, the cost of a hosted application vs a host-yourself application is just about the same at that scale … At least based on my experiences at the Expo last week at AdTech :)
Jon Gales
Nov 16, 2005 at 5:13 pm
David: by that logic no one should use a webhost either. Just get a fiber drop and host your own. For a few companies (Google) that works, for most it’s worth the expense to hire a firm that’s specialized at it.
Another beauty of hosted stats is that advertisers dig it–you can give them a login to see the stats directly and it doesn’t depend on your logfile.
Anway, it’s a moot point as nearly all of the top sites use a hosted stats service. I just checked Apple.com and CNN.com and the both use Omniture.
David
Nov 17, 2005 at 2:28 pm
Two sites don’t make it a moot point, nor does one company that’s able to charge a lot for the service. I work with a few companies that have sites on that scale and except for one, they have their own stats servers in-house or with their host. They’re still using similar programs, but they find the machines low maintenence and much lower cost.
It’s simply the cost of service/hardware and maintenence time (your time or someone else’s paid time) vs the cost of complete outsourcing.