Today I learned of a new Google endeavor, Google Analytics. It’s basically traffic analysis software, mostly targeted to advertisers (in fact, it’s free to AdWords customers), but also useful to bloggers and other amateur content authors. Since I’m not an AdWords customer, I’m limited to 5M page views (per month, presumably); that leaves me with a margin of barely 4.999 million.

At any rate, it requires you to include some Javascript on your site, not surprisingly.

I’m putting in it page.tpl.php, which is the template that governs page display. Google says it goes in head, after meta. As you wish.

Right now the Google Analytics site is painfully slow; it took a few minutes just to open the initial registration screen. Since it’s typically spartan Google fare, I assume this indicates back-end load. This is consistent with other Google betas; Google Reader was similarly unusable in the first days.

Ok, I clicked ‘Check Status’ to force the system to re-check for the javascript, and it’s now in ‘Waiting for Data’ status, which indicates:

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

Wow; I can’t wait that long. Oh well. I’ll be back in 12 hrs…