Turns out all you have to do is spend money with an authorized Google Analytics Consultant! I was catching up on the Yahoo! group and happened to notice this:

“Google Authorised Analytics Consultants … have
invitation codes and can help you to get up and running - drop me a
line off-list if you are based in the UK.”

Given that a number of people have complained both to the Yahoo! group and to me directly about the general lack of access to these free accounts I found this insight very interesting.

Maybe the reality is that at the end of the day, Google Analytics is not really free.

Not that I’m necessarily complaining; I’m a big fan of having knowledgable people (or well-written books) guide you through the process of defining business objectives, activities and the metrics that will really help you run your business. I guess it was just curious that apparently Google has distributed the keys to the kingdom, likely in an effort to push some business towards their partners.

Anyway, if you need Google Analytics and are tired of waiting, you should check out some of their authorized partners. I know the guys at ZAAZ do good work and Brian Clifton from Omega Digital Media has always contributed valuable insights to the Yahoo! group.

Worth a look.

I’m keeping up with a post-analytics Xavier Casanova and he just posted a nice piece about how he plans on staying true to his roots, thusly preserving his street cred. I was worried there for a moment, that one of the best-and-brightest was going to turn his back on all he’d done and manage his new business from the gut.

Phew.

I just added ROI Revolution’s “Google Analytics Blog: An Unofficial Google Analytics BLOG from ROI Revolution” to my blogroll (in the left-nav). They outed a tool that I built to scan web pages for hosted page tags, something I didn’t really want done but the genie is out of the bottle so at least for now I’ll keep the application online.

Someone recently asked me how I decide who to add to the blogroll. Basically, if you’re a good writer, a good analyst or a good friend I’ll add you. If you’re interested in being added, drop me a line.

DMNews.com just published a list of predictions I made about the web analytics market in 2006 based on a series of questions they asked me just before I left JupiterResearch. It’s kind of funny to see it in “print” now that I’ve been away for just over a month.

What do you think? Am I right? Am I wrong? Am I crazy?

Congratulations to Jeffery Veen and the team at Measure Map at becoming Google’s latest analytics acquisition!

I’ve been using Measure Map (among other, more powerful tools) for a few months now to measure traffic to this blog and have to say that for what it is, and for the price, it’s a great applications. Perhaps the most important thing Measure Map provides is dead-on simplicity — the metrics you need if you’re a blogger and little else. Hopefully, now that they’re part of Google they’ll be able to open up invitations a little bit and let more people use the system.