Google Analytics – Useless Junk

I mentioned the conversion from paid Urchin to free Google analytics yesterday.

The sluggishness of the service all day yesterday rendered it unusable, but I thought that this was a transient issue. I seem to have been mistaken.
I can now login faster (than yesterday) but the stupid system seems to have ignored traffic for the last 24 hours +
Losing 24 hours worth of statistics may seem trivial to someone who doesn’t work in an online business, but for someone who does it is extremely frustrating. If we got a boost (or drop) in sales in the last 48 hours I need to know if that is due to some change that we made to navigation etc., Fortunately we haven’t launched any new products or services in the last 24 hours, but we did start some new online advertising recently and I am currently not in a position to gauge its effectiveness properly.
Previously we were paying 199 dollars a month for a service that gave me useful information that I could use to track how visitors interacted with sites, which links were clicked on, which ones weren’t etc., etc. All very useful information.
Yes – Urchin wasn’t the cheapest option, but I wasn’t using it for tracking a hobby site or blog. I was using it for tracking a business that conducts a very high percentage of its business online. An online business.
Now I’m looking at this new “toy” that Google have offered the world and I can’t help thinking that they have really “dropped the ball”. Maybe I’d be better off choosing another paid service that actually worked, as opposed to a free service that is unreliable.
I’m not alone in my views. Tom provided a nice link to someone else’s blog that echoes my feelings
Like me they had problems logging in following the changeover and like me they are none too happy with the changes. I think the last comment pretty much sums it up:

Google isn’t acting like a real business, they are acting like an over-enthusiastic Golden Retriever puppy. Oh, they just knocked the vase off the table with their tail, but aren’t they cute? Um, no. Google, grow up.

As Google own Urchin’s code etc., why the hell couldn’t they run both the paid and free versions in parallel so that there wouldn’t be such a ridiculous impact on performance?
We may not have paid them as much as other companies using the system, but I am beginning to have serious doubts when I review how much we have paid them between Urchin and adwords and yet they are incapable of providing basic customer service…
Let’s do the maths..
A company paying for Urchin would pay 199 dollars plus per month, which translates to 2388 per annum on the basic Urchin plan. If the company’s site(s) were busy and doing several million pageviews per month that figure would be significantly higher, as you paid for the number of pageviews per billing period.
So let’s say that you were monitoring a couple of high profile sites doing 500 dollars worth of pageviews per month. That translates to 6000 dollars per year. It would be reasonable to assume that a company would also be spending at least some portion of their budget on PPC marketing and would be easily spending 500 dollars a month via adwords (without mentioning any of the other programs offered by Overture et al).
So the company is paying 1000 dollars to Google a month or 12k per annum. Not an insignifcant sum of money, but you could argue that as Google’s turnover per annum runs into 10 figures plus (I haven’t checked the exact figure, but I know it is high) that 12k is only a tiny, miniscule portion of it.
That would be a flawed presumption. Urchin had more than one client.
No company can realistically afford to treat its clients badly. It doesn’t matter how big or how small they are. If 1000 small to medium businesses, each spending 12k per annum with a company were to move elsewhere the loss of revenue would no longer be insignificant.