There was a huge rush to sign up for Google Analytics when it was first announced a few weeks ago. Online Web site traffic analysis services are not new - search the Web for them and you'll turn up dozens, both commercial and free. But Web-savvy people have come to expect great things from Google over the past couple of years.

Personally, I have found Google Analytics lacks the innovation that Google should have put into it.

Profiles

The first problem with Google Analytics is that each website must have its own profile if you want to view the results separately.

• There is no way to compare 2 website profiles
• Setting up website profiles, each with their own goals, is time consuming.
• Setting things up this way means that you can not compare data from the 2 sites.
• Each website needs its own tracking code.

Google Analytics does have the ability to track many websites under one profile, but this also has problems:

• You can't look at a websites data individually.
• Data just acts as it would for one website.

One script to track them all

When Google Analytics was released, it should not have needed separate scripts to track each website, but rather a single script that will work on any site.

Questions

After failing to do many things with Google Analytics, I have sent a list of questions to them as follows:

• How do I track all my domains (and subdomains) so that I have the option to see data about all my sites together or about a specific domain?
• If I track all my domains (and subdomains) in one profile, how do I view the keywords for only one subdomain?
• If I track all my domains (and subdomains) in separate profiles, how do I compare the performance of my domains (and subdomains) to each other?
• How do I track more than 2 custom variables?
• How do I track which tags on my blog are most popular when there are only 2 custom variables?
• How can I track the performance of Adsense on each page?