Google Analytics Leaves Beta

Google Analytics, Google's Web site analysis service, graduated from beta yesterday with several new features, according to Intelligent Enterprise.

As part of the announcement, Google said that the old version of Google Analytics will be removed on July 18th. Google introduced the new version in beta back in May.

Google Analytics began life as Urchin On Demand, a hosted Web analytics service offered by San Diego-based Urchin Software Corp. Google acquired Urchin in March 2005 and initially offered the Web traffic measurement service for $199. In November 2005, Google re-branded the service Google Analytics and began offering it for free.

The updated version now includes the option to view site traffic on an hourly basis, a feature from the old version that didn't make it into the recent interface upgrade. Google also added the ability to click through to external pages from links in Google Analytics reports.

Users can also now cross-segment reports by network location, which means they can view traffic from different network locations separately. The company has also made it easier to integrate a Google AdWords account with Google Analytics. In addition, the new interface now shows up to 500 rows of data on a single report page, up from a previous limit of 100 rows.

Earlier this month, Google acquired content syndication and management service FeedBurner, which offers similar traffic analytics for RSS feeds. Google has yet to say how or whether FeedBurner will be integrated with Google Analytics.