Many bloggers, designers, and developers take advantage of Google’s free Analytics service to track and monitor their site’s statistics. Along with a Google account, all that’s needed to use Google Analytics is the addition of a small slice of JavaScript into your web pages. For a long time, there was only one way of doing this, and then in 2007 Google improved their GATC code and established a new way for including it in your web pages. Many people switched over to the newer optimized method, but may not realize that there are now three different ways to track your pages with Google Analytics. The latest method uses asynchronous tracking to minimize negative impact on user experience. Let’s take a look at each of these three methods for tracking your web pages with Google Analytics..

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It has occurred to me lately that I no longer use Google Analytics for Perishable Press. Instead, I find myself keeping an eye on things using Mint almost exclusively. So, the question now is: do I continue serving the GA JavaScript to keep the profile active just in case I ever need the additional stats? I mean, Mint already does a great job at recording all of information I could ever need, so I no longer see the use for Google Analytics. I do wonder, however, if Google ranks GA-enabled sites a bit higher than non-GA sites. Hmmm.. it seems to me that there are several options going forward..

Option 1: Continue with Google Analytics

The easiest thing for me to do at this point would be to just leave it alone: continue serving the extra 6.3K/21.4K GA JavaScript (i.e., urchin.js) to site visitors. Sure, I may never actually use the volumes of data I am collecting via Analytics, but hey, who cares, right? Of course, delivering the urchin.js file requires bandwidth and other server resources, and also tends to slow things down a bit, especially on those rare occasions when the Google server bogs down.

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