Google Analytics integration

[nugget]

Holy Cow! - It only took them four years, but this is finally implemented. Announced on 16 April 2010, Google Analytics support has been added to LiveJournal. I never thought this would happen!

Title
Google Analytics integration

Short, concise description of the ideaAllow users to set a Google Analytics ID in their userinfo which would cause pages

Comments

[andrewducker]

Sounds like a good idea to me. Nice and simple to implement, no danger from it, gives the user more options.

[uthrom]

Mee too! (tm)

Bad link

[nugget]

the Analytics link above is hinky. Google gets confused by the https:// and assumes you're a logged in user. Removing the "s" in "https" causes the link to work: Google Analytics.

Also note that as of this week, Google Analytics is now totally open for enrollment and is no longer invitation-only.

For clarification

[nugget]

Several people have suggested to me that I expand on the description above for the purposes of clarification...

Google Analytics is a free service offered by Google for logging access to a website. People use Google Analytics to view who is visiting their website, what they're reading, how long they stay, and all variety of interesting logs and usage statistics. It's roughly equivalent to running a weblog reporting tool on local webserver access logs.

Since LiveJournal users do not have access to the the LiveJournal server logs, there has never been an opportunity for LiveJournal users to see how popular their blog is, or who is visiting, or where those visitors are coming from.

Google Analytics would provide LiveJournal users the ability to start tracking access to their blogs without the security and privacy concerns that would arise from having access to the raw webserver logs. It would be interesting and useful to any LiveJournal user who is curious about who is reading their blog and how people are finding it.

Re: For clarification

[goulo]

Can you elaborate on the security and privacy concerns that would result from LJ giving such info from their own server logs, instead of using an external system like Google Analytics?

In any case, yes some such feature is long overdue and desired.

Re: For clarification

[ivo]

Ah. Now it suddenly makes more sense to me. I just signed up and yes, LJ integration would definitely be valuable.

Re: For clarification

[gentlemangeorge]

I support Nugget's suggestion.

[petef]

+1, I'd find it useful.