In order to have a better idea who is visiting the company web-site and this blog, I’ve added Google Analytics to both.  For this blog, I’m testing out Google Analyticator by Ronald Heft.  So far, I’m impressed.  It puts the required JavaScript on every page, which is the minimum that you’d expect.  It also has a lot of configurable options, including the ability to authenticate with Google and pull data from your analytics account.  This allows you to select the site from a drop-list instead of having to enter the UA identifier.  Also, after you authenticate, you get a new widget in the WordPress Dashboard that gives you a subset of the information available in the GA Dashboard.

You can exclude certain types of users from tracking, such as the admin, editors, authors, etc.  This is quite useful if you don’t want your own activity to skew the stats.  You can specify prefixes for outbound links and downloads, and tell it which types of downloads to track, based on file extension.  It will also integrate with Google Adsense if you have an account.

So far, I’m quite pleased.