Google added a new way to verify your site in their Webmaster Tools: through a DNS TXT entry. It took me a couple of tries to figure out how to properly enter it through Slicehost's DNS GUI:

1. Type: TXT


2. Name: Enter the FQD name domain that you put in Google Webmaster Tools I.e. for this site, I would use www.robertbolton.com or robertbolton.com, depending on what I entered into Webmaster Tools.
   
3. Data: Enter the value provided by Google (i.e. google-site-verification: waRANDbRgWxXfEBMKhl8c1v8fL1kcVvRtPFU-OmN9I1)
   

To see if it worked, you can use the command line "host -t txt robertbolton.com" and a result should come back. Or just cross your fingers and click the verify button in Google...

I finagled access to Microsoft’s AdCenter Analytics and spent an hour going through the UI and checking out the functionality. It contains the standard functionality found in free analytics package, with the ability to track marketing campaigns and report on revenue. You can set up goals in case reporting on revenue isn’t you thing, and AdCenter Analytics also supports setting up funnels to determine pain points in your site.

I had heard a year ago that Microsoft was including some slick new visualization tools in the offering. The app contains a tree view, which is a visualization of traffic stats and I found it mildly interesting, but probably not something I would use that often. It also offers a number of different graphs. For example, the visitors stats are represented by three different graphs, one in monthly increments, one if weekly increments and one in daily increments. You can click on the increment to limit the data to that specific date range. Again, this is something that is interesting, but not a feature that would make me want to sign up for the account.

The one interesting feature I encountered was the ability to automatically install the script on your site via a connection to your FTP server. I’m not sure how it works – does it open all your html files and insert the script in the bottom? I guess that would be useful for small sites.

There is a fairly intuitive tool to exclude query string parameters for dynamic urls and also exclude IP addresses. This seems easier but less flexible than Google Analytic’s filters. The IP address exclusion allows you to exclude C and B address blocks by using "*", but it doesn’t support regular expressions, which is fine for most people. But that could become an issue if you needed to block a subset of IP addresses.

All in all it is a decent offering, but I didn’t see anything there that would make me want to switch or even sign up in addition to the current web analytics programs I use. As a new entrant to the field, I would have thought they would have some killer feature to gain traction. But that doesn’t appear to be the case.

I ran into a small problem with Google Analytics and secure connections. I worked with a company to get a secure certificate installed and noticed that the Google Analytics tracking code placed on the pages was calling a script from http and not https. This raised an alert in Internet Explorer asking if you “want to display non-secure items in the page”. Firefox also had a red icon, indicating everything was not secure on the page.



A quick search on Google turned up nothing useful, so I visited Google Analytics and quickly found the answer to my problem - http://www.google.com/support/analytics. The instructions are straightforward and you can place the code on non-secure and secure pages. Looking at the new tracking code and both JavaScript files on Google’s server, it looks like the only difference is the tracking code calls the script over https. This leads me to believe you could only update the secure pages on your site with the new tracking code and be fine.