Google Analytics Sucks!

Before I go on, I must say that I use Analytics every day, and it is by far the best tool I have found for monitoring site traffic.

The problem, though, is it does not let you get down to the nitty gritty details about a specific user. For example you could not find out what user, from what region, from what referring site, hit what content. You can find out all this information about groups of users, but not at the same time. I am guessing for privacy reasons (same reason you cannot obtain the IP). This becomes limiting quickly for me.



Maybe all this information is mute once you have hits in the thoasands per day, but when you are getting an average of one signup per day the individual user details are still very interesting and useful.

How to log the referring site

My web startup was deployed in June... It took me until this week to realize I should be recording the referring site for every signup. And no... Google Analytics is not a good solution for this.

The client side code goes something like this:

    <form>
     Email
     <input onfocus="javascript:document.getElementById('referringSite').value=document.referrer"
         name="email" />
     <!-- or with jquery: -->
     <!-- <input onfocus="javascript:$('#referringSite').val(document.referrer);" name="email" />-->
     Choose Password
     <input type="password" name="password" value="" />
     <input type="hidden" name="referringSite" value="" id="referringSite" />
     <input name="submit" type="submit" value="Sign up!" />
 </form>

So now, instead of knowing where I get the most hits from, I know where I get the most account creations from, which is what really matters.

Anyone know of any other super valuable info to record?