After waiting for nearly 5 days since I joined Google Analytics, the first report is available now. It's quite frustrating that you have to wait for so long while Google kept saying it would be available in next 12 hours. I can understand that a lot of web masters joined Google Analytics in such a short time, and Google servers must have been too busy servicing new customers and collecting massive amount of data. But I think they should have guessed the amount of attention they would be receiving.
Anyway, what is my impression about Analytics report? I was very surprised to see such a complete report. They have more information about your site traffic than you would actually use. I've seen other free analysis programs and nothing can compare with Google Analytics. They have got statistics of how many new and returning visitors you have got, how many visits returning visitors made, how many visitors came from each referrer (such as search engines or those who linked to you), how many came from which countries/cities, how many visitors have java disabled, and many many more. I am sure such data will be helpful to promote your site and to check which of your efforts are working to what extent. I still can't believe that you can receive such analysis for totally free.
There are some room Google Analytics can improve too of course, such as excluding my own visits from the report whether I use static IP or not, and the feature to choose any Time Zone (so far it uses only Pacific Standard Time). I would love to see the report updated within an hour or so if not within seconds as most counters do. At the moment the data for yesterday and today are still not available. But we can't complain much since it has been functioning for a few days only, can we? One thing I'm not so sure is the accuracy of the report. So far the total number of pageviews for any day is a lot lower than the numbers shown by the statcounter I'm using. I do trust the result from my statcounter since I can see the result of each visit within seconds, and I can disable the counter for my own visits. So I'll still stick to my statcounter while testing Google Analytics.
Overall, I'm quite overwhelmed with all the services Google Analytics will be providing and I think Google has done it again.
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