I’ve been using GetClicky for two years across all my sites, and I think it is the best piece of analytics code I ever did see. Try it out on your site… you can see the exact path your visitors take, a realtime “spy” function coded in Ajax so it’s a waterfall of what everybody is doing on your site in realtime. It also shows exactly how a visitor found your site, your most popular content, and how much time visitors are spending on your site all in one screen. When you go to install it on your site, just make sure to remove their small “getclicky” banner embeded in the code. I think they recently created a check box to easily exclude that. They offer a free version, so check it out. Visit GetClicky
There is no doubt Google would use site data, the way they harvest all kinds of data, even illegally without people’s permission. We know they created software to gather data on people’s Wi-Fi traffic while they were roaming the streets and taking pics of people’s homes, this has been proven and they are facing legal action because of it.
If Google is willing to steal data and act like the CIA in that regard, why wouldn’t they be using your analytics data too?
But a 3rd party company is unlikely to use analytical data to judge on how you should be ranked in Google. I put it up here as a suggestion and alternative to those who are interested. If you can’t see why this is important, keep using Google Analytics. I am not wasting anymore of my time debating it, use it or not. I don’t care.
At this point in time, Google is the man. You may not want them to know more about your search history, patterns, etc., but they’re already so big that a few sites here and there removing Analytics and replacing it with something else isn’t going to have any noticeable effect. It’s not even a bleep on the radar screen.
The only way to have an impact on Google is to have the entire world do a planned, organized, and scheduled “attack” if you will, i.e. most website on the planets remove their Analytics codes on a certain day and change to something else. Anything short of that is just the regular ebb and flow of the web.
Google’s going to be around for a while, there ain’t much you can do about it. Figure out how to work with them the best you can.
