I'm leaning more towards live+historical analytic tools like Woopra and to some extent clicktale.<p>These have <i>absolutely</i> changed the way we look at our web visitors. Now hosting feels a bit like being a BBS sysop, especially on our medium-to-small sites.<p>Google Analytics still makes good quick reports that are useful when discussing traffic with investors/advertisers. Yet we're using their dashboard less and less now that the live tools provide us some decent statistics for our smaller sites.<p>I have to agree adding an API for Google Analytics would be great. Woopra has neat javascript tricks where you can add additional information about the user from your backend to be passed to woopra. So in the GUI interface we can tie traffic to actual usernames (avatar images, too) rather than IP addresses. This is hard to describe how useful it is--- nameless IP addresses and user-agent strings lead you to "guess" when users are the same and it doesn't help across machines. When you can see how a specific customer uses your site over a month or two, it can help a lot in understanding what you've done wrong and right with your site.<p>Quick advice: If you have a small website (50k-1k page views a day) and you're not using something like woopra and clicktale to understand what your users do when they visit your sites, you're losing a great opportunity to make your site better for customers.<p><i>Edit</i>: A quick search turned up a few other live-analytic hybrids out there I hadn't seen before. Like whoson.com seems to have a self-hosted version. Might experiment with those, too.
I'd like to suggest that you try to get these feature's implemented in getclicky. They're smaller. I feel like that make's them more susceptible to change. I think it's pretty apparent that Google isn't really listening to us here.<p>Plus they already has some of these features, which I think is awesome.<p><a href="http://getclicky.com/" rel="nofollow">http://getclicky.com/</a>
You know, I would love an official API and several other features mentioned. But what I really want to see is faster serving of the Javascript included in my pages.<p>Several times recently, I've gone to my sites and it seems to never finish loading because Analytics is being slow again. It's at the foot of the page and installed correctly, but since it doesn't finish or close its connection it keeps the loading icon spinning forever which makes some users think there's still more to come. The last thing any analytics package should do is decrease the speed perception of your site.<p>Simple solution:<p>a) We download and install the Javascript on our end -- less for Google to serve, so they can focus on just saving the data.<p>b) They email us whenever a new version of the Javascript comes out, so we can update our copies.<p>That's not so hard, is it? Analytics is a nice stats interface, but it doesn't feel like it's been improved much (except for a new skin) in a long time. Expecting the above to be fixed, even just by improving the speed/stability of their JS serving, is the least we can hope for really.
I'd add in "add a checkbox to remove weekends from displayed results".<p>Selling business software, we've found weekends are a dead-zone which throws the numbers off. It's not a huge issue, but it makes things a smidge more difficult to trend.
Someone's got to step up and become THE competition to Analytics. That's perhaps the only way to get a behemoth like Google to respond with better innovation,