Google Analytics wobbles due to increased demand

IDG News Service - Google Inc.'s hosted Web analytics service Google Analytics suffered serious performance problems on Monday and Tuesday after the Mountain View, Calif.-based company announced its decision to offer it for free, but it seems to have stabilized on Wednesday (see "Google offers its Web analytics service for free").

"They clearly underestimated the number of people trying to sign up on Monday," said Alan Gahtan, a Toronto-based attorney who spent hours on Monday trying to sign up for the service, which used to cost $199 per month.

Google Analytics, formerly known as Urchin on Demand, lets users monitor visits to their Web sites to track, for example, the effectiveness of online marketing campaigns and to determine how to modify Web pages to improve sales conversions.

After Gahtan managed to register, he again faced much difficulty logging in. Once logged in, he found the service extremely slow and repeatedly got kicked off to a page saying Google Analytics was down for maintenance and to please try back later.

Gahtan couldn't look at usage data gathered by the service until Tuesday afternoon, and even then the data wasn't precisely fresh, but running more like 24 hours behind, he said.

By Wednesday, the service seemed stable and working properly, said Gahtan, who is using Google Analytics to track usage of his Web site, which he uses to market his practice, a boutique law firm specializing in IT and e-commerce matters.

Eddy Kawira, general manager of Extreme Software, had no trouble signing up for Google Analytics on Monday, but he faced major difficulties setting up the four Web sites he wanted to track. Like Gahtan, he found the service slow and kept getting redirected to a page saying that Google Analytics was down for maintenance.

By Tuesday, he could get on to the service without major problems, but there was little for him to do there: Google Analytics wasn't showing him any data. He finally saw data on Wednesday morning for three of the four Web sites, said Kawira, whose employer is based near Oklahoma City and develops and sells customized software for furniture manufacturers.

The problem wasn't limited to those trying to sign up for the service for the first time on Monday. Ethan Stock, founder of San Francisco-area local events search provider Zvents Inc., ripped into Google on Monday in his personal blog after he encountered various performance and sign-on problems when he accessed Google Analytics.

"Right now, I feel like Google doesn't care about me enough as a customer to tell me that