For the longest time now I have been a user of Google Analytics and because of this I have had to carry certain cookie related warnings. It seemed a good compromise to use Google to get this information and have it in one place.

However over the last couple of weeks I have been asking myself why?

Why am I sharing with Google my sites access statistics?

At first I thought it was because I like to look at the stats in the app on my phone. But then I realised I had uninstalled it the other day as I was so fed up with its limited functionality. Ok so what other argument had I used to try and convince myself? Other than I thought or perhaps it is better to say that I had convinced myself that using analytics gave me the best information about my website usage.

But the problem with all this is that I don’t really care how many people visit. If I did I would spend more time analysing the weblogs that are generated by my internet host intrinsically rather than relying on those from Google. I’m also not entirely certain how the analytics effects people visiting my site from other countries where Google is less accessible either.

So I think I’ve had enough of collecting statistics on my website traffic for someone else and not actually using those statistics at all for myself and will be turning off/removing the Google analytics code from my websites starting here with the blog and the main site then everything else.

Is this a foolish mistake?

This is an interesting question perhaps this is a mistake as once I remove Google analytics who is to say that my sites won’t suddenly plummet down the search rankings? Am I willing to take that chance? Well seeing as the blog pulls in about 20 visitors a day on the best days (normally the day after my weekly blog release) and my main site pulls about 6 visitors a day I don’t think I am hitting the big leagues in terms of search engine traffic. The forum pull about 200 visitors a day but with that said again more appear to be direct links not search results.

So from today lets see

I will be keeping a much closer eye of my visitor logs from the intrinsic systems of my server over the next few weeks. I could probably use some of the many log analysis tools I have on my Linux machine to examine them as well. Will my traffic go up or down - who knows? But frankly at this stage I’m not really bothered.

I guess that means it is Goodbye Google Analytics - I’m leaving and no it is not because you turned off latitude but perhaps it is because I suspect you may turn off Analytics or at least the free version.