Uhh... this article is kind of awful. It consistently confuses hits with pageviews. There's no mention of the most popular early open source (Analog) or closed source (Webtrends) analytics tools. And how can you spend multiple paragraphs telling the story of how GA came to be the most popular analytics platform without mentioning that it's a freebie? GA is an add-on to Adwords, whereas New Relic costs hundreds per month, and Webtrends/Omniture cost thousands. And why say "New Relic is its nearest competitor..." when New Relic doesn't even compete with GA? This article is just a shambles.
And where is sessionization? Isn't going through a logfile and associating the hits with specific users what made the Webtrends founders rich back in the late 1990s? Nope, it never existed, just like web data warehouses, OLAP, etc. In this alternate reality, web analytics moved directly from "glorified hit counters" to "event tracking".
This is not a history of web analytics, it's marketing material for Amplitude, whoever they are. I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that they're an analytics vendor and that event tracking is one of their main features.
Comments
Uhh... this article is kind of awful. It consistently confuses hits with pageviews. There's no mention of the most popular early open source (Analog) or closed source (Webtrends) analytics tools. And how can you spend multiple paragraphs telling the story of how GA came to be the most popular analytics platform without mentioning that it's a freebie? GA is an add-on to Adwords, whereas New Relic costs hundreds per month, and Webtrends/Omniture cost thousands. And why say "New Relic is its nearest competitor..." when New Relic doesn't even compete with GA? This article is just a shambles.
And where is sessionization? Isn't going through a logfile and associating the hits with specific users what made the Webtrends founders rich back in the late 1990s? Nope, it never existed, just like web data warehouses, OLAP, etc. In this alternate reality, web analytics moved directly from "glorified hit counters" to "event tracking".
This is not a history of web analytics, it's marketing material for Amplitude, whoever they are. I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that they're an analytics vendor and that event tracking is one of their main features.