Google announced this morning that their web analytics tool (formerly Urchin) is now being offered free to all website owners. While I have to admit that Urchin is not my favorite of the web analytics tools, it’s certainly better than the vast majority (including the one you probably got with your hosting package) and at $0 you definitely can’t beat the price. 🙂
If you can’t afford the hundreds of dollars for ClickTracks then this is definitely worth using.
As I’m fairly paranoid when it comes to dropping code into websites just for tracking and the affect that it may have on a site’s ranking I’ve always be hesitant to do so however this code is owned by Google and thus one can safely assume that Google isn’t about to have any issues with it’s use. 🙂
For more information on Google’s free web analytics you can read more on their site at http://www.google.com/analytics/. You can also signup free there. 🙂