By Emmanuel Narokobi - 29th September 2006

Hooray!! Finally at last Google has given us more capacity to install Google Analytics for our customers. As you may have read in our past articles we already provide this service for Post PNG, Tourism Promotion Authority and the Surfing Association of Papua New Guinea, so you too can now enjoy this very important and useful tool. The service is free of charge but there may be installiation fees depending now how complex your tracking requirements may be. For example if you have a large number of downloads that you want to track.

We are now planning to have it installed on 13 of our current clients websites and this will effectively replace our old system SmarterStats™. Although SmarterStats™ was effective it was not very accurate in differentiating between search bot hits and human hits so it gave us some very skewed readings. The other downside to SmarterStats™ was that every website tracked with it had to be hosted by Masalai, which in practise is not always the case. Some clients are quite happy where they are hosted so with Google Analytics this gives us the freedom to track websites that are not hosted with Masalai as well. So remember also that just because we didn’t build your website doesn’t mean you can’t use the system, this is open to anyone that has a website.

In the wider scheme of things the more people that sign up for Google Analytics with Masalai, the better understanding we will gain of how PNG websites fare in terms of online exposure internationally. Everyone today knows about how important the internet is for business and gerneral information and so finally now we have the tools to actually quantify that importance into numbers which can assist not just Masalai and our clients but industry associations and possibly government organisations in planning and marketing of PNG goods and services.