With little fanfare, the Google Analytics team replaced the venerable Urchin code with a fancy new tracking engine called ga.js. Google recommend upgrading from Urchin to the new, faster ga.js. To do so, go to your Analytics page and get the snippet where you previously got your Urchin snippet.

Why upgrade? What’s in the new version? Not much yet, but development on Urchin has halted apparently in favor of the new tracking engine (that I wish had a name!). As new features are added to Analytics, ga.js will be able to take advantage of them. In their own words…

We are also rolling out the new ga.js page tag which we recommend you use for all new accounts and new profiles for new domains. Although your existing urchin.js page tags will continue to work, you may wish to update them to ga.js anyway. This will allow you to take advantage of the most up-to-date tracking functionality as it is added to Google Analytics. An immediate benefit you’ll notice is that the ga.js tags allow you to track ecommerce transactions in a more readable way. And, we’ve created a special resource on the ga.js javascript for power users who want more control over Google Analytics tracking. If you do choose to update your site to ga.js, please note that the old tracking code (which uses urchin.js) and the new tracking code (which uses ga.js) will not work if placed on the same page together.

Check out your Analytics home page or the Analytics Blog for more details.

I was browsing the Google Analytics reports for my various sites, and I noticed some trends that surprised me. Since the numbers you tend to find aren’t broken out in meaningful ways, I thought I’d share my findings with you.

First, the numbers:

Surprising Conclusions

1. Holy cats! Firefox surpassed combined IE6 & IE7 usage for the first time in the Creative/Technical audience with a 47%/43% split.
2. There is a remarkable disparity between usage patterns between my sites aimed at technical or creative audiences and those aimed at consumers. While I expected there to be some difference, this disparity is much larger than I expected. Only 43% of the Creative/Tech audience use IE6 & IE7, while 81% of the Consumer audience do.
3. A year after its launch, 39% of the Consumer audience still uses IE6. <rant>This represents a complete failure on Microsoft’s part to manage the upgrade transition well, and is nothing less than a nightmare for developers.</rant>
4. Vista is a bomb. 9 months out, and it has only 12% of the Creative/Technical market and 9% of the Consumer market.
5. Mac use on the Creative/Technical sites outnumbers Vista use 2-to-1 (Mac 7,395 visits in the last 30 days vs. 3,521 Vista visits in the same time period).

First, let me disclaim that this is hardly a scientific study. I just found the results interesting, and I thought you might, too.

As I was comparing the numbers between various sites, I noticed a natural grouping in terms of percentage variance between my Creative/Technical-oriented sites and my Consumer-oriented sites. Breaking these out revealed these surprising numbers. The aggregated numbers above are taken from a little over 60,000 visits from 6 sites (3 of each type) in the last 30 days.

I debated whether or not to include the underlying raw data. Since these are client sites, I’d rather not share the actual hard data, so take my findings and conclusions with a grain of salt.

Feel free to comment/react/challenge below.