Google quietly launched this week a new service called Google Analytics primarily for those web site owners who need to track their advertisers campaign effectiveness. And it's free to those web sites owners who have less than 5 million monthly pageviews. Or if you have more than 5 million pageviews but use the Google Adwords service it's free for you as well.
This new service is based on the purchase they made earlier this year of Urchin. Urchin is a web anayltics program that I've been using for several years to analyze the traffic across all of the web sites my company owns and for our clients. I can atest that it is a great tool.
So if you run a web site and haven't started to process those log files to understand your audience, traffic patterns etc. now si the time, as it's free. Just read Google's terms of service and privacy policy first.