> It took us only a few weeks to write our home-brew analytics package.
Unfortunately, there's no way to replicate what Google Analytics currently offers (for free!) within a couple of weeks (or even months). Not with big data sets. Yes, GA does enforce sampling if you don't pay for GA Premium, but the free edition is still one of hell of a deal (if you don't care about privacy).
If you only use Google Analytics as a hit counter, sure, you can do that yourself within a couple of minutes. The advanced features are way more complicated, though (think segmentation and custom reports).
I suspect most of the people saying "you don't need Google Analytics! Do it yourself!" have never used GA for anything that meaningful. As you begin to really familiarize yourself with your website traffic and understand how to look at your clickstream data in a more investigative an analytical way, you'll start to see how nice GA is and how easy it is to answer your questions.
You also underestimate how ubiquitous GA is because it's free and extremely popular. I'd consider myself an intermediate to advanced user of GA, but for people less experienced, I can easily share stuff with them for complicated tasks or they know how to do a lot of the basics themselves.
In hiring digital marketing people, GA is pretty much on par with Word in terms of familiarity. It's something a lot of people have a basic competence with.
Unfortunately, there's no way to replicate what Google Analytics currently offers (for free!) within a couple of weeks (or even months). Not with big data sets. Yes, GA does enforce sampling if you don't pay for GA Premium, but the free edition is still one of hell of a deal (if you don't care about privacy).
If you only use Google Analytics as a hit counter, sure, you can do that yourself within a couple of minutes. The advanced features are way more complicated, though (think segmentation and custom reports).
This also begs the question: why not use Piwik?