In order to reduce the ability of spammers to use Google accounts for evil, Google have always tried to make it difficult for users to sign up for large numbers of accounts.

However, there can be legitimate, non-spammy reasons why one user/company/IP address may need to sign up for many accounts. If you are a computer teacher who wishes many students to sign up for accounts during lessons. Or, you may be a web design company who wishes to add Google analytics to each client site you produce, using Google accounts created for each client (so that they can log in and manage just their own data/settings and not the settings of all your clients.)

We are in the latter position, and Google no longer allows us to verify each account by email. They now ask for verification by mobile number. There is also a limit on the number of accounts you can verify per mobile number, so we are now in the position of having to go through our sim card collection to get these accounts going!

It seems to be, in our case, picking up on our static IP address. Tests using variations on the same domain name (user1@thedomainweuse.co.uk, user2@thedomainweuse.co.uk) still send verification the email way if I sign up from home. As many people aren't on a static IP address, they are unaffected?

There are different opinions on the max number of accounts - 15, 20 etc
There are also differing opinions on the number of accounts that can be verified by a mobile number. I've seen 3 stated, but have managed maybe 10 (wasn't keeping score!)

Next try may be sending invites to ourselves from Gmail accounts! I'll post any results here.

Google Analytics vs Raw log files (via something like AwStats)

"Ignoring the actual reporting, Google uses javascript tracking with cookies and sessions versus log file parsing from webalizer and awstats -- log files are much less sophisticated at understanding distinct visitors, paths and sessions.

Ignoring all other reporting, with GA and other robust analytics tools you can track funnels and conversion activities on websites. This means you gain a single place to see how your paid search, organic, display, email and any other campaign is doing at driving sales. With standard log tools you just see traffic.

Ignoring advanced reporting with GA you have the ability to add one segment variable which you can track. This could be returning vs new customer, membership type, gender, whatever you want. Reports can be keyed off of this to give you basic segmentation information on everything from user paths & flow to conversions. Of course with more advanced tools (Webtrends, Omniture, Coremetrics) you can do dozens of these variables and get into really powerful data insights.

So if you ignore 90% of the tool and look at just 3 features you can see how much more there is already."

http://www.sitepoint.com/forums/showthread.php?t=556517