Google Analytics - This is a big deal

— Published November 21st, 2005  |  by Brian Donohue   |  1 Comments

As you probably know, web analytics is the discipline of measuring the behaviour of visitors to a website, with the ultimate goal of improving a website based on real data.

In March of this year Google acquired Urchin, a respected but not particularly well known vendor of web analytics software. Around the same time, we attended a web analytics vendor beauty parade in London, and it seemed clear to us that Urchin was the best value product on the market. Eric Peterson, probably the leading authority in web analytics right now, said in a 2004 Jupiter research report, “Urchin leaves all other offerings far behind from an overall cost and price-per-feature perspective.” But we held off using Urchin because we weren’t sure what Google had in mind for the product.

Now we know.

It’s free!

On November 13, Google announced that they are providing an updated version of Urchin’s software free, to anyone. The web-based version of Urchin used to cost $6000 a year. Google took that software and tinkered with it. How? With Google Analytics, they've made the setup easier, made it simpler to track AdWords campaigns, and added more features, such as a browser overlay and visitor segmentation. So they took the best value analytics application on the market, improved it, and made it free. When was the last time something like that happened? Demand has been so high that Google has temporarily stopped taking new signups.

Sounds good. But surely there’s a catch.

This is the amazing thing here. There doesn’t seem to be any catch. Well, unless your site has over 5 million page views a month (which is a lot!). In that case, you need to have an active AdWords account. And regardless of the popularity of your site, you need a Gmail account to sign up for the service. (It’ll take you all of two minutes to sign up for one.)

Lots of people are wondering what Google’s motivation is. Paul Muret, the ex-founder of Urchin and current Google employee said, "Assuming analytical tools help publishers and marketers design more effective sites and ads, those sites and ads will attract more viewers. The goal really is to help advertisers and publishers gain more visibility". In other words, Google thinks it will benefit in the long run if web sites are better managed. As they put it, they’re "investing in our advertisers."

And to prove their point, Google Analytics tracks not only Google AdWords conversions, as you would expect, but it also enables you to analyse non-Google ad campaigns, including Yahoo and MSN search ads, as well as e-mail marketing campaigns. You can even track third-party shopping carts.

So should you use it?

It’s premature to say for sure, but most likely, yes. If you've already invested in a good web analytics program, then this obviously won’t appeal to you as much. But when your contract comes up for renewal, you’ll clearly want to see if your product provides real value over what you can get for free. (Frankly, unless your site is a complex ecommerce site, it’s unlikely you’ll need more than what Google provides.)

One of the most important outcomes of this announcement is that more people will start to view software as a commodity. They'll begin to realise that value doesn’t come directly from the software, but from how you actually use it.

This is particularly true for web analytics. Time and time again we see clients who have invested in an expensive analytics program (usually WebTrends), but who are getting surprisingly little return on their investment. They get a huge monthly report with tons of numbers but no insights, no interpretation, and no pointers towards action.

Now that Google is providing this application for free, we hope people will spend their time and effort where it should go – using metrics to improve their site.

What we're doing now

We've already installed Google Analytics on our own site, and we’ll be helping some clients to install it and get the most out of it as well. We can’t wait to get our hands dirty with this great tool.

A lot of our clients have told us they know they should be looking at web analytics, but they haven't the time. They're wary about spending a lot of money and are not quite sure what it’s all about. We hope that with this major announcement from Google, everyone will start paying attention to web analytics.

We'll let you know how it all works out.