InsideGoogle

Google Makes Web Analytics Free

Google has untethered its March aquisition, Urchin web analytics, from its cumbersome need to charge for services rendered. Yes, what once cost hundreds of dollars, if not thousands, in now completely free.

Urchin, now dubbed Google Analytics, is free to those with less than five million monthly page views, and also free without that limit to AdWords advertisers, giving Google at least some benefit from the service. If you go above five million monthly page views, its time to add the world’s smallest AdWords campaign.

By adding this code to every page on your website:

< script src="http://www.google-analytics.com/urchin.js" type="text/javascript" >
< /script >
< script type="text/javascript" >
_uacct=”UA-xxxx-x”;
urchinTracker();
< /script >

(with the xxxx-x being your account code), you can get some mighty detailed statistics. I’m not even sure I can go into the whole setup. Your main reports page has four graphs, showing daily page views, new and returning visitors, a geo-locating map and visits by referral source.

I’m sure tens of thousands of bloggers will be switching to Google Analytics in the coming months, eliminating the awful StatCounter et. al. images strewn all over the web, and I say good riddance. The interface is completely centered around AdWords campaigns (one wonders if it is at all appropriate for AdSense at this point), but it does straight up analytice better than any free (non-server-side) package I’ve seen.

There are three types of user views, Executive, Marketer and Webmaster. One view, the Site Overlay, lets you view a page and see an overlay on each link showing how many people clicked on those links. I’ll play around with it more and try to give a better impression when I’ve got some statistics (could take about eight hours according to the FAQ).

One thing: I thought Urchin had a server-side software version. While this is good stuff, it can’t really replace a full-fledged product that analyzes site logs in real time. Google Analytics is going to miss stuff like RSS feeds and non-web page content, and the code has to put manually on every type of page. Google’s taken a great product and let the market have it for free, but it doesn’t do everything. It will put a lot of people out of business, but it won’t rule the market.

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From Clikz:

“Part of Google’s philosophy in the advertising area is to provide our advertisers with the tools they need to be successful,” Paul Muret, an engineering director at Google and one of Urchin’s founders, told ClickZ News. “We want to give them the visibility they need to get the intelligence they need to make good decisions on advertising.”

Conventional wisdom says analytics applications are underutilized for several reasons: cost, information overload and the difficulty of determining what to do with the data. A free Google Analytics addresses the first issue, and the company also hopes to take on the latter two. The firm has developed an extensive help center, including a section that explains key analytics concepts. To help its larger advertisers, Google has trained sales reps and will provide those salespeople with a support team of analytics experts. Additionally, it has reached out to consultancies to form a new service partner program, so they can help AdWords clients.

Adam Lasnik:

My experience with Urchin?
I set up and used the service with a client a few months ago, and found it to offer fascinating insights and have very high potential overall, but it was frustratingly creaky (slow, a bit flakey) undoubtedly due to the high (millions of hits a month) traffic it was being asked to process for this client.

With that said, though, I can’t wait to try this out on my blog and my other personal sites, and I will recomend it heartily to my smaller clients. Assuming Google manages to scale this decently, I can see recommending it to larger clients as well.

Still, however, I’m skeptical that Google’s customer support will scale decently for this product. Urchin, er, Google Analytics is a very complex, frankly complicated service, and there are so many places in which users can become confused or overwhelmed. Thankfully, Google recently substantially improved their help documentation (a couple of months ago), but still…

And hmm… perhaps Google will roll out a more limited and/or fully integrated version for BlogSpot folks at a later time?

Search Engine Watch:

The software based product remains fee-based. Google said that might change, but there were no immediate plans at the moment.

Google also said a number of new dashboards for different types of customers — webmasters, advertisers and so on — are being introduced to spotlight key metrics.

Worried Google will use your data or the data overall to better understand how much you are willing to pay for ads, based on conversions. Google said that’s definitely not done, nor are there any plans to do that. Nor are there any plans to tap into the data as a means of improving regular search results or to identify “bad” sites, Google said.

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Press release after the jump:

Web Analytics Free of Charge, Courtesy of Google

Powerful web analytics service now available to all businesses

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. - November 14, 2005 - Google Inc. (NASDAQ:
GOOG) today announced that its hosted web analytics service, Google Analytics, is now free. Formerly known as Urchin from Google, Google Analytics helps businesses use performance data to improve their online marketing campaigns and websites. With Google Analytics, businesses can determine what keywords attract the most visitors, which email campaigns create more customers, and how to design web pages that hold people’s attention.

“We want to give all online marketers and publishers access to powerful web analytics to help them better understand what their customers want. With this knowledge, businesses can create more accurate advertising and build better websites,” said Paul Muret, Google engineering director, and one of the founders of Urchin. “By making this powerful service free, we aim to give all websites - large and small - the tools they need to better serve their customers, make more money, and improve the web experience for everyone.”

Google Analytics can enhance every aspect of online marketing - from selecting and bidding on effective keywords, to determining the most relevant offers in email campaigns, to optimizing website design. By acting on this information, businesses of all sizes can attract more visitors, convert more prospects to customers, and improve the overall return on their marketing investment. Google Analytics is simple enough for businesses new to web analytics to get started quickly, and sophisticated enough for the most advanced online marketers.

In addition to being free, Google Analytics includes:

- Integration with Google AdWords, and works with any online ad
network: Users of Google AdWords can access web analytics from a new interface within their AdWords account. Google Analytics automatically tags keyword destination URLs (which saves time and reduces the potential for errors), and imports cost data for ROI reports (for fast set-up and ease-of-use). Google Analytics is also able to track the results of any online marketing campaign, including banner ads, referral links, email newsletters, and organic and paid search.

- New reporting dashboards: Google Analytics executive summary reports for the three most common decision makers - executive, marketer, webmaster - will ease access to crucial information across departments.

- Global reach: Immediately available in 16 international languages: UK English, French, Italian, German, Spanish, Dutch, Japanese, Korean, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Portuguese, Danish, Finnish, Norwegian, Swedish, and Russian.

Google Analytics runs on the same computing infrastructure that powers Google.com so it can support the traffic demands of any site, from those with a few visitors a week to hundreds of millions. Google Analytics is already used by many of the top properties on the web, including dozens of Fortune 500 companies. Businesses such as The Financial Times, National Semiconductor, Ritz Interactive, Agency.com and Deckers Outdoor Corporation use Google Analytics to improve the user experience and marketing effectiveness of their websites.

“Much like it did with web search - Google is making web analytics simpler and more accessible for millions of sites on the web,” said Jeff Saville, marketing manager at Deckers Outdoor Corp. (Teva, Ugg, Simple Shoes). “With the new features, and the fact it is free, Google Analytics will give us a much clearer view of how we’re serving our customers, and the information we need to make it better.”

Google Analytics is available immediately for free to existing customers of Urchin from Google, as well as all new customers. Free online support is also available. Businesses can obtain customization or advanced integration from Google representatives and select Google service partners.

November 14th, 2005 Posted by Nathan Weinberg | Analytics, Services, General | 9 comments