Google Analytics
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Google Analytics is a product based on the popular web traffic analytics Urchin platform, as a result of Google’s earlier acquisition of Urchin.As a surprise to the webmaster community, Urchin’s technology, which is one of the most complete and well designed web analytics software in the industry, is being given at no cost to webmasters when they sign up at
www.google.com/analytics. This move has raised suspicion as to what are Google’s motives and what will be the consequences of Google having so much website traffic data in their power. Currently, Google can track traffic only through the traffic they refer from their portals and an estimate through the Google toolbars installed in people’s computers. However, this toolbar is not very representative of the general population, since most users are webmasters trying to see the PageRank value for web pages displayed in the toolbar. With direct traffic data from websites, Google could potentially add an enormous array of variables to their search engine algorithm. This has webmasters concerned.
Many webmasters, despite the search engine ranking possibilities that this tool could bring, are jumping in the wagon to get a slice of Google’s “gift” to the webmaster community. To many webmasters, their only source for traffic intelligence and reporting was through free tools available, such as Webalizer and Awstats. These tools were not too precise in reporting and gave straightforward information like visits, page views, search terms, and country. This data was valuable to some extent, but lacked many web analytics that were only provided through expensive services from Urchin and Webtrends. Google Analytics changes everything, something that could hurt Webtrends’ sales tremendously.
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