Prompt's TechBlog
Google provides free analytics tools
15 November 2005
Posted by Sean McManus
Following its acquisition of Urchin in March, Google has now launched a free web analytics solution based on Urchin's software. The tool, called Google Analytics, is free to use for sites with up to five million page views a month (ie, most of us).
To use the tool, you embed some code in the header of each of the webpages you want to track. Each time someone visits one of your webpages, the Google code keeps a count and tracks information such as what browser or screen resolution they're using. When you log in at the Google Analytics website, you can generate reports to find out which pages are most popular and how people are navigating your site.
Urchin software used to cost $400. As it did with image editing tool Picasa, everybody's favourite uncle Google has taken a commercial product and made it free. So, why do that?
Most obviously, Google Analytics is integrated with Google's keyword-triggered advertising system Adwords. You can define transaction funnels on your site, and use Google Analytics to see which advertising campaigns are delivering sales. As Yahoo, Overture and others muscle in on Google's advertising model, providing end-to-end analytics could be an important differentiator.
Significantly, Google will gather a lot of information about how people use websites which it could use to decide how they should rank in its search results. As we reported in June, Google has filed a patent for ranking search results by which links are clicked on a site and how long people spend on a webpage. Having its analytics tool embedded in those websites makes it easier to gather such information.
Unusually, Google Analytics has launched without a prominent 'beta' label. That might be premature: there are broken links all over the place in the documentation and the server has been extremely slow. But it's Google, so we know they'll get there. By making a commercial-quality analytics tool freely available, Google will ultimately help many webmasters to better understand their website traffic.
To use the tool, you embed some code in the header of each of the webpages you want to track. Each time someone visits one of your webpages, the Google code keeps a count and tracks information such as what browser or screen resolution they're using. When you log in at the Google Analytics website, you can generate reports to find out which pages are most popular and how people are navigating your site.
Urchin software used to cost $400. As it did with image editing tool Picasa, everybody's favourite uncle Google has taken a commercial product and made it free. So, why do that?
Most obviously, Google Analytics is integrated with Google's keyword-triggered advertising system Adwords. You can define transaction funnels on your site, and use Google Analytics to see which advertising campaigns are delivering sales. As Yahoo, Overture and others muscle in on Google's advertising model, providing end-to-end analytics could be an important differentiator.
Significantly, Google will gather a lot of information about how people use websites which it could use to decide how they should rank in its search results. As we reported in June, Google has filed a patent for ranking search results by which links are clicked on a site and how long people spend on a webpage. Having its analytics tool embedded in those websites makes it easier to gather such information.
Unusually, Google Analytics has launched without a prominent 'beta' label. That might be premature: there are broken links all over the place in the documentation and the server has been extremely slow. But it's Google, so we know they'll get there. By making a commercial-quality analytics tool freely available, Google will ultimately help many webmasters to better understand their website traffic.
# posted by Sean McManus at 12:09 PM 
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