You may remember back in March 2005, when Google acquired Urchin Web Analytics, they were charging 495 USD for those Fortune 500, and other, companies who wanted to use the service. Not long after that they dropped the price further to 199 USD per month. In November 2005 they re-branded and launched Urchin as Google Analytics, a free web analytics package. The interest was massive from online businesses wanting to benefit from knowing the answers to the key questions to online marketing campaigns, including:
- Which keywords attract the most visitors?
- Which email campaigns create more customers?
- How do we design web page content that holds people's attention?
Only a week after Google Analytics' launch, Google had to suspend new sign-ups as they had already reached a staggering 234,725 new accounts. A Google statement read:
"Google Analytics has experienced extremely strong demand, and as a result, we have temporarily limited the number of new signups as we increase capacity. In the meantime, please submit your name and email address and we will notify you as soon as we are ready to add new accounts. Thank you for your patience."
In order to introduce its service in a controlled manner, Google had limited the number of users by making it invitation only - making analytics similar to their Gmail process.
On Tuesday, this week, Google opened the flood gates and now businesses can again sign up to access precise information on what their customers want so that they can improve their online marketing and website content for free.
While Google Analytics has the capabilities you'd expect from a high end web analytics service it also provides "timesaving integration with AdWords. [And] of course, Google Analytics tracks all of your non-AdWords initiatives as well". Google was quick to point this out as a unique selling point to the package - as if they really needed to more to attract more users!However, one concern that online advertisers may have about adopting Google Analytics is whether they want Google to possess sensitive analytics information about the performance of their sites and ad campaigns. Access to such sensitive information could set the stage for differential pricing models, where advertisers ultimately pay what they can afford rather than a standardised rate. This concern may encourage the more sceptical site owners to look around for other free alternatives such as the increasingly popular StatCounter.
If web analytics services do get taken up and used widely by the estimated 80% of business advertisers that don't currently track their ROAS (return on advertiser spend), the PPC market could change dramatically as the effectiveness of paid campaigns becomes more transparent. Many smaller businesses have not had the budget to invest in sales tracking services, so making Google Analytics freely accessible is the best thing that can happen for them.
Google are essentially putting their AdWords system on the line and saying, "we can deliver sales, not just traffic", thereby allowing businesses to pay more per click because they can see through transparent and definite analysis that the sales are there to be capitalised on.
