Big news today is the launch of Google Analytics. It is a service that provides analysis about what your customers are doing on your website. In March of 2005 Google bought Urchin, a web analytics company who counted about 20% of the Fortune 500 as customers. Google has now re-branded Urchin as Google Analytics. It's a direct competitor to offerings from WebTrends, WebSideStory, ClickTracks and many others.
Why is it news? It's free.
To those of you spending $15,000/year or more for your web analytics, that's pretty big news. To the $460 million web analytics industry, it's even bigger news.
Of course, web analytics packages can be complicated to configure properly, so you might well ask what level of customer support $0 buys you. That remains to be seen, but judging from other free Google services like Froogle, the support will be reasonably good.
I'm going to try it out with one of our accounts over the next couple of weeks, and I'll report back on my findings. If it's as good (and complete) as people are saying, then it's going to seriously shake up the analytics industry. Even if you don't want to consider the disruption of migrating away from your current provider, it's pretty clear that you'll be able to wring significant price concessions or service improvements from them by next year.
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1 comment:
Urchin is a good piece of software and Google's purchase should make it more useful within the SEM, PPC space.
There will definitely be some significant declines in revenue for some of Google Analytics' competition.
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