Google Analytics

Google have released a product not in BETA for once. It is called Google Analytics and is basically the product of one of Google's company buy outs. The company that this product comes from was known as Urchin who used to charge as much as $200 (a month?) for using the software.

It's completely free to use so go give it a try. Once you insert the necessary code into your site it takes quite some time (about 6-7 hours for me) to actually verify that your tracking code has successfully been logged. After this it needs to wait another 12 hours at least to actually gather enough data to feed into its engine. For me its still in the gathering data stage so I can't say how useful it is.

The interface has been cleaned up by Google but the main data is still presented in Flash from the Urchin days. I hope Google release a DHTML version of the screens for users who prefer not using flash. There are a lot of analysis tools which try to optimise your site to get the best out of all that traffic (It isn't called Analytics for no reason ;) ). I dont think any of this will come in use for me since I dont get huge amounts of traffic nor do I try to sell stuff on my site.

One of the side-effects of the service being free is that unless you are an adwords customer you are limited to 5 million pageviews a month which means that you are basically tied into Google's service if you really want to use the service to its potential. This is the main revenue stream for Google at the end of the day and is the way they will make money from this, rather than getting individual sites to pay a monthly fee. I wonder what happens if you were previously a paying customer who didn't use AdWords but were allowed to use it for more than 5 Million Pageviews a month. Are you forced to use adwords? Do Google have a different strategy for previously paying customers?

This not only gives Google the ability to further market its AdWords and AdSense revenue generators but moreover it gives them the ability to analyse mass market traffic information. They have actually tried to go down various routes with this idea in mind. Their main aim, in my opinion, is to basically data mine the web trends and behaviours of individuals so that they can tune their advertisements to the people in a much more effective fashion.

Google Web Accelerator and the Wi-Fi network it seems to me was exactly about that. How can Google get data from the average user on general sites and the behaviour of users in clicking links? They wish to do this not from a typical user study but more a data mining or AI perspective I think. This will in the long run enable them to become an even bigger marketing agency who know everything about everything. Google's services are all related to their strength's in AI and information mining and so it seems this is just another piece in the larger "Tools for marketing" jigsaw that Google is heading towards.