Do you want to know what the users of your website is worth for you? Well, Google wants you to! Google seems to believe that the minute e-business merchants and their likes realize their actual potentials, they’ll focus much more on their websites and start drive up the price for online advertising.
Free tool
Apparently this is the reason Google now gives away for free their new highclass web tracking tool – Google Analytics. All you’ve got to do is to sign up for your own Google Adwords account with Google, sign up for a free Google account, and you’ll have yourself a high-quality tracking system. A system, that yesterday costed 199 $ a month- for the simple version. What Google offers here is allegedly “the full monty”.
What do you get
Google analytics is Googles new version of Urchin analytics software after Google bought the Urchin company earlier this year. The thing about Google Analytics is that it tells you what users do from the very minute they click your ad on Google or any other site, till they leave your site again. And Google Analytics lets you assign value to different actions and thereby calculate how much “money” you’re making on your different visitors.
So if you pay 50 cents each time a user clicks your ads, and the system shows you that those users in average are worth 2 $, you’re making a good deal. And if Google can show you that you actually make 2 $ they of course hope you’ll be willing to pay more than 50 cents for advertising with them.
Better sites needed
But the giveaway of the Google Analytics primarily serves another – more longterm – function, I think. Google hopes the giveaway will help siteowners improve their websites, get more products on the virtual shells of e-stores, and thereby grow the market for (online) advertising as well.
As Nikesh Arora, european Vice President of Google put it a month ago at a small roundtable IAB conference in London. “There’s far to many brochureware-sites today. Poor quality websites are one of the major obstackles to the furture growth of online advertising”
Find out more about Google Analytics at http://www.google.com/analytics/
Update december 3, 2005: This post just might not reveal the entire truth of Googles motives for giving away this piece of hosted software application for free. If you’d like to know one more aspect of story, read also my new post on this subject: Google analytics helps Google serve you the right ads, pushing up the price of advertising, defending themselves against not-so-knowingly competitors