Google presented Google Analytics

On the second day of Pubcon in Las Vegas, the team of Google Analytics presented their new service. Earlier today, Philipp Lenssen published an extensive review on his blog. I will limit myself to a summary of the presentation of Google Analytics's team.


Wesley Chan of Google and Brett Crosby (founder of Urchin en now with Google) explained the history and the unique advantages of Google Analytics. A year ago Google explored the web analytics market in order to monitor some of its own websites. After some comparative study, Urchin was selected and the service was used for several months with great success and satisfaction. In the end, Google decided to acquire Urchin and to offer the service as part of the Google offering, under the label "Google Analytics". While Urchin was costing several hundred dollars a month, Google Analytics is free for sites with less than five million pageviews a month. Sites serving more than five million pages a month can continue to use Google Analytics for free if they advertize using Google Adwords. Google Analytics is heavily integrated with Adwords. Advertisers can measure the efficiency of the keywords they bid on. Google Analytics is targeted towards measuring the conversion ratio of commercial sites, using the 'funneling' concept to show how many users are reaching target pages like subscription pages, checkout pages and feedback forms. Google has set up a tutorial on optimizing sites from a commercial viewpoint. It is called Conversion University.

Scalability is one of the strong points of Google Analytics, according to Brett Crosby. But the last few days, that scalability apparently had some problems. I put the code on this blog on Monday, but I had to wait until today to view the reports. Brett Crosby: "We were the victims of our own success. We have been pounded with signups in the past few days, and the crunching fell behind".

I spoke with one of Google's competitors, a provider of a web statistics software package. He claimed that Google is doing all this in order to gather statistics on the web surfing habits of internet users, to tweak the pagerank and the search results. Google categorically denies this: "Google will not use the data to influence pagerank or search results".

There is one disadvantage to Google Analytics. If you want to make your reports public, you will still need a counter like SiteMeter.com. With Google Analytics, you can grant access to certain people based on their Google account, but it is not possible to make part of the results available to everybody.