Google Launches Google Analytics and Conversion University

[mandy]

What is Google Analytics?

Google Analytics shows you how people found your site, how they explored it, and how you can enhance the visitor experience. Improve your website return on investment, increase conversions, and make more money on the web.

With over 80 reports, your free Google Analytics account will track visitors through your site, and will keep track of the performance of your marketing campaigns - whether they're AdWords campaigns, email campaigns, or any other advertising program. With this information, you'll know which keywords are really working, which ad text is the most effective, and where your visitors are dropping off during the conversion process. Don't be fooled by the fact that this functionality is available to you for free - Google Analytics is a full-featured, powerful analytics package.

AdWords advertisers can find all of these benefits from within their AdWords account - Google Analytics has been fully integrated with AdWords. All of your reports and settings are available from the Analytics tab.

To get started with Google Analytics, simply visit www.google.com/analytics or click the Analytics tab in your AdWords account. You'll be guided through a simple sign-up process, that will require the addition of a code snippet. Once that's done, you'll start gathering data immediately, on track for improved ROI!

Who is Google Analytics for?

Google Analytics provides powerful tracking for anyone with a web presence, whether it be a small hobby website or a giant online enterprise. It's one of the most powerful web analytics solutions on the market - and it's free for anyone to use!

Google Analytics provides in-depth reports for everyone involved in the running of a website, from the developers and designers to the marketing and management teams. Find out where people leave your site, and what content catches their attention. Compare marketing campaigns and see your return on investment for all of your AdWords spend. The ways that you can use Google Analytics are endless.

How much does Google Analytics cost?

Google Analytics is absolutely free! We're very pleased to be able to offer this web analytics solution for no charge, allowing anyone with a website to track conversion data, analyze the flow of visitors through their site, and identify elements of their site that could be changed to improve visitor retention.

This free version is limited to 5 million pageviews a month - however, users with an active Google AdWords account are given unlimited pageview tracking. In addition, Google Analytics is completely integrated into the AdWords front-end and with your AdWords campaign, making it easy to track your AdWords ROI.

more info: http://www.google.com/analytics/

Google also launched a companion site, Conversion University, which provides tips on marketing and content optimization

http://www.google.com/analytics/conversi...rsity.html

EDITED TO ADD: article on this topic: Google gives away user-profiling tools

[bargainbloodhound]

However, more interesting to me is how Google could utilize this new data. For instance, Google could add pageview and unique visitor data to its search algorithm in order to more accurately determine site popularity and "Web Attention". This would be more reliable than PageRank because it can't be SEO'ed to artificially inflate a sites popularity

.

full article: http://www.webpronews.com/insiderreports...rithm.html

[regic]

The privacy issues here are as big as the often criticized  ones with Doubleclick.

G-Analytics downloads a javascript to browsers to track users' web site activity.  You can block this invasive crud from your personal computer by adding this code to your c:\winnt\system32\drivers\etc\hosts  host file

# [Google Inc]
127.0.0.1 www.google-analytics.com

[regic]

Google Inc.'s free Web site traffic analysis feature introduced Sunday was quick to impact WebSideStory, the company that arguably leads the analytics market that Google has just entered.

In the hours after Google debuted its Google Analytics feature, San Diego-based WebSideStory's stock price fell as much as 12 percent....

While the share price recovered somewhat by day's end, the message was clear: Google is shaking up another bunch of businesses.

In this case, it's firms that provide Web analytics tools...

full article: http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,1886881,00.asp
related article: http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/business/1...Stock.html

[mandy]

Another article on the impact of Google Analytics on other web analytic firms.

A rebranding, new features, and multiple language support challenges Web-analytics companies like WebTrends and Omniture.

full article: http://www.destinationcrm.com/articles/d...cleID=5621

Personally, I'll be skipping Google Analytics and sticking with TulipStats for my web analytics  :twistedevil:

[bargainbloodhound]

Somebody goofed when figuring out how much capacity they would need...tsk...tsk  :twistedevil:

Thank you for your interest in Google Analytics!

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.

http://www.google.com/analytics/sign_up.html

3rd time this year they've launched a new service only to suspend new registrations due to a lack of capacity- Google Earth and Google Web Accelerator were the other two.

[mandy]

Nearly 2 months after Google suspended signups for its new Google Analytics service, the service continues to be plagued by capacity problems and the service is unlikely to start accepting new signups before mid-year.

From the Google Analytics site:

Google Analytics Status Update

4 January 2006

Over the past several weeks, the Google Analytics team has been working hard to add capacity to handle the extraordinary demand for Google Analytics. Because providing a great user experience is our top priority, we temporarily suspended new signups for Google Analytics.

Over the past weeks, we've improved the freshness of report data so that existing customers can see reports as recent as several hours old. We've also re-enabled the addition of new profiles so that all existing Google Analytics customers can track additional sites (up to 5 per account).

Finally, we will soon invite our first batch of users from those who submitted their email addresses to sign up for Google Analytics. We expect to send out additional invitations over time as capacity increases.

We again thank you for your continued interest in Google Analytics, and look forward to opening signups to everyone very soon.

--The Google Analytics Team

http://www.google.com/analytics/progress.html

From InfoWorld:

More than six weeks after renaming and upgrading its Web analytics service and cutting its price to zero, Google  continues to labor to make it meet the expectations of the company and of users.

...This week, a Google official declined to even give a ballpark estimate of when Google will resume sign-ups for the service, saying only that he expects that to happen "soon," at some point before mid-year.

...While prospective users remain locked out, existing users have faced lingering issues and inconveniences.

..."I think Google has never wanted, nor been forced, to supply customer service,"
.

full article: http://www.infoworld.com/article/06/01/0...its_1.html

[bargainbloodhound]

..."I think Google has never wanted, nor been forced, to supply customer service,"

I think that person is right!    The reason I've never been excited when someone mentions the possibility of "Google Auctions" (or "Google Base") is because the company isn't any different than eBay (or any other large corporation).  Customer service sucks, and while they may be a great search company, their efforts in several of the fields they've branched out to have sucked: Google Analytics, Google Print Advertising (read the advertisers comments in the Google Print Ad articles  here), and most importantly Froogle which lags far behind other comparison shopping engines in features, traffic (the all important eyeballs), etc.