My Own Pirate Radio

Google made a smart move in acquiring Urchin, the web analytics company, earlier this year. They made a smarter move by opening up the analytics services for free a few days ago.

Why make a $200 analytics product free to all? (1) Build goodwill and stickiness with web site owners; (2) Create an upsell path to AdWords, Google’s main revenue engine; (3) Derive strategic insight by mining the data. No-brainer.

#3 is a biggie; for millions of web sites, Google will now know a heck of a lot more about the web site owner demographics, how web users actually discover those sites (via web page links, search engines, browser favorites, etc.) and how users navigate within them (pages visited, links clicked, page dwell time, etc.). Lots of other analytics software does similar things today; the difference here will be scale and the further concentration of data in the hands of an already-powerful and data-rich company.

I would love to see the aggregate statistics. For instance, you could use the clickstream data from sites monitored by Google Analytics to estimate which web properties — services like Google, Yahoo, MSN, Flickr, Bloglines, Technorati — are getting the most live user traffic. This would be very powerful from a competitive standpoint. So far, though, Google has stated this sort of analysis is out of bounds:

Though in theory people who are using Google Analytics and competitive services to monitor their ad campaigns could be exposing information to Google on how those rival services work, Muret said Google would not get any competitive advantage from that. “We have very strict controls on the data. It is only used to provide reporting to customers and people using the analytics,” he said. (ZDNet)

We’ll see. All that data will be hard for the boffins to resist.

P.S. I’ve tried kicking the tires and it appears someone botched the scalability math; after 48 hours, the service finally agrees to recognize my site, but I still have no data. Try, try again.