Google Analytics Launches to Enhance Conversions
Google has finally spun Urchin into a new Google branded analytics tool which Google is offering for free to site publishers; Google Analytics. Well, its free up to 5 million pageviews per month, so if you have a fairly high traffic site in need of analytics, Google requests that such sites do have an active AdWords account.
Google is offering AdWords Integration of Google Analyitics into the advertising interface. The service will be available to all site publishers, even if they are not Google AdWords advertisers (see above); “Google Analytics is the only product that can automatically provide AdWords ROI metrics, without you having to import cost data or add tracking information to keywords. Of course, Google Analytics tracks all of your non-AdWords initiatives as well.”
In an effort to educate more publishers and advertisers on the importance of ROI and conversions, Google Analytics has also launched Conversion University. At Conversion University, advertisers can learn about marketing and conversion optimization and practice ways to better understand their web analytics.
Just how far will Google go to enhance the conversions of their AdWords advertisers? I’ll go out on a limb to predict that Google will expand their Analytics platform in the future to dynamically enhance sites, cross selling, shopping carts, and conversion pages to lead to higher sales conversions. Heck, they already have some patents which point to such developments.
Question is however, do businesses really want Google knowing all about their sales and conversion process, and to what extent?
Knowledge of this release has spread like wild fire as the google analytics systems were running very slow and sporadic messages indicating that they are undergoing maintenance is appearing every now and again.
But they do assure us that our stats are still being recorded!
Looking forward to playing with this as soon as it’s collected some data.
Same here Alistar. Once the stats are updated there will be more meat and potatoes to the Google Analytics pie.
I am noticing that more and more sites that I visit today are running the Google Analytics tool. Just pay attention to the status bar when a site loads and you’ll see the browser fetching info from google-analytics.com