https://www.google.com/analytics/
I learned that this was coming via this Information Week article.
Lots of fascinating issues and implications!
– How much of a further competitive edge will this give AdWords over other pay-per-click advertising services like Yahoo! Search Marketing?
– Will this completely decimate small, low-cost Web Stats services like StatCounter? My gut is that it’ll make a dent, particularly amongst small to medium-sized businesses, but that for those who are looking for something very quick, easy to set up, and fast to browse, they may indeed stick with simpler solutions.
– What will this mean for HitBox, ClickTracks, etc? Once again, I think this’ll significantly impact their share of small-to-medium-sized clients, but it’s very unlikely to rock any relationships with Fortune 500 / large firms.
My experience with Urchin?
I set up and used the service with a client a few months ago, and found it to offer fascinating insights and have very high potential overall, but it was frustratingly creaky (slow, a bit flakey) undoubtedly due to the high (millions of hits a month) traffic it was being asked to process for this client.
With that said, though, I can’t wait to try this out on my blog and my other personal sites, and I will recomend it heartily to my smaller clients. Assuming Google manages to scale this decently, I can see recommending it to larger clients as well.
Still, however, I’m skeptical that Google’s customer support will scale decently for this product. Urchin, er, Google Analytics is a very complex, frankly complicated service, and there are so many places in which users can become confused or overwhelmed. Thankfully, Google recently substantially improved their help documentation (a couple of months ago), but still…
And hmm… perhaps Google will roll out a more limited and/or fully integrated version for BlogSpot folks at a later time?
Anyway, I’m going to quit blathering and give this service a try now. 🙂
What do you think?