CRASH! Did you hear that? Any idea what it was? That was the sound of the Web traffic analysis market crashing to the floor following the no-charge release of Google Analytics.
Well it was until today, when a number of people were finding that the data that should have been collected on site for over 24 hours hasn’t appeared for analysis. Google quote that data should be available after only 12 hours.
The delay in reporting will give some thin hope to charge-for analysis service. We’d imagine that it will be short lived as we’re pretty certain that Google will get the service pumping out the stats soon and suspect that the delay has been due to a huge demand.
How much? Free
The service is generally, of course, available at no charge as it is, as with everything that Google does, designed to drive additional sales for Google’s advertising.
Always remember, Goggle may look like a search engine company, but it is, in fact, an advertising company.
The only exception to free usage of the service is sites with over 5m page views per month. Hey guess what? If you have an active Google AdWords account, you’re given unlimited page view tracking. There is no mention of how much it might cost if you don’t have an active AdWords account. Do you see a pattern here?
It looks like the service is comprehensive both in the breadth of reports available and in its thoroughness of reporting. Examples are that Google enable the tracking of external links, something of great use to many media companies, by simply adding some JavaScript to the link. It even easily tracks events within Flash files.
The history
Google bought Urchin Web Analytics for an undisclosed amount back in March this year. At the time, many in the online reporting world started to tremble.
They already had a number of big name customers like GE, NBC, Procter & Gamble, NASA and AT&T. Prices they charged varied from $495 (only covering 100,000 pageviews/month) to $4,995 for their Profit Suite. Prices increased depending on the number of Websites that were monitored.
Google’s free offering is based on Urchins online reporting offering.
Pressure on reporting companies is coming from other directions like, Microsoft with their AdCenter and eBay which has just launched a subscription-based service.