If you are a website owner with or without a previous background on how to run a website professionally, you probably want all the help you can get to enhance your visitors’ experience. Whether your purpose is to make more money, improve the quality of interaction with your visitors, or just to track the traffic of your website; who is better than the Internet Godfather with its tool: Google Analytics to help you succeed?

Google Analytics is an application offered by Google to help website administrators get a better understanding of their websites’ performance by producing detailed reports & statics about the visitors & their behavior. These reports are basically private visitors’ data collected using a JavaScript on the host website including information like how users found or got referred to the website, their browsers & locations, the length of their visit & if they are unique visitors or returning ones. Google Analytics is incorporated with its advertising application: AdWords, where marketers get to review whether their ads are attracting people & bringing revenue or not; and if the website is using AdSense to make money, Google Analytics can help analyze the ads performance as well.

Google stores all the data collected on its servers not the users’ to provide easy access for the benchmarking process to be preformed perfectly, but is that the only reason behind it? Well, let’s see… One of the Web 2.0 design patterns states that “Data is the Next Intel Inside”, meaning? Meaning, data is the most valuable thing a company can acquire to get the competitive edge over its rivals & Google has mastered the art of acquiring data in every possible way! To use Google Analytics users must sign up using their Google account -like every other Google service- & by integrating AdWords & AdSense, it’s a single log- in to use 3 services. That’s great, really! But let’s look at the big picture, Google simply knows everything you are doing on the web; it’s not just your website that will be analyzed, you too! And while we are at it, how many users are using Google Analytics? What about Google’s other services? According to Chris Messina:

“For Google, this leads to huge network effects, because they can essentially merge behavior data from across its entire network of services to build out a better picture of you — leading to a kind of competitive advantage that no one else can touch.”

It’s worth noting that Google Analytics gives its users the control over their data, it’s their own data after all! Data can be exported with the Google Analytics Data Export API or directly from the Google Analytics interface into Excel, CSV, and PDF. Did you notice that you can’t export your data to another web analytics? Like Piwik -for instance- which by the way stores data on & accesses it through users own websites. If users thought about migrating to another web analytics service, they’ll have to start from scratch! Piwik is doing a great job considering it’s an open source application, though it doesn’t support any track option to Web 2.0 technology-based websites like: Ajax & Flash, while Google does so!

Despite the fact that the raw data material comes from users & owned by them, Google owns the aggregated valuable data created from the analysis conducted on every website & the comparison done between similar websites in the same industry via benchmarking – the main advantages of using Google Analytics over other web analytics-.

Security concerns will always be a hot topic with Google Analytics, even more when noticing that such a data-mine application doesn’t have its own privacy policy; instead, it goes by the standard search engine policy! Will Google use users’ data for its own good? Are the data safe? Who can view it? Google claims that they do not use any of the data collected for their own purposes unless users allow the information to be shared. For more in-depth review regarding the security concerns, Phil Bogle discussed the issue in his blog –though it’s an old post-. Nevertheless, 3813 out of 10,000 most popular websites according to Backend Battles are using Google Analytics, websites as popular as Twitter, MySpace, LinkedIn & Answers.

What about you? Will you use Google Analytics on your website? Or Have you already? Do you think Google have a future plan for all the data that had been collected and stored, or it’s just a service, nothing more? Do you think what Google has been doing with the Analytics will increase the openness of the data, or the competitive side of it will lead Google and every other company that follow its lead to fulfill Tim O’Reilly’s prophecy when he said:

“People really need to pay more attention to this area. Harnessing collective intelligence is the principle that has opened the web 2.0 era, but data as the Intel inside is the one that will close it down.“

Refrences:

Creative Commons License
The Google Analytics: Help me, help you! by Najla AlNomair, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 Australia License.