There was a huge rush to sign up for Google Analytics when it was first announced a few years ago and people believed it was the best on the web. Former Urchin went from 500$/month to FREE and nobody asked what’s the catch. In exchange for sharing your data with the company, Google doesn’t require you to pay for their analytics service. Nothing is free, especially at Google’s. They monetize everything, eventually, so how do they profit with Google Analytics?
By using services such as Gmail, Youtube, Froogle, Earth, Desktop, Checkout, Orkut, Talk, Blogger… Google gets to know a lot about you and when you fire up Google Analytics, Google will know everything about you. They will know what you have, what you sell, how often you sell, how much you earn, when you earn it, who your customers are, where they come from, your website’s positive and negative sides and a lot of other information about your business. Do you really want Google to know that much about your revenues? Think twice.
Aside from that, Google makes one job easier with Google Analytics. They assign you the PageRank you deserve. When Google doesn’t have the statistics it gets with Google Analytics it has to rely on external information to determine your PageRank which makes it unreliable, but good for your website. With all that analytical data they give you exactly what you earn but without it they have to use complex algorithms to calculate your position on Google and most of the time your PR is higher when not using Google Analytics.
One thing I would add is that a lot of guerilla online marketers are in love with Google analytics because they think it gives them accurate information about things like conversions, but as anyone who has monkeyed with web stuff long enough can tell you, the only truly accurate way to track something like conversions is at the database level, which is why affiliate networks use tracking gifs/scripts predictively, but why disputes about actual counts are always settled by actual data records. Only your server (or servers) can tell you exactly how many people showed up and exactly how many conversions are in your database - however a conversion is defined for you.
The only other thing I’d add is in support of what you’ve said about giving data away. When you’re running PPC campaigns, I’ve often wondered if it’s wise to tell Google what your conversion rate is. On the one hand, they could use CR to buttress a flagging quality score if the CR indicated a lot of user preference for the content, but, on the other hand, they must also use CR to figure out how valuable certain keywords are and ratchet up their cost. It’s all a bit of a black box, but I tend to favor not giving them the info since tracking the conversion yourself is more accurate anyway.
Good article, btw.
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