On The Trail

After a rough start on Monday Google Analytics is finally starting to come on line with actual reports. We set up ciceron.com on Monday morning and now reports are available for Monday and Tuesday. At first glance the available reports are very impressive and the user interface is intuitive and clean.
Here are the things I find most impressive for a free tool:

1. The segmentation buttons. Many of the rows of the standard reports have the ability to segment on the fly. For example, you can see what keywords brought new visitors to your site as opposed to returning visitors
2. Integrated ROI reports. Only Google could do this, but it turns out you can only do it with Google campaigns/keywords.
3. Integrated A/B testing. It is relatively easy to do this in most other tools but they’ve provided some reports that specifically call out this optimization tactic.
4. Geo Map overlay. The program produces a nice looking map with a clear indication of where your traffic is originating. Most other tools just produce a list of cities/states/countries. A map is much more powerful.

All in all I’m very impressed. Over the next day or so I’ll be exploring the browser overlay, the funnel reports and the conversion tracking. I’ll put a full report here when I’m done.

As for the more strategic question of what does this mean to the web analytics marketplace I think this is a good perspective from Jim Sterne (quoted in a Clickz article):

“The Google Analytics announcement is a tsunami that will wipe out the lower-end tools and lift all higher-end tools after a short flood of delayed sales cycles”

Google has released a free tool that matches or beats the functionality of any mid-level analytics tool on the market. With Google’s money and marketing muscle it looks to me like this part of the market is done for anyone but Google.

The good news is that this will only serve to increase the need for people who can actually use this data to optimize their online marketing. Google has made the tool a commodity, but the analysis will be in more demand than ever.