ReveNews
Analytics buying spree Related to Cookie Deletions?
Two Web site analytics companies were just sold. WebTrends was spun off to a private equity group for $94M cash, and Urchin Software was bought by Google. Why the sudden interest in analytics? With all the news about cookie deletion, and particularly third party cookies, an strong argument could be made that analytics is the future source of this data. The ad serving industry is the one that seems to have it’s panties in a bunch over the cookie “problem”, but the “live” versions of analysis programs still use 3rd party cookies.
The “live” version embed code in every page and use cookies to track users through the site, and everything is consolidated by the company for Web based analysis. The installed versions, however, would use first party cookies. These cookies are less likely to be deleted or blocked, making integrated analytics perhaps more accurate. I can’t guess about a private investment group, but you can look at Google and make some guesses at their motives.
My first thought is that they will release some version of Urchin for free, like they did with Picasa, just because they like to grab up great ideas and release them. The second idea I had is that perhaps they will integrate site analytics with AdSense. Google already has some decent tracking tools as part of AdSense, but imagine the possibilities if the same code you paste on your page for AdSense also gets you insight into user behavior, user counts, conversions, and more.
I don’t see Google making this a paid feature as it does not fit their model. This could become the reason why you would use AdSense instead of Yahoo! or MSN for your ad displays, and it might incentivise you to add Google code to every page of your site. I’m thinking that this idea makes more and more sense and fits their model well.
WOW Brad. Great entry and excellent “what ifs.” I will say this much: marketers are pretty down on turning over their analytics data to third parties. This may bite Google in the rear if they don’t play cards right and start blending things as you suggest.
Think about what this could mean to non-marketers. There are large numbers (hundreds of thousands?) of AdSense users who know nothing of site analytics who could be opened up to this area.
I can see Google wanting to help educate these people and help them improve their site which will then have the old trickle-down effect and increase AdSense views - and hence, the bottom line.