Google Analytics Trends Shaping 2005
Google's move into web analytics is already reshaping the market months before its own tool has shipped, and every vendor is reacting.
Google hasn’t shipped an analytics product yet, but its announced move into the space has already changed how the entire web analytics market is behaving in 2005. Here’s what’s happening.
Google acquires Urchin
In March 2005, Google announced it was acquiring Urchin Software Corporation, the San Diego-based company behind one of the more established hosted web analytics tools on the market. Google has said little publicly about its specific plans for the product, but the acquisition alone was enough to send a signal the entire industry noticed: the largest search company in the world now owns a serious analytics platform.
Existing customers are in limbo
Urchin’s existing paying customers, along with resellers who had built businesses around the product, are largely in a holding pattern, watching for word on pricing, features or whether the standalone product will even continue to exist in its current form. That uncertainty is itself becoming a competitive opening for rival vendors pitching stability as a selling point over the unknown.
Competing vendors are reacting early
Established players like WebSideStory, Omniture and ClickTracks are all responding to the acquisition news well before Google has shipped anything, emphasizing existing feature depth, support relationships and proven reliability in their own marketing. Whether or not Google ends up disrupting the market’s pricing, the announcement alone has already sharpened how every other vendor is positioning itself.
The free-tool question hangs over the market
The most-discussed possibility since the acquisition is that Google could eventually offer an analytics tool at little or no cost, subsidized by its advertising business the way AdWords and other Google products have been positioned before. Nothing has been confirmed publicly, but the speculation alone is already affecting purchasing decisions: some businesses evaluating analytics vendors this year are deliberately waiting to see what Google does before committing to a paid contract elsewhere.
Where this leaves businesses right now
For a business choosing a web analytics tool in the middle of 2005, the honest answer is that the ground is shifting under a market that looked settled a year ago. Nothing Google eventually ships is guaranteed to be free, full-featured or even available to everyone right away, and there’s no functioning product to evaluate yet, only an acquisition and a lot of speculation. The practical move for most businesses is to pick a tool that solves today’s measurement needs rather than waiting indefinitely on an announcement with no shipped product behind it, while keeping an eye on how this plays out over the rest of the year.
More Marketing Analytics coverage, or browse everything published in 2005.
