Exciting Announcements at eMetrics Today
Today at the eMetrics Summit in Washington, D.C. Brett Crosby announced several Google Analytics features that will be rolled out over the coming weeks. Here's a rundown. — First, you'll be able to use Google Analytics to track site search activity.
Context & Ripple Effects
The eMetrics Summit announcement continues a busy 2007 for Google Analytics: the product relaunched in May with a rebuilt interface and reporting engine (new UI and features), then added user-requested capabilities just a month later (June's feature drop). Brett Crosby using the Washington, D.C. eMetrics stage for the next batch — site search tracking among them — signals Google treating the industry's own conference as its launch venue.
The pickup on Google Blogoscoped alongside the official blog post shows how closely the analytics-watching community tracks each increment; for a free product, that attention is itself competitive currency against paid web analytics suites.
First-order effects
- Site owners running internal search get search-term reporting inside Google Analytics within weeks, removing the need for a separate tool to answer what visitors look for on-site.
Second-order effects
- Paid web analytics vendors face mounting pressure to match functionality Google gives away, since every free feature narrows the gap their price premium has to justify.
Third-order effects
- If the 2007 cadence holds — major relaunch in May, incremental additions in June and October — free analytics platforms are positioned to commoditize baseline reporting, pushing commercial vendors upmarket toward deeper analysis rather than standard dashboards.
The trend: Web analytics in 2007 is consolidating around free, rapidly iterated platforms like Google Analytics, forcing paid suites to differentiate on depth rather than coverage.