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In of this article I mentioned Google Analytics, a product which has taken the Keyword Analysis Tool World by storm since its launch in August 2006. But is Analytics really all it’s cracked up to be, and, what’s more, what are the implications of letting an online leviathan like Google handle, store, and analyze your company’s vital statistics data, before using it for their own purposes?
Wait…! Google uses my data for its own purposes?!
Yup, yet most people don’t even realize it when they sign up for an Analytics account and install the tracking code on their website. But before you panic about sinister invasions of privacy, and a virtual Big Brother approach by a global corporation which practically owns the Internet, let’s put things back into context for a moment. After all, nothing is ever black and white, so there are a number of factors to be considered here.
- Google needs user-behavior statistics even more badly than you do, because its main mission in life is to give its users what they want. And in order to do this, Google must ultimately find out what exactly that is, so what they do is put together everyone’s data from their Analytics keyword analysis tool, to kind of build a Map of Internet User Behavior.
- This means that the data Google gleans from your website’s statistics is used for general demographic purposes alongside data from countless other sites, not in fact for any personally identifiable purpose.
- Unlike the search engine down the road, Google does not normally disclose your personal or professional data. Perhaps the best indicator of its serious approach to privacy is that, thus far at least, Google’s integrity in this matter seems to have withstood the .
Having compared the with those of a couple of its rivals, I’d have to say that your confidential data is far safer under Google’s terms of service than elsewhere.
But is it any good?
In a word, yes. Google Analytics collects and processes a truly awesome amount of visitor statistics, and orders it neatly for your perusal. Every conceivable metric is included from visitor numbers and their geographic locations, to a breakdown of where exactly your website’s visitors are actually coming from, what browser and operating system they’re using, where they hit your site, which pages they leave from, and how many web pages they looked at while they were with you. You also get visual tools, such as map overlays, and what, despite all the add-ons made during the past couple of years, I still consider to be one of the key features, Site Overlay, which lets you see how visitors actually traverse your website using its navigation, and internal link structure.
I may have said this before...
A couple of years back I wrote a piece for SitePro News which detailed four extremely , and while the number of good reasons has indeed grown, not least through the newly available Intelligence Reports, the original four are still as valid as they were when I first wrote about them in 2007.
So, if you’re an online entrepreneur on the lookout for a first-class keyword analysis tool, you could do a lot worse than Google Analytics. Of course, it does take some getting used to, and the sheer amount of information it presents the user with can seem daunting at first, but the learning efforts needed to master Analytics can pay huge dividends in the long-run. |
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