Digging Deeper into Google Analytics - Winners and Losers
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The biggest winners from this move on Google’s part are the small to medium-sized businesses who can’t afford to spend money on web analytics software or services. Many companies don’t even know what web analytics is or what it can do for them; they are also part of Google Analytics’ target market. After all, if you’re a company with limited resources, why would you spend $200 per month on a service you aren’t even sure will give you a significant benefit?
The big losers from this move will be the web analytics companies that already target the small- and medium-sized business market. Companies such as WebSideStory, who sell their products to large businesses for, say, $40,000 per year, will probably not need to worry. But what web analytics firm’s sales force can match Google’s reach, when the search engine welcomes 380 million unique visitors every month (according to Nielsen/Netratings)?
That number of course doesn’t even take into account the thousands of companies that are already using Google’s AdWords service. In her analysis of the issue, Sarah Lacy of BusinessWeek observed that “By offering a free service – and one that’s tightly integrated with AdWords – Google is almost the de facto standard.” That’s not bad for a market Google wasn’t even participating in less than a year ago.
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