Earlier in 2005 Google purchased a company called Urchin. Urchin provided software that tracked vistors to your website. When I heard about this I figured it was only going to be a matter of time before Google came out with a free service to generate reports on your website traffic. That time has come with the release of Google Analytics.
Google has pretty much dominated the website advertising market with Adsense. There is finally some competition to Adsense, so it makes sense to Google to up the ante by providing yet another service that would complement Adsense to stay one step ahead of the pack. Will Yahoo add a similar service to keep their Yahoo Publisher Network on par with Google’s offering? Only time will tell. Perhaps Jeremy will have some comments on this?
If I were StatCounter I’d have to wonder if Google just swatted us out of the air? Will StatCounter (and services like it) still be able to exist in a Google Analytics world? Perhaps if they are able to over a larger feature set than Google, but then you have ask yourselve if that is a race you want to be in against Google. Either way they’ll have no way to creating the type of synergy that Google can when you combine Adsense with Analytics.
I’m still waiting for my first report to be generated for this site so I can’t comment on how well the service performs, but I’ll definitely be comparing it to the StatCounter when it does.
This type of service has to potential to attract everyone with a website, which makes you wonder why Microsoft or Yahoo didn’t do it first.
UPDATE Mon 14 Nov 2005 8:45am: There is now an official announcement of the service. Sorry about the spelling problems in the title, kudos to Keith for pointing this out.