If Analytics Are So Great, Why Don’t We Have Them?

The short and simple answer to this is that medium and large companies that
can afford analytics do have them. There are many analytics software packages
that cost money, among them WebTrends, HitBox Professional, and Manticore
Technology’s Virtual Touchstone. The low-end price for web analytics is $200
per month. The high-end price? A couple grand a month is not unusual. To the
microsite, the small site, the web merchant on a shoestring, the mom-and-pop
site, the struggling e-zine, the blogger who aspires to be Wonkette but isn’t
yet—that is, to most of the sites on the web —two hundred bucks a month
sounds like a lot of money!
Then, in mid-2005, Google rocked the boat, buying a small company called
Urchin. Urchin was no Oliver Twist. It was, in fact, a runner-up for the 2004
ClickZ Marketing Excellence Award for Best Small Business Analytics Tool. Itproduct, Urchin Analytics, had a monthly cost on the low end of the market —
about $200 a month —and was designed for small businesses.
Six months later, Google did something completely unprecedented. It
rebranded Urchin’s service as Google Analytics with the intention of releasing
it as a free application. Google prelaunched it to a number of large web publications
(among them NewsForge.com, where Mary Tyler is a contributing editor).
And shortly after that, Google opened it to the public, apparently
completely underestimating the rush of people who would sign up — a quarter
of a million in two days.
Google quickly limited the number of sites that registrants could manage to
three, although if you knew HTML at all, the limitation was pathetically easy
to bypass. Google also initiated a sign-up list for people who were interested,
which eventually morphed into an invitation system reminiscent of the controlled
launch of Google’s Gmail. The moral of this story is, “Don’t underestimate
the attraction of free.”