So there has been plenty of debate on what web analytics to use for your company or client’s site, a paid version such as Webtrends or a free service such as Google Analytics. Honestly, if you’re looking for nothing more than the basic out of the box metrics such as unique visitors, page views, bounce rates, referrals, and such you can argue that Google’s product does a great job for free. I use it on my site for this reason. Anybody in the industry knows that one of the big knocks Google gets by offering these free tools is that they own your data and can use it at their discretion. Actually, they do use it to provide the data needed for their “benchmarketing”, now called “intelligence”, section within Google Analytics.
Google announced this week that they are developing a browser based toolbar that will allow a visitor to hide their information from Google Analytics. This toolbar will be available globally within the upcoming weeks. This is what Google has said:
“Over the past year, we have been exploring ways to offer users more choice on how their data is collected by Google Analytics. We concluded that the best approach would be to develop a global browser based plug-in to allow users to opt out of being tracked by Google Analytics. Our engineers are now hard at work finalizing and testing this opt-out functionality.”
Good news for Google as this release helps give their reputation a boost and combat the negative publicity. Bad news for any company who uses Google Analytics as their primary means of web analytics because in theory your metrics will be less as more people who come into your site are not captured. Yes, this toolbar will accomplish basically the same thing that anybody can do right now by disabling their cookies, but what makes this more “damaging” is the promotion that Google will be placing on this toolbar and how more visitors might use it over the techno-geeks that disable their cookies.
Only time will tell on how many people will use this toolbar but from my landing page optimization testing, I have experienced about 4% of all visitors do not have their cookies enabled. Will that 4% go to 6, 7, 8 or 10% now that it is easier to do for the average web user? We will have to wait and see.
Update: I am attending SES NY and was able to sit in on a session that I brought up to the panel of speakers, one being a representative from Yahoo. His take on it was that Yahoo also has had this feature for months now and nobody uses it. All I suggest is that you keep an eye on your analytics to see if it has changed at all. Let me know if it has.
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