Google Analytics might be one of the best things that Google Robin Hooded to website owners large and small. The analytics package provides incredible functionality and does so for not a dime. That combination of functionality and free have lead to massive market share for Analytics. One estimate last year put Google Analytics at a whopping 80%, while another fell slightly shorter, but still impressive at 74%.
It’s been a win-win for Google and for the sites that use the tool to measure their efforts, but a post on the Google Analytics blog today should have some eyebrows raising. The post is short, titled:
More choice for users: browser-based opt-out for Google Analytics on the way
Maybe Google realizes they need to earn back some “do no evil” sentiment from the population at large. Maybe there’s a clever reason why it’s best that you not know what happens with the traffic on your site. Maybe, gulp, they really are just doing the right thing. It’s hard to tell. The blog post, almost short enough to have been slipped out of Mountain View in a tweet, is served point-blank. In it’s entirety:
As an enterprise-class web analytics solution, Google Analytics not only provides site owners with information on their website traffic and marketing effectiveness, it also does so with high regard for protecting user data privacy. 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. We look forward to make it globally available to our users in the coming weeks.
So, it’s coming soon, and it’s pretty clear that the solution would allow people to completely opt out of being tracked by Google Analytics.
Depending on how the option is presented and received to the end-user, it could have an unnoticeable effect, or it could eventually impact quite a lot of what you know about your website traffic. ‘Free’ may just become very expensive in the long run.
Thoughts?
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{ 6 comments… read them below or add one }
Eeeeks! I rely a lot on Google’s software to see how successful my websites have been. The details of my visitors are important to me but I think the impact of the changes hinge on what they mean by “track users”. I could get by without the knowledge of what city my viewers are living in and perhaps some of the finer details. However, the detailed information that Google analytics provides is extremely valuable in measuring the effectiveness of the sites that i build.
Internet marketers are freaking out about this, but I’ll bet at most 2% of people actually opt out.
Without much detail (provided by Google on how they’re going to roll this out) I’d agree. But, it will depend on their tactics. What if, for example, this became a default question when you installed Chrome?
Just food for thought. It does signal an interesting stance toward marketers who have become smitten with (Google) Analytics at the very least.
No way that’s a default option in Chrome, but tasty food for thought. What if AdBlockers automatically opted people out … or asked them if they wanted to opt-out. That would probably be a good stat to estimate numbers with. What percentage of ads are blocked, that is.
What will we do with the NEW data it generates: how many people opt out and at what point in the process?
Good. I agree with the 2% comment, but lets take moment to tear into his quote. Lets set the record straight GA is not Enterprise Class, GA is Enterprise class if your cheap. They have no support, you cannot pass non GA parameters, and you cannot run a non aggregated report.