Google have just made Google Analytics available for free to Adwords advertisers. Google Analytics is a re-branded ‘Urchin Analytics’ which previously costed $199 per month. Google bought Urchin out in March of this year.
Here’s how they describe it:
“Learn how visitors interact with your website and identify the navigational bottlenecks that keep them from completing your conversion goals. Find out how profitable your keywords are across search engines and campaigns. Pinpoint where your best customers come from and which markets are most profitable to you. Google Analytics gives you this and more through easy-to-understand visually enhanced reports.
Available in English, French, Italian, German, Spanish, Dutch, Japanese, Korean, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Portuguese, Danish, Finnish, Norwegian, Swedish, and Russian, and seamlessly integrated with AdWords, Google Analytics provides the actionable information you need to improve your site content, optimize your ad campaigns, and boost your ROI.”
I’m yet to dig too deeply into Google Analytics yet myself (I’m currently installing it) but it tracks the ROI of your Adwords campaigns (if you have any) but from what I understand also will track other traffic also.
I’ll write more as I analyze (sorry) the service and learn more about it but I’ve got a feeling it’s going to be very very useful.
Read more about it on the many articles appearing on Google News.
update: It looks like they’re under a lot of load in terms of traffic because it’s all running incredibly slowly at this stage. What I’ve seen so far is that once you’re registered it is a matter of installing some javascript between your head tags and then waiting up to 12 hours for the statistics to start to come through.
They also seem to allow you to track multiple sites through the one account. No real information in mine yet but I’ll be watching what they give me in the next 12 hours.
