Comments on: Episode 22: Inside Google Analytics with Phil Mui

By: Dan Huddart

Dan Huddart — Sat, 14 Aug 2010 10:19:41 +0000

My favourite of your podcast series yet, very insightful to have someone so knowledgeable from inside Google.

Shame we couldn’t tease out any future features of GA.

The ‘black hole’ comments surprise me, I have never found GA to give tangibly different results from the other major tools.

By: Phil Mui

Phil Mui — Sun, 04 Jul 2010 20:59:26 +0000

Hi Gene, about your question on why GA is “free”. Here is one way to look at it: the online marketing industry is still relatively young. To convince marketers to shift their offline to online spend, there need to be very good reasons. As an online advertising platform company, it is in Google’s interest to help convince marketers that online advertising can be very accountable. There are many marketers who cannot afford certain solutions in the marketplace. GA tries to satisfy the measurement & reporting needs of these marketers. It also turns out that GA has been designed very well (IMHO) — some enterprises also find GA more than meeting their measurement & reporting needs.

Hope that this helps.

- Phil

By: Gene Juang

Gene Juang — Thu, 17 Jun 2010 10:37:23 +0000

And no, I don’t work for Omniture/Adobe….

I forgot to ask, what do you all think about the measurement industry now that GA is rolling out many similar functions offered by paid vendors like custom report by SiteCatalyst or WebTrend. Will Google have yet another Monopoly in the analytic space?

By: Gene Juang

Gene Juang — Thu, 17 Jun 2010 10:34:24 +0000

Why does Google provide Analytics for free? Is Google ethically right to provide such service? After all, the aggregate data of most website analytics should be measured and collected by someone who has no conflict of interest. Like Mui shared, Google has ad business that should raise question from Govt to step in and make sure Google’s so-called end users’ privacy effort is safely guarded. I can’t help but to fear Google eventually will use all these data collected for something of their benefit.

Now back to the product itself. Aside from non-real time, GA’s limited to Site-level metrics only in most of its reports. Furthermore, it can’t segmentize visitors like the way SiteCatalyst does. However, SiteCatalyst is extremely expensive, though it is perhaps the most “relied” (not just used like GA) Analytical tools by major enterprises in the world.

By: Rudi Shumpert

Rudi Shumpert — Tue, 08 Jun 2010 11:34:56 +0000

Artas,

Thank you for listening and for the comments. I understand your point. However, our goals are not to be investigative reporters nor do we want to do anything that would cause issues for our guests (or hosts).

-Rudi