Google to offer its clients free trail of clicked-on ads

Google to offer its clients free trail of clicked-on ads - Technology - International Herald Tribune: "Google was planning to introduce on Monday free analytical tools for online publishers and marketers, a move that would help the company's clients get a better sense of Web site traffic patterns and advertising campaigns.

Online analytical tools help publishers determine how often people have viewed certain pages and clicked on certain links within those pages. The free services will be integrated into Google's lucrative AdWords program, in which marketers for, say, wrenches, pay to have their ads appear near search results whenever online users search for "automotive tools."

Google Analytics will crunch numbers on behalf of users, telling them how often visitors who saw an ad associated with "automotive tools" clicked on the ad, versus those who searched for "hardware stores."

Google Analytics will also allow publishers and marketers to analyze the performance of non-Google ad campaigns, like e-mail marketing, banner ads or search ads on Yahoo, MSN or any other search engine. That service is free even if companies do not advertise with AdWords, as long as their users do not view more than five million Web pages in a given month.

The new service will cause significant ripples in the analytics industry, said Eric Peterson, an analyst with Jupiter Research, an Internet consultant.

"This will really start to get a lot of companies interested in improving their Web sites," he said.

Just 17 percent of the 250,000 or so companies with at least $1 million in annual revenue and a Web site now use analytical tools and services for those sites, Peterson said. The remaining 83 percent have been deterred by the cost of such tools, among other things.

The industry currently attracts about $460 million in revenue, divided between publicly traded companies like WebSideStory and privately held firms like WebTrends, Omniture and others.

Until March, that group also included Urchin, a California-based analytics company that Google acquired for what people familiar with the deal said was about $30 million. Until now, Urchin operated as it had before the deal, offering analytics services for about $200 monthly, and much more for bigger customers. Competitors like WebSideStory, WebTrends, IBM and others, Peterson said, "will have to seriously address how to compete" now.

"When you put Google's application next to any one of the existing ones, you'll not see glaring differences except that one of them is free," he said.

Paul Muret, one of Urchin's co-founders, is now a Google engineer.

"Part of Google's philosophy is to improve the user experience and make the Web more powerful," he said. "This gives tools to marketers and publishers to improve their sites and improve the end users' experience as well."

Of course, it also potentially improves Google's financial prospects. Assuming that analytical tools help publishers and marketers design more effective sites and ads, those sites and ads will attract more viewers. Peterson said Google could also use the data to refine the way it ranks sites, thereby improving its core search service.

And Google Analytics could conceivably yield improved marketing intelligence for the company, should many online publishers and marketers choose to hand off their data. Google could then learn about the performance of past advertising campaigns on specific sites."