WebProNews

Free analytics for sites proves the right price for many

The popularity of Google's free analytics service brought in a crushing wave of interest when it debuted. That wave flowed into dozens of the top 500 sites in the world.

Your friendly neighborhood WebProNews writers have always said the best meal in the world is a free one. We're not surprised to see that sentiment extend to other industries, particularly on their websites.

Website monitoring service Pingdom took a look at the top 500 websites to see if Google Analytics made inroads into them with its Analytics product. They noted their findings at the Royal Pingdom blog, and we'll admit to some surprise about them:

We put the Alexa global top 500 websites under the microscope and found that 161 out of these 500 websites are using Google Analytics, which is 32.2%.

Even though website statistics is only a secondary market to Google, the free availability of Google Analytics must have had a profound effect on the bottom line for competing, commercial products from companies who cannot afford to offer their services for free.

We think the access Google must have to the data for that many heavily-linked and trafficked sites pays for the free service many times over. Google owns basically a third of the market for web analytics, and charges customers nothing for it. That's an amazing statistic.

Earlier this morning, we noted Google's interest in mobile advertising. The mobile platform may be heating up for analytics as well, as measurement firm comScore disclosed its acquisition of M:Metrics in a cash and stock deal today.