Nov 28 2005
Free Analytics Software From Google?
What was once $495 from Urchin is now free, compliments of Google. The search giant bought Urchin Software Corp. eight months ago and promptly lowered the monthly cost of that company’s hosted Web-analytics service, Urchin On Demand, from $495 to $199. Now Google is rebranding the service as Google Analytics and making it available to everyone for nothing.
They are not taking any new customers temporarily according to their website due to the high demand. I signed up a few weeks ago and was quite impressed with the functionality and ease of use. Unlike many stats solutions, Google Analytics is very intuitive and simple to use, read, and understand. No matter how sophisticated you are in your stats assessments, this package gives you $495-worth of value at no cost.
Why did Google do this? Simple. Their bread and butter is Google AdWords. Give people a free stats package that enables even the smallest AdWords customer to track results, they will want to bid on more keywords. Think of it as giving away the razor to sell more razor blades.
