Google Analytics: if everyone knows everything, how do you get to know the most?
There’s a really quite profound line in the Pixar movie, The Incredibles, when the son of the film’s main protagonist remarks, “Saying every one is special, is just a way of saying that no one is.” Similarly, the almost psychic powers imbued upon the e-marketer by Google’s admittedly very impressive analytics package, (GA) comes with its silver linings accompanied by a real risk of cloud.
For the uninitiated, GA allows website owners free access to a wealth of statistical information; not just on the web site for which they are responsible is being accessed and viewed, but also what the key searches are on Google that day. Essentially, it allows you to read the mind of the surfing world and adapt your content to reflect that. So, for instance, say that, on a given day, a moderately high percentage of Google users were searching for details on a breaking news story, online marketers could use that information to load their pages with enough related content to draw individual searches towards their site*.
At first sight, that’s an amazing trick. Indeed, you’d have to be very foolish not to make the most of the service. However, what we can’t get away from is the fact that, on the whole, e-marketers are not very foolish people and, it’s a reasonable assumption, to suppose that pick up on GA will, in time, be near universal. Consequently, as GA becomes the norm, the competitive advantage flatlines and the exception gradually becomes the standard.
For the e-marketer, there’s a very clear short-term advantage posed by GA and those that are amongst the first to make the use of GA a core aspect of their modus operandi are likely to emerge as the very clear winners. However, as usage of GA becomes the standard, curiously, we are left pretty much where we started. That is, with nearly all sites offering the same degree of targeted content, it’s likely to be the effectiveness of that content and the ease and imagination which it is presented that, as is currently the case, will separate the wheat from the chaff.
Users, it is imaginable, will find themselves experiencing yet further accuracy in the search results returned in relation to the query entered. However, when, over time, users find web pages advertising Discount Trainers being returned in response to a search for news on the Formula One Drivers Championship, it’s conceivable that resentment amongst this, the key audience, may start to simmer. For everyone, not least Google, this could end up with GA becoming a very mixed blessing indeed.
Beyond the few broad guesses made above, it really is hard to see, with any degree of accuracy, where the wealth of information provided by GA might take us. It’s not even certain that utlisation of the tool will become the norm. However, any insight into the minds of the surfing masses has to be of vital information to any marketer and, maybe, unlike the HG Wells story, Google Analytics might yet just see the one eyed man crowned king in the Country of the Blind.
* Tailored Digital Media can provide any organisation, private or public owned, tailored news feeds that will drive traffic to your site . For more on our tailored news feed service, look
here.
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lauress 10:04 pm on January 26, 2010 | # |
Very interesting post.
If marketers, on a global scale, start to all use Google Analytics, I believe Google would turn some parts of it into premium content. This way, it would allow marketers that paid to be the best, and would make GA worth it again.