With new tracking rules coming in from both Europe and I’m sure the rest of the world and modern browsers including a “do not track” feature it must be hard for Google to see a future for Analytics. Increasingly it seems that it is trying to depreciate the value of analytics by reducing the value of the information we collect, in favour of the information it collects.
Let me give you an example: –
- Recent changes to Analytics have logged in users not passing their keyword information through to Analytics (although this isn’t evident in Adwords).
- Google is encouraging people to stay logged in by increasingly pushing us to be logged in to use their services.
The end result of these two policies is of coarse that Analytics is seeing less and less keyword information, but Google is seeing more and more from it’s logged in users.
If I was to be cynical about this, I would say that it is an attempt by Google to still collect all the information it wants (as I’m guessing its in their terms of service), but not passing that information through as it has done before.
So what can we do about it? More and more it seems that Google is leaving itself open for new competition. In the analytics field there are paid options which are now starting to look quite attractive now we are hooked on the value of this type of information. If any of you out there have used any, please let me know. I’d be interested on your feedback.