Google Analytics A Boon To Small Business Websites

Very big news this week from Google, following their recent purchase of Urchin, one of the best webstats tracking tools on the market. For those not familiar with that tool, website statistics tracking is a crucial part of running a business website -- it lets you track just about everything that affects your site, from the number of visitors, to when they visited, to what search engine they found your site at, and, most importantly, what search term they used to find your site. Knowing how a visitor found your site is the most vital piece of internet marketing information that you can possibly have for your site.

Urchin Is Now Google Analytics

Google has just folded Urchin under its corporate identity, rebranded it as Google Analytics, and they are giving away this web stats tracking tool for free! To sign up your website for this important service, you can visit Google Analytics and, if you don't have one already, open a free Google account. All you need to do is add a snippet of code to each page of your site that you want to track. (Easy for your webmaster to do, if you don't do it yourself).

Why Is Google Giving You Webstats Tracking For Free?

That's an easy one. It will allow Google to dig even deeper into what is going on in people's websites, as well as signing up a huge number of new Google accounts. All this is valuable information to Google -- very valuable. As search engine marketing develops, Google wants to know all about you, and your website. For you, the business website owner, it is a tradeoff. But with Google and Yahoo! gathering so much online information about everyone anyway, it's not like you are going to hurt Google by staying away from the party. And since Google is really establishing an easy-to-use, valuable, and free service here, it is something every website owner should consider.