There was a time in the history of the web, when almost every website had numbers glaring somewhere around the footer of the site. Things that looked somewhat like this:
Basically these were hitcounters, the first of the traffic measurement tools to come on the web. One might still find them in many blogspot blogs where bloggers proudly display their traffic numbers. However, with growing traffic, and sophisticated traffic measurement, these have almost died a slow death. Now, Google Analytics have decided to bring this back in fashion with their latest announcement.
“Many users are clamoring for a simpler way to share their Analytics traffic data with their external stakeholders. These stakeholders, such as investors and advertisers, typically use data reported by other services to evaluate the performance of a company. Many times these estimates are significantly different than that from Google Analytics.
One way to share your Analytics data with everyone is to use our recent integration with Google Ad Planner. With this, you can replace Ad Planner traffic estimates with actual data collected by Google Analytics.”
Many users in my mind equals to bloggers. For one they were the ones most clamoring for such a function till now, and even if you read the entire announcement it is a little blogger centric with a mention for WordPress plugin to integrate this onto the site. Obviously if my last post is anything to go by then the only Indian publishers who will use this feature will only be blogspot bloggers or some new tech kid blogger. This is how the traffic counter will look like:
If more and more people use this feature though, it will be a lot of help for a lot of media planners at least in some sort of initial research. Analytics much like many of Google’s products is the most popular traffic measurement tool and has been widely regarded as amongst the most accurate one as well. So this will take away a lot of credibility issues that plague publishers and in fact serve advertisers well too. A small but useful move by the Analytics team nevertheless.
This follows the industry benchmarking feature that they added last year. In March the team announced the launch of two related new Google Analytics features: a beta version of industry benchmarking and a data-sharing settings page. And they were well received in most online circles. This new move sort of takes that step a full circle by making data available for almost everyone.
Thanks for sharing this info….