Last week, while I was at Emetrics Marketing Optimization Summit in Alexandra, VA, Avinash Kaushik presented the new features of Google Analytics, see Google Analytics Enhancements – Avanish Kaushik (which I have hardly played with yet) and it’s just one more nail in vender oriented Web Analytics – the answer is no one “owns” the data anymore – or, should I say ….. Google owns it all…. ha, ha, ha.

Read about it in The Google Analytics update: Thoughts and Implications by Eric T. Peterson in Web Analytics Demystified blog.

Here’s a portion of Eric’s post where he talks about the motion chart, above, and what it means to the high end vendors who will find it harder and harder to get new contracts or keep the one’s they have.

Google Analytics, adding missing functionality like segmentation, customization, and data export functionality given the associated costs and the fact that Google Analytics already dominates the web analytics landscape with an over 65% marketshare across all sites with tag-based analytics deployed.”

Except it appears that nobody told Google this. Or, if they did, Google didn’t listen.

Now don’t get me wrong, the new features are not totally perfect.  The segmentation feature which is receiving the most hype within the web analytics community is not true visitor-level segmentation but rather session-based segmentation which severely limits an experienced practitioner’s ability to drill-down into the data. But I suppose this is a perfect example of “you get what you pay for” and since we’re not paying having multidimensional session-level segmentation that can be immediately applied to all historical data is pretty sweet.

On the upside, I was actually pretty surprised about Motion Charts which to me seemed like a tchotchky but after playing with it for just a little bit I’m inclined to agree with Yahoo’s Dennis Mortensen that Motion Charts have potential. I especially like the “Link to Chart” option that seems to allow us to share the visualizations we create with other Google Analytics users.

Here’s a Motion Chart that I’m rather enjoying the use of: Keywords by goal conversion rate by bounce rate sized by Percent New Visits colored uniquely with trails turned on.

But here’s my point – regardless of weather Google is being “Good” or “Evil”,  or of what it’s ultimately going to do with all this data – the issue is this …. if Omniture, Coremetrics and WebTrends don’t add enough value to the data, they’ll become obsolete, I’d say – within 3 years.

Yes, Google now has signaled they have the High End Vendors of Web Analytics in their sight.

But aren’t we just talking about no one “owning the data” anymore?   After all, isn’t everything going into the “Cloud” pretty soon?   Who really owns anything, anymore?

The value of what we offer is the life we bring to it – not the acquisition of the data, not even the presentation of it – but the “intelligence” we produce from it.

So here’s how I see it.

Water.  Bottled Water.  And yes, some people like Anil Dash think Bottled Water is a scam -  but really, it water (data) is really …. free … then it’s how it’s presented that we’re paying for …. attributes of Branding that we value.

Except, Branding is related to “demonstrative value” – so ….. it’s not the data, itself, that we should be paying for (hell, Google is giving it all away to us for free … why should we go and pay a ton of money to big vendors … even companies like ComScore … which I personally feel should not be charging separately for each view of the data, when it’s the same data we’re looking at, that we already bought – same thing for the Web Analytics Vendors.

Pretty much, the age of vendors like WebTrends, Omniture, Coremetrics, is slowly setting – or should I say … quickly setting, much like the age of Elves in the Lord of the Rings – (towards the age of Man?).

Getting back to what Eric T. Peterson is saying (saw him last week at Emetrics, by the way, along with Avinash):

Especially in this uncertain economy, if I have to choose between spending between $20K to $50K on an entry-level SiteCatalyst/Coremetrics/WebTrends/Unica/Nedstat deployment or spending nothing to explore the use of segmentation, report customization, and Motion Charts while waiting for someone like DataLinks to port their application to the Google Analytics APIs so you can spend $995 to build totally customized key performance indicator reports in Excel … well, as a small business owner the choice is pretty clear.

WebTrends recent announcement about moving increasingly into BI, essentially as middleware between web data and traditional business analysis applications, is typical of the response I expect we’re going to see from the for-fee vendors. Some type of move up-market to continue to justify the expense of data collection, which will further limit opportunities for growth since I expect the end-user market to continue to mature at a much slower pace than the available technology set.

I mean, why pay for data collection and storage if Google and Yahoo are going to give it away? Especially in the context of those APIs and the low-cost applications we’ll inevitably see, I suspect the management teams at Omniture, Coremetrics, WebTrends, Unica, and Nedstat are looking suspiciously at their Q4 and Q1 2009 projections for SMB sales and global expansion trying to figure out exactly how much free web analytics will ultimately impact the business.

Eric ends his post by re-saying all he said, but in bullet points – and here’s the parts that most struck me:

“…I still don’t think Google Analytics is appropriate for advanced practitioners, at least not as a system of record, but the number of truly advanced practitioners working out there today is still relatively small;

• I think the Data Export APIs are the most exciting aspect of this announcement and I’m looking forward to all the cool, new applications that will inevitably spring up based on these APIs;
• I think that Google has sucked the wind out of Yahoo’s sails, whether they intended to or not, but I still don’t think that Google Analytics and Yahoo Web Analytics are directly competitive;
• I think the vendor folks most impacted by this announcement are the teams responsible for SMB sales, the expansion into Europe and Asia, and anyone selling web analytics solutions at a sub-$50K price point;
• I expect the for-fee vendors to respond to Google Analytics not by picking on the features (remember: voters don’t like negative campaigning!) but rather by working to more aggressively take their existing suites and platforms up-market;
• I don’t expect this announcement to be a death blow to anyone. Rather it serves as yet another reinforcement of the inevitable commoditization of the web analytics data collection market and a wake-up call to any company with a ten-year plan to continue to make money counting page views.

So … that means in a couple of years, the big three (WebTrends, Coremetrics and Omniture ……) … bye … they ‘re going to have a really hard time.

But again, if they’re charging for features that … have become like “water” then why should we drink their water when we can get the same features, almost, for free?

I think I need to spend a few days really playing with Google Analytics now … I have no excuse …. I asked Avinish and the Google Analytics team for these improvements and they have delivered.

Now, it’s time for me to do the same.