Yesterday, Google Analytics released a premium version of their analytics, aimed straight at the heart of Omniture and Webtrends. Looking at the fact sheet, it seems to be not only better in functionality than these enterprise packages but nicer looking, too. Now that they have support, advanced tagging, real-time analytics, and the typical Google beauty, the end is near for players who have done web analytics for a long time but haven’t adapted. Go see for yourself.
The next stage of the game will be in creating unified dashboards that measure owned, earned, and paid. Easy to say and easy to understand, but nobody has it yet. Earned is channels such as Facebook, which can only be tracked via the graph API. Omniture, Webtrends, and Coremetrics have yet to figure it out, while neither has Google. Paid is advertising, which Google is pretty good at. But nobody ties all three together yet, which is a headache for advertisers and agencies.
Watch the social analytics and web analytics players come together this year. Even the free version of Google Analytics now has multi-channel attribution, which is critical to measuring the value of social.