Some time back, Google acquired Web traffic analytics company Urchin and significantly lowered the price on their hosted services. Well, today, the deal got a whole lot sweeter. Urchin has been re-branded as Google Analytics and the service is being offered for free. Just create an account, add a snippet of JavaScript code to your Web pages, and Google begins compiling reports on your site traffic. And of course, integration with AdWords should be really tight. I’ll be taking a look in the coming days and following up with any observations on what they’ve put together.
Update: While it has taken a bit of time to recover from a rather shaky, apparently traffic-inundated launch, Google Analytics is looking really terrific. It will be particularly powerful if you can hook it up to your e-commerce site, feed it transaction data, and watch conversion rates from AdWords campaigns. I predict that Analytics will further strengthen Google’s position in the online advertising market as this tool will help their customers run more effective ad campaigns through better understanding their customers.