Mountain View, California — In its relentless quest to be more than just the world’s preferred search engine, Google Inc. announced on its official blog posting that soon it will be developing a “global browser based plug-in” for its Google Analytics service that will allow users with an alternative choice to opt-out of being tracked by Google Analytics, the traffic monitoring service now used by 71 per cent of the top domains on the interwebs.
Google has been fighting privacy concerns on several accounts and things are only becoming more troublesome as the company grows and enters new markets. The newly proposed features to its free website analysis program aimed at enterprises.
In a blog post yesterday, Google Analytics product manager Amy Chang said that technologist are “finalizing” experiment on the add-on and that the company intends to make it globally available “in the coming weeks”.
“Web Analytics is basically a sophisticated website monitoring system,” said head of Web Analytics at Google South-East Asia Vinoaj Vijeyakumaar.
“Beyond just recording how many people visit your site, you can see what they do there and how much time they spend doing it.
“You can set and manage sales goals and receive automatic business reports based on those goals. This kind of intelligence can greatly improve productivity in any industry,” he said.
With the new improvements, Google added about 20 preset goals to the Web Analytics repertoire.
The search giant is caught up at the crossroads, Google needs to support advertisers, investors and consumers. The obligation to support advertisers and shareholders resides in the ability to develop tools that provide data and ad targeting. But to succeed, Google must become a good corporate citizen and give consumers a method to opt-out and protect their privacy.
“As an enterprise-class web analytics solution, Google Analytics not only provides site owners with information on their website traffic and marketing effectiveness, it also does so with high regard for protecting user data privacy,” Chang, wrote.
“Over the past year, we have been searching ways to offer users more choice on how their data is collected by Google Analytics. We concluded that the best approach would be to develop a global browser based plug-in to allow users to opt out of being tracked by Google Analytics.” she announced.
Google already provides an opt-out plug-in for AdSense — which maintains your opt-out even if you clear cookies. AdSense now uses the same tracking cookie as DoubleClick and the two ad networks are sharing at least some data, but it is unclear how much.
In-depth intelligence reports have also been enhanced. However the company acknowledged that algorithms used for those reports will not be made publicly available. The fact that Google is offering an Anayltics opt-out plug-in likely means the company’s internal data shows that most netizens probably would not use the thing. If too many installed the plug-in, it would reduce the accuracy of the service.
“Though Google Analytics does not track personally identifiable information, the plug-in will give users the choice to fully opt-out of sending any information back to Analytics,” Chang says. “We are constantly working to enhance the balance between privacy options for users, while providing advertisers with valuable and actionable data to improve their Web sites.”
To help enterprises get the most out of Web Analytics, Google has appointed “authorized consultants” who are certified by the company to train staff members in how to use the program.
“We have three authorized consultants based in Singapore and we hope to open one in Malaysia very soon,” said head of communications for Google South-East Asia Dickson Seow.
According to the data collected by the University of California, Berkeley, Google Analytics is no small service as roughly around 71 percent of 400,000 top domains were found to be using the service till March 2009.
Google is rather vague on the specifics of the new opt-out tool. However, Chang says the search engine takes privacy very seriously and will continue to provide people with more choices.
“Knowing how to use all the features in the most effective manner can help online traders stay ahead of the game.” For more information, log onto www.google.com/analytics.