Tags: Google, Society
Google Market Sense
November 20th, 2005, by Rich.
I’m going to stick my neck out and make a prediction. I was thinking around the subject of Google Analytics just now, considering the increased information that Google now have. It’s a short leap of faith to guess that Google will use the data that Google Analytics provides in order to improve or reinforce their PageRank algorithm, and I’m sure most people have twigged that by now. To suggest that would be to make the mistake of thinking Google is still a search company.
What I predict Google will do next is vastly more interesting, because it’s all about money, and competition, and seeing into your customers minds, and your competitors pockets.
I predict that Google will sell anonymised marketing data that describes entire customer trends, from the initial search, through the discovery process, right along to the purchase, and beyond to store loyalty.
Say you’re a t-shirt shop and you want to sell witty sloganeering clothes. You realise (from Google Analytics) that people are coming to your site having performed a tee-shirt related search, but 99.99% leave without making a purchase.
When the customer exists your site, they reach the boundary of what you can track - but critically - Google can track them further. Google know the other stores your visitor has clicked on, and if those stores use Analytics, then Google also know whether your potential customer gets to your competitor’s checkout.
Why didn’t they buy from you? Who did they buy from instead? What was the differentiator? Was it the cost; P&P; the site layout; the size of the pictures; the type of information given; the download time; the usability, the special offers? etc.
This kind of tracking has been going on in high streets for years - watching general customer flow, or tracking specific customers as they leave stores to see where else they shop - but until now it’s been unfeasible to do it on the net.
In marketing terms, it’s an absolute goldmine, and it’s my prediction of what Google will squeeze the cash out of next.
November 23rd, 2005 at 10:56 am
Nice article, indeed I also believe one of the reasons is that Google will use the data to improve their ranking system and so eventually the affiliate websites will rank lower than unique content websites.
February 22nd, 2006 at 1:48 pm
I think this is a little naïve. It assumes that competitors would be happy to share extremely detailed and confidential data. In the unlikely event that they were, collusion on that scale would almost certainly be illegal: it would amount to price fixing as competing stores would mimic each others best aspects to the point where they became clones. Indeed, Google would need to be in a monopoly position and that would throw up regulatory concerns. That’s before you consider the privacy issues.
February 22nd, 2006 at 3:40 pm
These were first pass thoughts, so naïve is a fair criticism. The Analytics T&C’s state that “Google will not share information associated with You or your Site with any third parties”, which sounds fairly good for assuring direct comparisons are avoided.
What that statement doesn’t say however, is that “Google will not sell knowledge and services derived from the analysis of information associated with you or your sites.
For example: A visitor searches on Google for T-Shirts and visits your sloganeering T-Shirt site. AFAICT thre’s nothing in the T&C’s or in law, that prohibits Google from telling you that n% of customers who visited your site went on to make a related purchase from a competitor.
I just can’t buy into the idea the Google need analytics for the feelgood feedback of happy site owners; but I concede that there is the possibility that the entire Analytics business model is based on that - a loss leader to ensure site owners are friendly with Google.
The benefit for Google, if this is the case, is that if a site owner is already using Analytics, then using Adsense is just a few clicks away, inreasing potential of yet another site that they can sell Adverts on.
February 23rd, 2006 at 12:50 pm
I think it’s more subtle than that. Feel good is mostly a nice by-product. Analytics can help page rank as tells Google more about how people use the web. It shows how dependent a site is on search traffic; a high dependency might suggest the site has little following. How sticky is the site; do people spend any time there? If not, the site may be low quality. I’m sure there are plenty of other examples. It also tells it the proportion of searches performed by competing search engines.