Google Analytics will finally integrate blog tracking
With all that Google has had on its plate over the past two years, you can imagine some projects have been shoved to the very back of the back burner. But only now is a February 2006 acquisition starting to heat up.
Over two years ago already, Google purchased the developer of an innovative set of blog traffic measurement tools called MeasureMap. Its key feature was providing blog proprietors with a near-real-time geographical plot of where its readers originated from, along with key data as to what readers were interested in and what they responded to.
Surprisingly, not much happened with MeasureMap since that time -- it's been active, it just hasn't changed very much. But in recent days, subscribers to MeasureMap have received e-mails from Google preparing them for a shift over to Google Analytics, where the acquired tool's unique features will presumably be integrated.
"We're giving our earliest users of Measure Map an opportunity to use our new service, built on the powerful Google Analytics platform and continuing to use the interface you're familiar with," reads an excerpt of the e-mail posted by one blogger whose principal subjects include, among other things, blogging itself.
"Question though is, will I get a much better and fully functional MeasureMap account?" asks YugaBlog proprietor Abraham Olandres. "Or I might end up seeing my own Google Analytics instead? I hope it's the former. GA is good, but MeasureMap was specifically tailored to bloggers and the data that it filters and presents are the very relevant ones bloggers most often want to figure out."
Presently, Google Analytics is a free tool best suited to commercial sites whose goals include driving readers to specific pages, and often converting those readers into customers. Bloggers have other goals in mind; they're intrigued by more personal data about readers' statistics and their interests.
"I bet I check my stats a half-dozen times a day, anxious to see if anyone has linked to me or see what posts are most popular today," wrote Google's Jeffrey Veen, whom the company assigned to the MeasureMap team...back in February 2006. "Our users agree -- whether their audience is just friends and family or thousands of readers -- they're having more and more fun with their blogs and investing more time in them. And that means content across the web is getting better."
Since that time, Veen became UI Design Manager for Google Analytics; and in May 2007, he credited MeasureMap as having inspired the redesign of GA's front end. But that was the last ping of data about MeasureMap that Google has given its GA customers, up until this recent e-mail.
Source: betanews.com
