Over at Reel-Time we’ve long felt the pain of never having the scale or revenue to invest in the tools that big sites can afford. Most notably a decent traffic analysis package. Sure, there’s the usual freeware log-file analysis, but nothing approaching the sophistication of an Omniture Teamsite or Websidestory HitBox.
Last week Google introduced Google Analytics, granting access to AdSense publishers such as R-T. Our webmaster Mark Cahill performed the install by adding some footer code to the pages, and voila, a week later we have the first real stats for Reel-Time that we’ve had in ten years.
And it cost nothing. Omniture and Hitbox which charge $0.09-$0.22 per thousand pages, are way out of the range of the little niche players.
Needless to say, I am very happy, but in awe of Google’s ability to overnight put companies like Omniture and HitBox under the gun.