Remember the old saying, "There is no such thing as free lunch?"  Well, Google has been providing free lunch to their employees for years, and now they are extending this generosity to Web analytics users http://www.google.com/analytics.  So, if you have a Google AdWords account, come and get your free analytics.

So, what does this mean for the Web analytics industry?  No, the sky isn't falling...let's keep this in perspective.  Google Analytics (formerly called Urchin) is not a highly-sophisticated data warehouse with refined granularity, automation or power.  It is also not a well-orchestrated professional services organization that can help you optimize your marketing and merchandising practices based on your Web analytics data.  At best, it's a conversion tracker akin to many other solutions that cater to the majority of the Internet's small and mid-sized companies.  Basically, it's lunch.  Now, everybody eats lunch, and Google's Analytics solution is deployed on hundreds of thousands of sites around the world.  But the more sophisticated options out there (Omniture's SiteCatalyst, Coremetrics' solution, WebSideStory's HBX, Fireclick's Warehouse Suite, Visual Science's solution, WebTrends 7, etc) are (in different ways) full-course dinners.  And, even though there may now be such a thing as free lunch, I can definitively say that there is no such thing as free dinner.

So, if you're driving your email campaigns through the Coremetrics LIVEmail program, tapping into the knowledge of the Omniture Best Practices Group, personalizing online content based on search results in WebSideStory's HBX, performing A/B testing through Visual Sciences, automatically receiving ad-hoc segmentation dashboards in the Fireclick Warehouse Suite, or maximizing your search engine optimization ROI using WebTrends 7, then you're dining well.  I recommend that you continue your well-balanced diet, because every dollar properly invested in Web analytics can help you create a company culture that will leave your plate full for a very long time.

However, many of you are merely obtaining casual lunch metrics.  There's nothing wrong with that.  If your team is mostly interested in traffic analysis, conversion tracking, simple path analysis, marketing effectiveness metrics, etc, then there's no reason to stuff yourselves.  Too much data, like too much food, really just leads to indigestion.  Also, let's not underestimate the value of the free solution that Google is offering.  I have been to the Google campus for free lunch quite a few times, and they're not just handing out ham sandwiches over there (on the contrary...it's every kind of food, custom-made burritos with 10 kinds of hot sauce, etc).  Google Analytics is not as plain-vanilla as people think.  Jupiter Research analyst Eric Peterson describes the solution in more depth on his blog:  http://weblogs.jupiterresearch.com/analysts/peterson/archives/011878.html.

Overall, I think that hunger is a great thing when it comes to analytics.  You can't improve your business without accurate, reliable data.  Likewise, you can't satiate your daily hunger with a meager lunch (even if you didn't have to pay for it).  There is still a place in the market for sophisticated solutions, and I recommend that you gravitate in that direction.  However, if you are afraid of biting off more than you can chew, there is no reason to starve altogether.  There's always free lunch at Google.