Some posts ago, I wrote a post called “Since Gatineau nothing will ever be the same” because Gatineau was the first competitor, a real one, that Google Analytics has as the top free Player. I was sure that the competition among free tools would be the base of a new age in analytics, the age where the most flexible and powerful tools reduce their price and become “smarter”.
Now Yahoo! accelerated the process, because a Flexible and smart tool as Indextools is going to be provided free of charge. So we don’t have two Analytics tools markets, but just one…for free.
The economy theory says that as close the substitute products are as important the variable price become. I mean, if you have two identical products, why should you pay more money for one of them?. Now lets leave the books aside for a moment because in the real world there are not identical products (even commodities are not so), because they are different in something, services, price, quality, perception, etc.
So, even when there are not identical products when the gap in the variable “price” get larger, the small differences become more and more irrelevant. Just imagine what is gonna happen with the rest of the paid tools when Yahoo! begins providing Indextools for free. How will you convince your Finance department to Paid 100k dollars a month for Omniture when you have Indextools that in most cases provide you more than what you really need to use.
Until now we can say that it is the end of the paid tools, or at least the expensive ones. Some other may imagine that Omniture, Webtrends, Coremetrix, Clicktracks, etc, will be bought by Google (just to give an example) to compete directly with Yahoo! Indextools (of course Google Analytics is not yet prepared to compete with Indextools). But if we do so we are leaving lot of variables out of the analysis, actually probably the most important one for Big Clients, which is the value of the information. I mean, the NYTimes wont be worried if they have a monthly big bill to pay in a Web Analytics tool service, but they will definitely worried if their information is not safe or at least it may be used by another corporation, with or without bad intentions.
Companies have different needs and perceive each product in a very particular way, that is why they must be provided with different solutions. So from now on, clients should measure how important is each of the following variables for them in order to choose the right Web Analytics tools:
- Quantity of information.
- Quality of information.
- Flexibility of generating information.
- Implementation and maintenance difficulty.
- Provider independency.
- Provider reputation (Something really important if you are not hosting your information, like in the most of “page tagging solutions”)
- Price.
- And so many others.