1. It brought analytics to the minds of agency communications and policy folks. Having 18F going around adding Google Analytics to as many government websites as possible also opened up lots of other opportunities to help people better understand their users.
2. It's an example of a shared service - one that doesn't require extra procurement, is super reliable, and doesn't require every agency to duplicate work. The sheer size of the government makes the fact that sometimes the left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing is understandable - the way we've set up a federal system actually makes this an intentional feature. However, if we reduce rebuilding, either by sharing services or code would be a big win for the budget and for quality.