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Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

I got the exact same email today, and had to read their terms of service to know for sure I wasn't being had.

Apparently you need an adwords account 'in good standing', I'm not sure what they mean by that because we do have an adwords account, and as far as I know and can see it is in 'good standing', only we're not advertising any more using google because we found that it isn't making enough money in return.

See:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1593898

I'd pay for analytics, it's a very useful service and I can't see the adwords angle, after all with something as vague as 'good standing' as the deciding factor how about simply charging for analytics?

I always figured that analytics was free because it provides google with useful data as well.

Maybe it's time to get my old stats suite dusted off and re-installed, I don't like operating against the TOS even if it is apparently something they'll let you get away with.

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Good standing doesn't seem to be vague to me really. Your account isn't violating some ToS, delinquent, etc... Most accounts are probably in good standing.

I wouldn't worry about this too much. It doesn't cut you off, just limits it to updating once per day (basically just a day behind). Its possible that your business/company is dependent on information from hourly reporting in realtime, and if that's the case you should probably augment GA with some other paid service or roll your own BI internally.

I think it is a bit weird (and points to a fairly serious lack of 'Chinese walls') that google would change the behavior of their analytics package based on your account for a completely unrelated offering.

I see adwords, adsense and analytics (as well as search) as unrelated offerings by google.

Analytics has always been tied to AdWords. There used to be a page-view-per-month hard cap that could be removed by linking to an active (spending $) AdWords account. AdWords integration is also pushed pretty heavily in the GA training material, and even in the certification exam. In the real world, there are quite a lot of people whose only experience with GA is optimizing CPC campaigns. Personally, I've never used it for that purpose, but Google pushes them as a bundle.

Funny, I've been using analytics, adwords and adsense for years (adwords not so much for the last two years or so) and I never clued in to that.

I wonder if I'm alone in that perception or if this is more common.

That's curious, because I was just at a talk by Alma Whitten who said that Google didn't use any of the GA data for profiling or ad-related stuff, and simply provided it as a service. Did I misunderstand her, or, possibly, you?

Even if they don't use it from their side to maximize the efficiency of displaying ads, they want you to use it to maximize your AdWords performance and/or AdSense revenue. They make it easy to link your account to your AdWords/AdSense account so that you can run tests and reports.

Alma Whitten might be uninformed. (Was this talk recorded? Do you have a link to it?) There are some options in the account UI that, if enabled, allow Google to do some analysis of your data.

Link directly to their help center: http://www.google.com/support/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&...

Ooh, okay, I think I see where the misunderstanding is: I was asking Alma (in questioning time at a talk at the IFIP/PrimeLife summer school ( http://www.cs.kau.se/IFIP-summerschool/program.html ), which was unfortunately not recorded) about website users' information, not the data of the website itself. Though it's a pretty fine line there, isn't it!

I told her that I blocked google analytics because I didn't want it to find out things about me for advertising etc. She responded saying that Google doesn't do that, but now that I think about it she was probably saying that Google doesn't profile me specifically, nothing about anonymised data... yeah, now I'm not so sure. :)

> I'd pay for analytics...

You could just take how much you'd pay for analytics and buy some ads. :-)

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