Ask HN: Why is Google Analytics free?

Google Analytics is a way for Google to buy massive amounts of web traffic data in exchange for some pretty charts.

They use the data if sharing is enabled, which is the default mode: http://www.google.com/support/analytics/bin/answer.py?answer...

It's strategically useful for them to have so much visibility into the web.

I read an article pertaining to a similar topic to this about why, for the most part, all the services that Google offers the public are free and it really is the fact that Google, at its heart, is a marketing firm first. Every feature they offer you is designed not to generate profit so much as it is to keep you with them. By giving away their services for free it obviously increases their brand name, encourages brand loyalty, but also levels the playing field. They set the bar by offering these services for free. No one will pay for a service that is at least comparably offered for free. For this reason if Google makes gmail free then every other website has to offer their mail services for free, the same goes with Google Calendars, and all of the other apps they offer. Why would they want everyone to offer their apps for free? Because then the difference between them and Yahoo or Bing or any other site is on marketing abilities and few companies in the world come close to challenging Google's marketing capabilities.

Allegedly they don't take information from analytics. (Most of the important metrics they could probably get from something like G-bounces (when you press the back button and go back to the results page) or other sources like data from Chrome or social data.)

It's free b/c it helps marketers measure and optimize their Adwords spend, and justify it to their managers. (Most search advertising requires cumbersome custom tagging - in Google Analytics, Adwords is basically integrated automatically or with one click.)

It gives them direct insight into a whole lot of websites that don't/can't/won't use AdSense.

I don't know if they actually use the data for anything but I've read it's not used at all for search results.

Brett Cosby (founder of Urchin / Google Analytics) was interviewed by the Stanford Entrepreneurial Thought Leader seminar. He touches on why Analytics is free, as well as a weath of other interesting information:

http://ecorner.stanford.edu/authorMaterialInfo.html?mid=1905

It drives sales for AdWords.

To sell more ads. That's the answer for why most things online are free.

Because they mine the everliving shit out of the data for improving ranking algos and getting people to buy more ads