CogBlog
In 1997 I co-founded COGBOX in with Michelle DeCol. Since then we've offered online marketing, web development and corporate and brand identity to a wide range of clients. Here I post thoughts and comments on search marketing, recent projects, and other things I find interesting.
Google announced this week that they are now offering Urchin Analytics as a free tool to site owners everywhere. Earlier this year Google bought Urchin and promptly lowered the price from $495/month to $199/month. Now under a new name, Google Analytics, the service will be free to all for the first 5,000,000 page views/month. Google AdWords advertisers will have unlimited free service limits.
The main problem with this announcement was that it caught all current Urchin customers completely by suprise. The Urchin site went down, Google Analytics went up in it's place. Accounts stopped working, traffic stopped being recorded until updates were made to each and every customer site, links were broken on the Urchin/Google site.
It seems in their enthusiasm to paste the Google name on Urchin, Google completely overlooked many, many issues that should have been well thought through before flipping the switch. Now they've closed the new account sign-up until they can get their house in order.
By handling things they way they did Google has:
1. completely alienated their existing Urchin customer base
2. devalued their own product
3. generated huge PR, only to ensure the first experience of any new customer is a bad one
4. shown the business world that they have a lot of growing up to do as a company
Free services are great, but as a business that relies on partners like Google, I'd rather pay and expect good service for my money.
The main problem with this announcement was that it caught all current Urchin customers completely by suprise. The Urchin site went down, Google Analytics went up in it's place. Accounts stopped working, traffic stopped being recorded until updates were made to each and every customer site, links were broken on the Urchin/Google site.
It seems in their enthusiasm to paste the Google name on Urchin, Google completely overlooked many, many issues that should have been well thought through before flipping the switch. Now they've closed the new account sign-up until they can get their house in order.
By handling things they way they did Google has:
1. completely alienated their existing Urchin customer base
2. devalued their own product
3. generated huge PR, only to ensure the first experience of any new customer is a bad one
4. shown the business world that they have a lot of growing up to do as a company
Free services are great, but as a business that relies on partners like Google, I'd rather pay and expect good service for my money.
1 Responses to “When Free is Not the Best Price”
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Great points Chris! Not only this, but do people realize that with GA, they may be showing Google exactly how many sales they have and what their ad cost per sale is.
This is kind of scary considering that with a clever algorythm Google could easily figure out how to maximize their revenue from each and every Adwords account based on how much the business appears to be earning.
I have a real problem with sharing that kind of data with the same company that I am spending advertising dollars with. Talk about a conflict of interest.