Google offers free analytical online tools starting today

Google plans to introduce today free analytical tools for online publishers and marketers, a move that would help the company’s clients get a better sense of Web site traffic patterns and advertising campaigns.

Online analytic tools help publishers determine how often people have viewed certain pages and clicked on certain links within those pages. The free services will be integrated into Google’s lucrative AdWords program, in which marketers for, say, wrenches, pay to have their ads appear near search results whenever online users search for "automotive tools."

Google Analytics will crunch numbers on behalf of users, telling them how often visitors who saw an ad associated with "automotive tools" clicked on the ad, versus those who searched for "hardware stores."

Google Analytics will also allow publishers and marketers to analyze the performance of non-Google ad campaigns, like e-mail marketing, banner ads or search ads on Yahoo, MSN or any other search engine. That service is free even if companies do not advertise with AdWords, as long as their users do not view more than 5 million Web pages in a given month.

By Bob Tedeschi
New York Times News Service

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