The announcement of Google Analytics’s new features provided for free will radically shake up the web analytics field for any agency seriously considering or working in the online advertising arena. In my opinion, what used to be a very niche and expensive area will be suddenly available at a far lower cost and to a far larger amount of people leading to a kind of golden age in web data analysis.

The older data analysis through log servers or bulky web analytics packages force companies to spend thousands or millions of dollars every year that often required a programming level of skill such as Sql (sp?) or at the least RegEx (something I had to learn originally for Google Analytics). Google Analytics new features removes the need for such a skill level and brings the ability to provide detailed analyses to a larger amount of people who can quickly and effectively test many kinds of problems, solutions, or findings.

Yes, there will still be a need for the higher level of deep data analysis, but in terms of needing to run an online marketing campaign as efficiently and profitably as possible, Google has opened the floodgates to make this a reality without having to either have a programmer do everything for you or sit and wait on the incredibly slow bulky analytics packages.

I can now run analyses across multiple accounts by the same client in an effort to see if there is an on-going relationship between multiple online marketing channels without having to download the data and do a large amount of data merging with data crunching. In need of an ad hoc report or a hopefully brilliant idea came to mind to test? Google Analytics allows the ability to quickly test the idea without having to get someone else to run it for you or to wait on the data to be collected. The speed at which web analytics data can be analyzed has been reduced dramatically, which in turn should make data analysis as interesting as someone doing analysis within Microsoft Excel. In fact, if you know how to do custom filters in Microsoft Excel, you will find the advanced segmentation in Google Analytics very familiar.

All this analysis brings higher level analysis down to a simpler level—those that quickly jump on this wagon of web data analysis will be the first out of the gate—particularly if a culture is set up—and will win the day in the web’s hyper-competitive environment.