Upon entering my Google Analytics account this evening, I was presented with a new request.
Google Analytics Data Sharing:
“In order to improve your experience with Google products, Google Analytics is updating its data sharing policy. You now have the ability to share your Analytics data with other Google services. This will improve integration, enable additional features in Google’s advertising services (including Google Analytics, AdWords and AdSense) and improve your experience with these products.”
The big question is: What do I get in return?
I’m all about open source and open information, but they’re not really selling me on this one. If you go by the explanation above, it sounds like I get to improve Google. They can do this without me, I’m sure. There’s also a bunch of fluff about improving my experience with their other services. “Additional Features”? How about a link?
My fear for this new “feature” is that it will be accepted by all of the less savvy Google Analytics users, while the businesses that took the time to set up their analytics accounts properly will decline to share. If that’s the case, how valuable will the data be?
The Google Analytics Blog has a good writeup of what this is all about. It would have been nice if there was a link to this post from the opt-in message so I could check it out before sharing my analytics information.
This might actually be useful, but I think it will take a month or so before we have anything useful to compare.
I’m very interested to find out if anyone else is using this feature. If you’ve enabled the benchmarking feature and have gleaned useful information from it, please share it with us.
What is everyone else thinking about sharing your Google Analytics information with others?