A large number of website webmasters use Google analytics religiously, but majority of marketers and SEO specialists are often wondering if Google is really using all his data. If they do, what do they use it for? and is it worth all the trouble in SEO?
The thing is, Google never fully discloses analytics data, and people can only hazard a guess. Fortunately for us, simply looking at Google’s business decisions now that Larry Page is at the helm, will give you the impression that they are indeed using the data. But before you jump for joy, consider the following first:
Conference attendees usually try to use panel discussions to get Google engineers to confess whether they are using exit rate, bounce rate, time on site and other factors but most of the time, asking these specific questions gives the engineers the means to prepare and sidestep the questions with carefully chosen words. Instead of trying to find out factors that we can exploit, we need to find the answers to a much more important question: Is data from Google analytics actually useful when it comes to search engine ranking? It is highly unlikely that Google focuses on a single aspect when ranking pages. It instead takes into consideration several factors in order to determine overall quality of the site. This is why Google engineers tend to encourage us to stop focusing on specific factors and instead look at our sites with broad strokes and a much bigger perspective.
When Larry Page was put in charge, one of the biggest changes he has implemented is the closing of some of Google’s less (or non) profitable departments, such as Google Labs. That is not to say that Google is no longer interested in innovation, rather they are being more practical in their approach. They prioritize making projects cost-effective, and has shortened the amount of they give to projects for reaching that point.
In the case of Google Analytics, the required investment in money, hardware, software, and manpower just to maintain the service is significant, even for a company the size of Google’s. With Larry Page’s more profit-oriented approach, it is very easy to deduce that Google Analytics is still here because Google is using the data it provides.