Search Marketers Overwhelmingly Use Web Analytics

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As we see in this chart, just about every size and kind of marketer uses analytics for search. There is simply no good excuse not to. Google Analytics is free (up to a point), and using it to incorporate conversion into optimization can save massive amounts of money.

As of May 2009, 85% of the search analytics users we surveyed use Google Analytics, and that’s a 29% increase over the year prior. Google Analytics was designed to give the long-tail of medium and small web publishers a free way to get better at PPC marketing. This is, of course, very much to Google’s benefit since it is the largest seller of PPC advertising on the planet.

That bit of self-interest aside, considering that it is free, Google has produced an amazingly full-featured analytics program. Larger sites that need a little more analytical firepower seem to be turning to Omniture, but many of them also have tags in place for multiple analytics programs.