Google Data

As a product management intern with the Enterprise team this summer, I've seen a number of Mini customers use its reporting features to optimize their site and search - with great results - and it seems like a no-brainer to me to enable our customers to go a step further, using Google Analytics. Analytics is a sophisticated and free web analytics product that provides both key integrations with Google Adwords and comprehensive reporting on visitor behavior, content performance and e-commerce. Google Analytics is an easy-to-use, web-based system designed to reveal how users interact with your site and to help you improve your web presence. More often than not, we're finding that the customers who are concerned about search performance and who are purchasing Minis are the same customers who are turning around and using real usage data to optimize their websites.

So after only about a month here, I'm really excited to announce the completion of my first project - the distribution of free Google Analytics accounts to all current Google Search Appliance and Google Mini owners!

Google Analytics will help Enterprise customers answer questions like:

"What is my most popular content, the new product pages for our big release or the company party pictures?"

"Which Adwords are the most profitable, and which campaigns are best?"

"How popular is our user registration process, and how often do those who sign up then purchase a product? Or are users just after the free content?"

"We've heard internationalization is a good thing – but where are our visitors coming from and what technologies are they using to access our site? Wouldn't it be neat if we could visualize all of these visitors on a world map?"

If you're a customer, you can locate your very own account code by signing into your http://support.google.com/enterprise account and clicking on the Profile link on the left-side bar. Once you retrieve your account code, go to https://www.google.com/analytics/home/ and click on the "Sign Up Now" link. Upon filling in your account details and pressing the "Create my account," button, you'll be given the ability to enter your Analytics account code. Also on http://support.google.com/enterprise, you'll find a brief document which summarizes the advantages of Google Analytics and how to pair it with the Mini.

With the combination of the Google Mini or Search Appliance and Google Analytics, I expect we'll see a ton more success stories like the great ones in these customer videos.

Keep checking back!

-Matt Kulick