Google announced this week that it was launching a from of events tracking, allowing web masters to track flash and social media elements and how their users interact with them (reported on the google analytics blog).
Is this something new? Something which will revolutionise the world of web analytics? No!
This functionality has been available through many other leading analytics packages, and is already available through Yahoo Web Analytics, the new challenger to Google analytics since Yahoo bought out Indextools. So why is it newsworthy?
Well, it shows that Google are serious about the whole analytics game, and that they are trying to build something competitive which has benefits aside from an ease of integration with AdWords. So far this, and the fact that it was free, were (and I suppose still are) the only reason to choose Google Analytics over the more advanced tools in the market. But since Yahoo made Indextools free after they bought the analytics tool, and since most tools can incorporate AdWords data in one form or another, this wasn’t going to last them for long.
So its a step in the right direction for Google and a shot across the bow for its competitors as they show signs of taking the analytics market seriously.
Google keeps improving their analytics solutions. I wonder what else is in development.