Google Analytics Premium, Enterprise, and Disruptive Innovation

Google Analytics Premium was announced today. Finally. It wasn’t really a secret.

What do you get for an enterprise fee?

Dedicated support, a number to call, no data caps, some attribution modeling (nice), and now, 50 custom variables.

There’s good literature around disruptive innovation in web analytics, with a very specific vocabulary and model build around.

Is this disruptive or incremental?

• The increase to 50 custom variables is purely an increment on an established dimension.

• Enterprise support is incremental from the previous version of support. They did have a type of support. It was vague. But it was there. So that’s an increment.

• Increasing data caps is incremental.

• The guarantees are incremental. There was protection in the past. There’s more protection now.

• The attribution modelling is a new. It could be disruptive.

Is attribution modelling disruptive?

It’s certainly a new competitive dimension. It’s likely to be far more transparent than most MMM firms. And it’s a natural extension of Google’s core competency. It helps people understand why things are happening. Original features that assists people in making better decisions down the line could, potentially, probably, be considered disruptive.

Watch this feature.

It’s squarely in their sweet-spot.

Industry

Fan boys abound. Omniture Fan Boys will point out a superior report builder and data slicing capabilities. Coremetrics Fan Boys will point out usability differences and a superior eCommerce support. Webtrend Fan Boys (you tireless people) will argue it’s the best from a compliance standpoint for government. Google Analytics fan boys will scream ‘game changer!’.

Google Analytics was always a reasonable alternative to Omniture and Coremetrics. (I did my first enterprise install of GA in 2008.) There was just a lot of discomfort within enterprise on support. It persisted. It drove preference. The last of those specific enterprise concerns are now addressed.

In effect, the incremental improvements are along known primary dimensions, and allows them to compete better.

You, The Customer

There’s value if you’re an enterprise manager.

For 95% of the user base, the release isn’t aimed at you.

When firms compete, you win.

Towards Disruption

The Adobe Vision was that designers would value analytics, and that synergies would be realized through integration.

The Google Vision is to assist people in making better websites, better experiences, and better results through data. They believe in democratic data access.

The IBM Vision is sense making.

Each vision contains a bias about which dimensions are most important, and most likely to generate a sustainable competitive advantage. The vision is a grand hypothesis.

Which do you buy into?


Credit where due

Phil Mui, WAA Research Committee member and group product manager over at Google, has an excellent track record of both incremental feature improvement and some disruptive innovation. I congratulate him and his team for getting this out and launched.