Google Analytics is one of the most used and user friendly website analytics software around and it totally free of cost. Google has just released the Google Analytics Opt-out Add-on for web browsers. The main objective of the add on is to tell Google Analytics Javascript (ga.js), not to send any information to Google Analytics. When this add on is enabled, data would not be sent from your computer to Google when you open a website which uses Google Analytics code in it.
By using this Add-on, you would be able to block data such as your IP address, browser information etc to Google Analytics Javascript. If you enable this Add-on your data will not be sent to the Google website analytics software and on the other hand if you disable this Add-on, data would be send to the Google Analytics software. Google has just released the beta version and is available for browsers such as Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome etc and can be downloaded from here http://tools.google.com/dlpage/gaoptout .
Google has always tried to maintain the reputation of its web site analytics software to be trustworthy for its users. The online analytics tool by Google has alway to preserve the privacy of its users along with making the tool more transparent for both website users and site owners.
This has created heated response from users all over the world and many have raised serious concern over this. Many fears that they will see a drop in the traffic numbers as per the Google web site analytics tool as Google Analytics would not be able to track the traffic details coming from browsers which has Google Analytics Opt-out Browser Add-on enabled. This add-on will surely make difficulties in generating accurate website traffic reports as they would not have any clue on the missing data.
This is certainly going to create issues to Internet marketing professionals such as SEOs, SMOs, SEMs, Web analytics professionals etc, who consider Google Analytics as their major source of online analytics. This might also prompt a few of them to turn to another website analytics software, but they might find it difficult to find a free tool as effective as Google Analytics.
In my opinion this Add-on will create some serious issues for those who are serious about their analytics stats and are in search of accurate data rather than relative data.
Thanks for sharing this Google Analytic tool. Hoping you will be there with more updates. :)
I think Google Analytics Opt-out Browser Add-on should have been released a long time ago. Good that it has come now and I am sure a lot of internet users are going to use it. Visit my blog – Techchai.com to read some more interesting facts.
Thanks for sharing this Google Analytic tool. Hoping you will be there with more updates. :)
The timing of this co-incides with the EU cookie directive kicking in. For many websites the only non-essential cookies are the GA ones. So Google either needed to produce a get out of jail fast card, like this. or risk a wholesale exodus from GA by European site over the next year or so.