Jascha's Blog

The freely available Google Analytics service has been wonderful for the Analytics Industry. It has made analytics accessible to nearly everyone whom has a website. Unfortunately, today, widespread reports indicate an international outage for Google Analytics, Gmail and possibly more services. This outage has serious impacts on websites around the world and the businesses they are in that their customers depend on. CNet’s coverage of the outage has a great quote from Twitter user Tadiera: “The Internet dies without Google. Can’t get to my bank Web site because it’s waiting on ‘google-analytics.com.’ This is made of lame.”

This isn’t the first time a Google outage has outraged users. There was the 2008 incident. And there was the 2007 incident. Interestingly, each has occurred at roughly the same time of year, but not sure if that’s anything more than coincidence.

As the old saying goes “You get what you pay for.” Thom Craver astutely points out that “I repeat what I wrote earlier this week: If you’re a large company, you do not want to rely on Google Analytics. At this point, the little guy is now suffering.”

It’s a constant challenge for small businesses to afford high reliability services. Free options are great until something negative happens. Then they are forced to do nothing but wait for the service to restore. In reality they aren’t paying for the service so an outage here and there shouldn’t be upsetting technically…try telling that to anyone using a service that goes down though.

It’s unacceptable, however, that large companies are using free software on mission critical operations like analytics. It’s not just about data loss, it’s also about a hanging Javascript that can cause a page on their site not to load, which interrupts customer facing business operations.

Google is not the only one that suffers reliability issues. Just this past January Omniture also left it’s customers in the lurch during it’s outages. As Forbes reported, “…customers of Omniture’s Web-based data services have experienced sporadic hiccups for days on end since the beginning of December, receiving data as much as two days late–long after it would be useful, in many cases.”

The fact is that both Google and Omniture sample their customers data to begin with. It should concern their customers that these providers are having outages even when they are pulling sampled data.

Webtrends has made significant investments in our infrastructure to ensure that these kinds of incidents don’t happen. Do a search on Google for Webtrends outage. The only thing you’ll find is a one hour outage from a customer that uses our software, not our hosted service. We know it’s not sexy to talk about SaaS and other backend infrastructure topics when everything is running smoothly. But, when s*%@t hits the fan, then our customers love us for our reliability, scalability, and availability.

Update: The best coverage of the Google outage today was from Larry Dignan on Between the Lines

Google explains what happened here on their Official Blog.

What a day! I spent it at the eMetrics conference in San Jose. It was really nice to see Jim Sterne continuing to evangelize the growth of the industry, to proselytize that this ‘this is our time’ as an industry, and as individuals, to step up and lead the maturation of our industry. It’s been great for me to have a chance to meet up with people I have a tremendous amount of respect for and don’t get to see every day like: David Alston, Douglas Karr, Anil Batra and I’ve had a chance to meet people that I’ve not had the chance yet like Jason Burby, Sean Powers and Richard Sim.

In all, it’s hard to find a more targeted audience that has the know-how, the experience, and the passion for analytics that this crowd does. At the same time, I was disappointed not to see more of our industry influencers here. It appears that the economy has taken it’s toll as I was told by the eMetrics staff that and that many attendees backed out at the last minute. Regardless, I was glad that I attended.

At events like eMetrics we talk about taking a step forward as an industry, together. Yet not everyone’s actions speak the same voice. In my observations I’ve seen some unfortunate behavior that I believe has the potential to kill the industry from the inside out if it isn’t culled. A few weeks ago, Omniture’s CEO Josh James called competitors in the industry ‘nuisances.’ Here in San Jose, Omniture decided to not wear our sponsored lanyards in favor of their own. I’m not sure if it is company policy or just in bad taste by the team in attendance but it is my opinion that respecting your competition means embracing them when it is appropriate. At an industry conference shedding something as innocuous as a sponsored lanyard in favor of your own is an unfortunate act.

I for one respect my competition. Their ideas, their capabilities, their people.

hang up the gloves to champion the industry

For example, I love what Google is doing with APIs. I wrote about it on my blog.  I applaud Google Analytics’ community evangelist Avinash Kaushik for publicly complimenting us in twitter and on our blog in a position piece about Webtrends Social Measurement and the sentiment tracking. It’s time we realize that if we don’t grow up and work together our industry will suffer as a whole. Standards, benchmarks, best practices, and models are our real challenges. Not so much each other. We still have market share to reach before we need to worry about a grudge match.

Today we offered the Digital Marketing Maturity Model (DM3) to provide a framework and objective criteria for assessing the strategies, skills, tools and best practices that support the successful measurement of all digital marketing activities. The other industry models focus exclusively on web site measurement. The Webtrends Digital Marketing Optimization team developed the model based on 15 years of experience helping top brands build successful measurement programs. We’d love to talk more with everyone about the DM3. We’d love to support work that our partners and competitors are doing to push this industry as a whole forward. What initiatives are you working on that you’d like to see more Webtrends support? What initiatives do you think we as an industry need to get behind?