Is this the beginning of the end for Google Analytics?

Posted on March 19th, 2010. Written by Jamie Northrup.

Like many webmasters out there, I use Google Analytics to track the traffic to my website so I can know who is going where and from where.

These stats tell me what is working and for who it’s working, so that I can know which aspects of my websites need work and which are successful.

Yesterday, via this post on their official blog, Google Analytics announced:

Over the past year, we have been exploring ways to offer users more choice on how their data is collected by Google Analytics. We concluded that the best approach would be to develop a global browser based plug-in to allow users to opt out of being tracked by Google Analytics. Our engineers are now hard at work finalizing and testing this opt-out functionality. We look forward to make it globally available to our users in the coming weeks.

So what does this mean? Is it over, will their stats still be worth something?

I have to believe that first it will all depend on how many people will download and activate this plug-in to opt out. It may hurt small websites a lot more than bigger ones as they already have less data to work with, but in the end, there is always other tracking software out there, but none that we have found to be as easy, effective and cheap (free) as Google Analytics. Let’s hope this doesn’t spark a huge following of people, and we can all still use our stats to know what we are doing right or wrong.