How Google Analytics could enable competitors to siphon off your customers
Do you sell things online? Imagine Google could track every visitor to your site and display ads for your competitors when they visit Google.
Giving Google access to your customer base in this way would be a questionable bargain because Google adwords enable competitors to siphon away your customers. But this is exactly what Google Analytics could do.
Unlike Adsense, the Analytics terms of service do not prevent Google from tieing visitors to your site with visitors to Google search. So if your site sells bicycles and you use analytics, Google can display competing bicycle ads on Google.com to your visitors.
Google isn’t running analytics as an exercise in charity. Is the difference in terms of service just an oversight or coincidence?
5 Comments so far
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Google has a facility in Adwords to prevent the adverts of competitors being displayed. The responsibility is on you to specify which domains/sites belong to a competitor, but the facility exists.
By Matthew on 11.16.05 2:05 am
My point exactly, Google has competitor blocking in Adwords but not in Google Analytics.
Adwords also promises, unlike Google Analytics, not to associate users on your site with Google search users.
By philbo on 11.16.05 11:46 am
[…] [Update: An additional concern about the terms of service is that appear to allow Google to track users from your site to the main Google search and present competing ads there, see here for more.] […]
By Bogle’s Blog » Google Analytics and End User Privacy on 11.17.05 3:03 pm
Sure you got a point. Google could target your customers with competitors ads on Google.com.
However this is not, I believe, really what Google’s up to.
Nope, the case is that Google analytics helps Google serve you the right ads on _adsense sites_, pushing up the price of advertising, defending themselves against not-so-knowingly competitors as I just put it on my blog:
http://newmediatrends.fdim.dk/2005/12/google-analytics-helps-google-serve.html
By Jon Lund on 12.03.05 1:20 am
[…] Also, compared with Google, Performancing is less likely to be able to use the information they harvest to work against publishers interests. […]
By Bogle’s Blog » Performancing Metrics on 03.17.06 6:41 pm
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