The news of the debut of Google Analytics reached the online world yesterday and promptly brought the service to its knees. But on day two the service is performing well and reveals a capability that promises to put to rest some of the arguments against the lack of cost performance measurement raised against Google's AdWords and AdSense capabilities. With a very simple piece of code that can be inserted into each Web site's page, Google Analytics will spew out well-designed reports to help Web site owners to understand in detail how their traffic is converted into purchasing opportunities and effective content traffic. Reports can be optimized for a marketing view or a content view and include graphics and lists of visits by pageviews, new and returning visitors, source and geographic distribution, with varying levels of detail. The detailed reports a wide variety of views for executives, marketers and webmasters, including CPC program analysis, CPC versus organic conversion, keyword conversion and other views critical for understanding the value of online marketing and advertising campaigns.

While easy to use on its outermost layer Google Analytics appears to provide a very rich level of analysis that will help advertisers to maximize their ad investments more easily than ever before. This will be one more nail in the coffin of advertising and online directory services that do not offer up optimal ad performance. While there's no guarantee that Google's ads will out-perform the competition every time having data such as this at its disposal will give them enormous power to understand and optimize their advertising tools for a wide variety of audiences and advertising needs. Score one yet again for Google in the vision and power columns, with the performance column being up for grabs but bolstered significantly by the presence of a powerful tool that will help them to understand what it takes to win at the performance game on a very broad and detailed basis.