No, I don’t think Google needs more money. However, spending money typically has the benefit of leadership wanting to know what they’re getting from it. That would mean that people would have to start looking at their Google Analytics data to find out what they can learn in order to appease the boss.

Unlocking the Value of Google Analytics Data

They would soon find, the things they can learn can easily save or create thousands of dollars of revenue per month for a small to midsize business. So few small to mid-market businesses use Analytics appropriately that creating a system where an ongoing monthly payment is required, seems to be the best course of action to get their attention.

Ensuring Fair Treatment for Analytics Users

I don’t want to punish companies that are actually using Google Analytics appropriately.  That’s why I propose a waiver for companies that set up goal/conversion tracking and log in every once in a while.  See, I’m not crazy.

Addressing the Concerns of Small Businesses

As a small business owner, I know it’s ridiculous to ask Google to start charging companies for something that’s already free (they already did that when they took our ability to see which keywords people searched for and converted it into a lead/sale and moved it strictly to Adwords). I also know that Google may initially lose a number of companies to free sub-par analytic software, but inevitably everyone would come back.

The Potential Benefits of a Pay-to-Use Model

Here’s my thinking – enough companies would start paying attention and using Google Analytics appropriately to tell all of their friends about what they were able to do and get out of that data. They would learn how to track their leads appropriately, learn how to figure out which pages on their website need improvements and/or have inefficiencies, and they would learn how to use small amounts of data to make a large impact on their bottom line.

The Reality of Google’s Current Approach

Then again, I’m dreaming. Google is more than happy to continue collecting all of your website’s data, analyze it themselves, and make a huge amount of revenue from the data they glean.