Google Analytics Market Share
Since Metric Mail makes use of the data that Google Analytics provides, we wanted to estimate the share of websites that use it. There are some studies about the market share of analytics solutions, but they are using rather small samples.
That’s where we get down to the nitty-gritty.
Alexa is kind enough to provide a list of the Top 1 million domains as currently ranked by their service.
We used their data as a starting point for our research. There is a discussion about the reliablilty and accuracy of their data, but we figured it is still the best source that is easily available.
In the next step we imported the data in Google App Engine’s data store. Just in case you ever want to import a million rows, it takes a long time ;) Around two days in our case.
For the actual process we needed to retrieve each site and then look for patterns of Google Analytics. On the one hand, there is the identifier that Analytic’s uses e.g. UA-12345-123. On the other hand there is the Javascript snippet that website owners need to embed in order to make Analytics work.
Since the App Engine team recently released the Mapper API, we decided to make use of this new API. For more info on the Mapper API check out their project site and the fantastic article on Nick Johnson’s blog.
Without further ado, here are the results after 8 days and 5 hours of processing:
- Number of websites successfully checked: 883194 (responded within 10 seconds)
- Number of Google Analytics profiles found: 441207
- Market share in the Top 1m: 49.95%
We hope you find this information as useful as we do. In case you haven’t done so yet, check out Metric Mail and let us know what you think.
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