Timberline Interactive

Hey, web merchant! How much do you trust your Google Analytics numbers?

Hopefully, plenty. You tag all your advertising links, and you've invested in enough due-diligence and debugging, so you're confident your data is clean and reliable. That's important, because analytics are how you assess and run your online business.

However, if you use Google Analytics (and the tool now owns a jaw-dropping estimated 80% share of the analytics market), your numbers are about to get less reliable.

That's because Google today announced, in response to privacy concerns, that it will be introducing browser plug-ins to let individual web users opt out of being tracked by Google Analytics. If such opt-out visitors come to your store, they won't register as a visitor. If they buy, search, whatever . . . Nada. They're not part of your data.

It remains to be seen how popular such opt-out behavior becomes. After all, as any web merchant knows, the data captured by Google Analytics is anonymous and contains no personal information of any kind. But if hordes of web users start opting out, your Google Analytics numbers will be worth about what Google charges you to use GA: nothing.