Well, this should make things interesting in the old traffic-tracking game. MeasureMap, which has been in what some have called “permanent beta” for awhile now, has been absorbed acquired by Google. I haven’t used MeasureMap, since apparently I wasn’t deserving enough to get invited into the beta, but I’m curious why the search company would want to acquire the service when it just acquired Urchin and relaunched it as a free service called Google Analytics.

I managed to get into that one before a tidal wave of users swamped it, and I find it extremely useful – although I admit I kind of like much simpler tools such as MyBlogLog too. Google Analytics is filled with stuff that is aimed at marketers who want to “optimize” their “conversion rate,” whatever that means. But it’s a lot of fun to see that people have hit my blog from Ecuador or Vanuatu and places like that. Why? Who knows. Entry and exit points are also interesting to note, and search keywords too (although I want to point out that the latter has nothing to do with me mentioning naked co-ed snooker in every post).

As Paul Kedrosky observes, this could make a lot of other companies going after the same space – such as Webtrends or Mint or BlogBeat – more than a little nervous. Some of those who have tried MeasureMap, including Kareem and Pete Cashmore, say it’s pretty good and “beautifully designed.” (although subject to outages, likely from server overload issues). Good luck to the rest – it’s hard to compete with the GoogleBorg.

Note:

Mike Arrington makes a good point – it’s interesting that MeasureMap is being bought before it is even out of beta. Dennis at TechDirt calls it “hiring by acquisition.” And Mark Boulton has a nice comparison of MeasureMap, Google Analytics and Mint here (hat tip to Mark Evans).