A posting on Seo-Scene.de led me to an article by Mario Fischer about Google Analytics and privacy. In essence its about the possibility that Google, by merging data, could assign IP-addresses to individuals. In itself this is an interesting discussion but I do not want to go into details. This article led me to take a look at how widespread the distribution of Google analytics is on the German-speaking Internet. For this undertaking I have taken a look at the front page and a few pages beneath of about one million German-speaking domains (for Olaf: to be exact, it were 1.176.638 domains). The result looks like this
I was able to find the Analytics-code in 129.344 domains, which is about 11 percent. This is already a considerable amount. It gets even more interesting when we look at the pages that integrate Analytics or Google AdSense. Since Google’s JavaScript-integration of AdSense gives them the same data mining possibilities as with Analytics, we should not entertain the illusion that they would not use it:
with 208.721 domains or roughly 18 percent, Google should have more coverage than any other service on the German Internet. It would be interesting to know how many users Google reaches with this amount of coverage. I would wager that the numbers are even higher since sites with a trend towards high user counts are likely to integrate Analytics/AdSense. Sadly I do not have enough time to check this today, maybe I will get to the bottom of this later.
