At Google we like to create solutions for the future. And we imagine a future where web use won’t be restricted simply to Earth. Rather, people will want to visit their favorite sites while cruising around the rings of Saturn with friends or relaxing at the (inevitable) Mercury tanning facility.
When the galaxy is our playground, marketers, analysts and webmasters will want to understand location use beyond Earth. For example, if you had a chain of taco stands and noticed many users visiting your website from the Mars outpost, well, that might help you make a business case to begin expanding your business to serve Mars colonists.
That’s why today we’re announcing a sneak preview of our new Interplanetary Reports. While currently you only get a partial picture of website visitor location, we want to expand beyond Earth to help you understand visitor activities from neighboring stars and planets. You’ll also be able to drill down on each planet to see greater detail. For example, which colony or outpost your visitors came from similar to the city drill down available for Earth today.
In order to help you improve slow interplanetary site speed we’re also adding an average page load time to this report to help you understand latency issues caused by distances between planets.
When you slice and dice the data from these new reports, you might discover some interesting things. For example, we noticed a direct correlation between gravity and site bounce rate. Visitors coming from the moon bounced 6 times higher than those from earth.
We figured you might have questions. So, following is a quick FAQ for current Google Analytics users:
When will the new reports be released?
The new reports are scheduled to be released to all users starting in the year 2030, when we anticipate local space travel becomes widespread.
How far across space will the new reports track?
We’ll start by tracking location from as far away as the Andromeda Galaxy, however as light speed travel becomes more widespread we’ll be integrating new (patent-pending) technologies to track visitors from greater locations.
Does Google Analytics plan to also segment traffic by species?
Non-human traffic is something we’ve been thinking about. As we work together with our space-faring friends, we’ll be introducing a new section within demographics to take into account any new species discovered.
We hope you’re as excited as we are to explore the galaxy and also keep connected to the web. After all, updating your space logs (slogs) should be a social activity that users from across the galaxy can comment on, share, and of course measure.
- The Google Analytics team
photo courtesy NASA/JPL-Caltech
