Knowing where your visitors are coming from and what they are doing once they get to your site is one of the keys to successful online marketing. The problem is that good analytics don't come cheap. Or rather, they didn't use to. The folks at Google have decided that it's time to change that and have taken a popular analytics option and turned it into a no-cost solution for web site owners.

The web analytics program that used to be known as Urchin has now been renamed Google Analytics and the $199 a month price tag has been dropped. The service is now free for any web site logging up to 5 million page views a month and has no limit for sites that are registered AdWords advertisers. Because Google Analytics integrates so closely with AdWords, users are able to do ROI analysis on their campaigns without ever having to import or export data.

Google Analytic's tracking features aren't limited to AdWords ads either. Users can track email campaigns, advertising campaigns and standard search referral information on the site.

From CNet coverage:

Google Analytics will let Web site owners see exactly where visitors to their site are coming from, what links on the site are getting the most traffic, what pages visitors are viewing, how long people stay on the site, which products on merchant sites are being sold and where people give up in multistep checkout processes, said Paul Muret, an engineering director at Google and one of the founders of Urchin.

Google Analytics also includes a feature that automatically imports the cost data for return on investment reports into the Google Analytics program so advertisers can see how much they're paying for keywords compared with how much money they're making off them, Muret said.

"This has the potential to be a pretty big deal," Eric Peterson, a senior analyst at JupiterResearch, said of the news. "They made the acquisition earlier this year and are trying to think of good ways to take advantage of it. It is probably a no-brainer."

In the meantime, Greg Drew, CEO and president of WebTrends responded the news with the following statement:

"Today, Google announced a free web analytics service to add value to AdWords advertisers, and just like Gmail it offers simple, self-service style capabilities to small businesses," said Greg Drew, CEO and president, WebTrends Inc. "Our customers know that enterprise organizations require more than just a set of reports to measure a campaign or understand site traffic. Marketing analytics are mission-critical and enterprise customers need a consultative organization that helps them turn insight into action to improve their business results, which requires industry expertise and services, solution flexibility and organizational trust - - three reasons why WebTrends 7 is the most widely adopted enterprise-class web analytics solution on the market today."