2025-11-14 | Article | Insights
Timo Aden, co-founder and managing director of Digitl, was one of Google's first employees in Germany for the product launch of Google Analytics in Europe in 2005.
In this personal review he tells about the journey of Google Analytics, from the acquisition of Urchin and the challenging free launch in 2005 to its evolution into today's essential, data-driven enterprise tool.
Today, data-driven marketing is taken for granted: We manage budgets based on KPIs and optimize campaigns in real time. Twenty years ago, this was a vague idea, and marketing was often purely a matter of gut feeling.
It was precisely during this time, in mid-2005, that I found myself in the application process at Google. I was applying for a position titled "Market Evangelist" – for a product that didn't yet exist and that I was completely unfamiliar with. The name Google Analytics hadn't even been coined. There was hardly any other information available; the word "Urchin" came up occasionally, but that was about all the concrete information I had at the time.
The only thing that was clear was that there would be a new product, and I would be part of its market launch in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, and Scandinavia. A European team was being assembled for this purpose.
After about 15 interviews with a wide variety of people at Google, I finally got the offer. I started at Google in Hamburg on January 1, 2006 – the beginning of a wild journey with a product that continues to be a big part of my life to this day.
In fact, this mysterious "Urchin" was the starting point for everything that followed. In March 2005, Google acquired the San Diego-based company Urchin (founded in 1997). The company name is a play on words referencing sea urchins (Urchin, meaning hedgehog; see logo), whose spines collect debris in the ocean, and was intended to symbolize the storage and analysis of website data. The web analytics tool provider was primarily active in the US market and had several thousand customers up to that point.
Urchin was a rather simple product, but with an innovative approach: it could measure entire Visits, while most competing products only counted individual Page views and Hits. The innovative aspect was the combination of two existing functions: server-side log file analysis and client-side JavaScript tagging.
The deal itself received little public attention. There was a press release, which was mentioned at most in the trade press. The purchase price was never disclosed, but estimates range from $20 million to $30 million. (For comparison, Google's split-adjusted stock price on that day was $4.51.)
Although Urchin was technologically fully integrated into Google's infrastructure, it never completely disappeared. To this day, we find a relic from that time in our daily lives: when marketers create campaign links, they use "utm parameters." "utm" stands for nothing other than...Urchin Tracking Module.
Between March and November 2005, Urchin was therefore "flattened" and rebuilt within the Google infrastructure.
On November 14th, the time had finally come: Google Analytics was launched globally. The real bombshell was that Google was launching the tool for free. This was unprecedented in this form.
At the time, around 30,000 registrations worldwide were expected. A day later, on November 15th, when Europeans also tried to access the tool, the server was completely overloaded. Demand had exploded so rapidly that the servers were nowhere near designed for such volume.
So the registration process was quickly discontinued. It was no longer possible to create new accounts.
Right around that time, I started my job in Hamburg. One of my first tasks was to maintain a simple Excel spreadsheet. This spreadsheet contained invitation codes that I could give to interested companies and agencies to gain access to Google Analytics. Unimaginable today, but people were practically begging for these codes. Everyone was very nice to me...
Only after a few months were the capacities upgraded, and Google Analytics was then freely available to everyone from 2007 onwards, just as it is today.
One must remember what the market looked like back then. At that time, there were indeed several web analytics tool providers, such as Omniture, Indextools, or HBX.
In the years following its launch, this market has consolidated enormously – many providers were acquired, disappeared from the market, or now exist in the shadows.
But the reality was: Most websites at that time used no Web analytics tool at all. Data-driven marketing strategies were virtually nonexistent – unimaginable today. Google Analytics filled this void and is now the undisputed market leader by a wide margin.
Free access and the resulting democratization of web analytics have had a huge effect – but the real strategic lever for the marketing industry was another innovative feature: the direct link between Google Analytics and Google Ads (back then it was called AdWords).
This has provided enormous added value, especially in online marketing departments, as this information simply wasn't available before. This combination of analytics and activation has, for the first time, enabled truly data-driven decisions.
The entire cycle could be tracked: Which ad led to which behavior on the website and which conversion? This transparency subsequently led to a significant increase in online marketing spending over time – success could suddenly be proven.
During my time at Google, a small Google Analytics team was formed in Europe. We took care of the product, implementations for major clients, and shared our web analytics knowledge with the market.
We were very hands-on in this process. For example, the initial German translation within Google Analytics was very poor. So, together with some colleagues, I improved the translation and, through this and my direct line to product management in the US, was able to influence the tool to some extent.
The product has evolved enormously over time. In the early years, many small features were added that now seem commonplace, such as exporting reports as PDFs, sending them via email, or the ability to display more than 100 lines in a single report. The on-premise solution (Urchin) was discontinued completely after some time.
Professionalism steadily increased over the years, leading to the launch of Google Analytics Premium as a paid option in 2011. This version removed many limitations, introduced SLAs, and added enterprise features such as raw data export and integration with BigQuery.
On March 15, 2016, this evolved into Google Analytics 360, which could then be integrated with the entire Marketing Suite (Display & Video 360, Search Ads 360).
Based on ongoing development, the focus of measurement has also changed drastically: Initially focused on page views and visits, it moved to visitors (in Universal Analytics) and today focuses on events (in the new GA4, which is now officially called Google Analytics again).
Today there are functionalities that one wouldn't have dared to dream of back then: cross-channel automatic cost data import, attribution, predictions, audience creation, app tracking (the iPhone didn't exist in 2005), modeling and AI.
But it's not just Google Analytics that has changed dramatically as a product – Google itself has too. In 2005, it had approximately 3,000 employees worldwide (today around 183,000), and revenue was just over $6 billion (today around $350 billion). At its German headquarters in Hamburg, perhaps 50 people worked at that time – today there are over 500 in Hamburg and over 2,500 in Germany.
Google Analytics is now well-established and firmly embedded in the majority of companies. As an essential component of marketing, managing a business without this tool is almost unimaginable.
Even after leaving Google, Google Analytics has always been a close companion of mine – in the meantime as a book author, blogger, podcaster and also as the founder of companies that focus on services in the field of digital analytics.
The Google Analytics roadmap looks more than promising for the coming months and years, and so I am looking forward to the next 20 years of Google Analytics.
Congratulations, Google Analytics!