I think it comes down to protecting your data from the chances of it being used by the US government. This is a pretty unlikely scenario but there are lots of European concerns that covert industrial spying could be taking place via cloud solutions owned by US concerns even when hosted in foreign countries. Third party agreements are quickly ignored when the national security card is played. Obviously there is a lot of paranoia here but there have been enough press reports regards PRISM etc that people are starting to wonder if the cloud is really worth giving up your data freedom for. Remember that a web analytics service will record the IP addresses of anyone who uses your service as well as the URLs the are looking at. Probably to most of us this is not a concern but possibly for access to health and other sensitive services it could be. Another concern is the use of cookies which can be abused to track access across the whole of the web. I think it mainly comes down to privacy concerns and whether you are comfortable with a third party knowing who is accessing your site and what they are accessing.

It is difficult for many SME institutions to pay for web analytics tools. One South African institution has used Google Analytics over almost a decade with interesting results Article The Mandela Portal – an assessment of global visitors using ...