The move encourages federal websites to utilize cloud-based apps.
Government agencies in the U.S. can now use the free web analytics tool offered by Google. This week, Google Analytics got approval to be listed in the Apps.gov site, which lists approved cloud-based tools.
In the announcement on the Google Analytics blog, Google took great care to assure that privacy standards would be maintained. As you can imagine, Google having access to a bunch of web traffic data for government website might raise some privacy concerns.
Google worked with the US federal General Services Administration (GSA) to make sure Google Analytics is compatible with federal websites.