My colleagues and I have observed an interesting trend over the past few months; more and more Fortune 1000 prospects and clients are buying into Google Analytics.
A year ago, virtually none of the companies that we worked with used Google Analytics as a primary analytics platform. In fact, few even considered GA as a viable alternative. Instead, most companies stuck with well-known analytics brands like Omniture and CoreMetrics or approached new-fangled outfits like UNICA, which fancy themselves as comprehensive marketing management solution, capable of delivering intelligence across all online and offline marketing channels.
Interestingly enough, though, a lot of the companies that we worked with started to recognize some fundamental flaws with these “enterprise” level analytics providers. First and foremost, the price tag associated with these platforms was painfully high. Often surging into the six-figure range, cash-strapped marketing departments started feeling the pinch. Secondly, most of these platforms required extremely tedious and time-consuming implementations for both new installs and upgrades. That’s bad news for organizations in desperate need of solid and refined success metrics.
Lastly and perhaps most importantly, these platforms were often likened to high-performance jet fighters or formula one roadsters. In other words, while the performance levels were extremely high, very few expert-level administrators were capable of actually operating the controls.
Here’s where Google Analytics stepped in.
Slowly but surely, Google began adding enterprise-level features to their analytics suite. Couple that with an inherently user-friendly interface, a headache-free implementation, and an incredibly attractive price tag ($0) and it became clear that GA could take the place of those pricey and cumbersome heavyweights.
This year alone, we helped several high-profile clients steer away from pricier options and towards company-wide implementations of Google Analytics, and the beauty was that in each case, the client was able to take GA for a free test drive before making the executive decision.
In 2009, Zeta is hard at work transitioning a new batch of clients and prospects to this platform. Google Analytics isn’t a perfect platform, but with enterprise-level features and the ability to track everything from search to affiliates to email, it’s getting better and better all the time.
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Hi Hugo, thanks for the article. I’m an SEO Specialist in Costa Rica. I just have a question: Should we be concerned about data privacy when using Google Analytics? What’s the difference with paid web analytics then? As far as I know many Companies where worried about data privacy, even some SEO guru’s have mentioned that you can use Google Analytics as long as you don’t mind sharing your data.
great news, it matches with a project ive started that will start with what the top 1000 companies are using, and will also use some other stats to show relationships between analytics solutions and dev platforms and also website traffic.
nice post good luck in 2009
More companies would use Google Analytics if the analytics is real time instead of 24 hours delay.
Thanks for all the feedback!
@SEO Best Practices – good question. I guess I would argue that Google already has a lot of data on most businesses, regardless of whether or not they use Google Analytics. After all, they can mind their search query data as well as all the ad-serving data they acquired via the purchase of DoubleClick.
Google has general data, but they do not have conversion data on most companies. By giving Google your conversion data you are doing yourself a great disservice. If you don’t mind giving that info away for free, I’ll take it too, and I am no threat compared to Google. More than likely they control over 50% of your traffic.
I appreciate your concern, but you’re verging on conspiracy theory at this point. Google does not gain access to your conversion data (via Google Analytics) unless you opt in to share that data with them.
Hi,
blog.zetainteractive.com to GoogleReader!
Thanks
Jinny
Nice, no advice.
hey dude.. great post.. thanks
I’m amazed at the number of businesses which do not use any solution to track web visits and marketing campaigns. I guess some people just do not care..or at least do not have the motivation to care.
Your blog is so informative … ..I just bookmarked you….keep up the good work!!!!
I’m Out!
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