- Image via Wikipedia
It truly amazes me when I hear clients and prospects dismiss Google Analytics as a second-tier analytics platform, unworthy of being mentioned alongside longtime titans like Omniture or Webtrends. That may have been the case a year or two ago, but it’s simply no longer a realistic viewpoint. Here are five reasons why:
1) Enterprise Features – Over the past year or so, Google Analytics has rolled out a bevy of features, such as advanced segmentation and custom reporting, which cater to sophisticated online marketers.
2) Google Analytics API – Though still in private beta, the new API offering promises to unleash a flood of new and dynamic reporting functionality. Our analytics team here at Zeta has been invited, and we are hard at work unlocking the API’s analytic goodness!
3) Usability – Whatever Google Analytics lacks in terms of functionality is more than made up for by its incredibily easy-to-use interface and search functionality. Unlike traditional analytics platforms, Google’s offering is fairly easy to implement and extremely easy to use. No need for high-end dev support and even the greenest online marketer can typically pull at least some high-level, actionable data.
4) Industry Trends – My colleague Rod Roudi recently shared an eMarketer study on analytics use in the United State. The study suggested that 53% of US marketers were using Google Analytics in May of 2008 (up 12% from May of 2007). What’s amazing about that is this data is that the uptick occurred prior to the release of the aforementioned Google Analytics enterprise functionality! Granted this study does not take into account the many enterprises that use both Google Analytics and another top-tier platform simultaneously, but the trend it identifies is still worthy of note.
5) Price – Duh! Unlike its five- and six-figure counterparts, Google Analytics has an incredibly attractive price tag – it’s free. Truly agile organizations are taking advantage of this fact by implementing Google Analytics’ enterprise features, cutting loose the pricier analytics providers, and using that extra marketing budget to, you know, engage in marketing.
*If you like what you’re reading, you can follow me on twitter at http://twitter.com/hugoguzman11
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{ 14 comments… read them below or add one }
Any idea how much traffic GA can handle? We’ve seen it do pretty well with 20 million monthly pageviews, but wonder if there is a cap.
Good question! I don’t believe that there’s any cap on traffic. Here at Zeta, we manage a variety of extremely high-traffic websites and none of them seem to have any issue with caps.
Interesting post. The main point is the price – incredible functionality for free. The only thing I don’t like is the idea of giving Google every singe piece of data about what’s happening on my website. Oh well.
By the way it would really improve your website readability if you increase the spacing between the lines of text. Just find the file style.css, scroll to the bit #content and enter the following line before the end bracket:
line-height: 1.5em;
You can adjust the number if you like.
Thanks for the feedback and the readability tip!
At an advanced Analytics seminar day i attended, it was suggested that more than 50,000 unique pages could cause problems in GA – even those sites that do don’t usually have daily traffic to all of those pages, so are ok. Also, if traffic is above 200,000, sampling occurs.
Google analytics is a great tool that should never be dismissed. Sure Google knows that much more about you but the data you get in return is extremely valuable.
Two concerns I have which maybe you can clarify:
1) GA uses 1st party cookies which is not as reliable/persistent as 3rd party cookies used by for example Webtrends
2) What about the concerns over data ownership with GA compared to paid for analytics? Are there ways round this?
All said I love GA for bits usability but have to use Webtrends at work which can be painful at times…and no standard bounce rate reporting!:(
Good questions juls!
I’ve done comparative analysis for GA vs Omniture, Webtrends, CoreMetrics, etc…and the bottom line is that a) while there are discrepencies, they are more or less statistically similar b) no two platforms generate the same data set (regardless of whether they use first-party or third-party cookies)
As for your second question, I guess I just find it unlikely that Google would suddenly withhold analytics data from the 1,000′s of companies (including many Fortune 500s). That sounds like it would lead to a massive lawsuit. Also, keep in mind that even top-tier providers like Omniture are prone to data outages: http://www.forbes.com/2009/01/20/omniture-web-analytics-tech-ebiz-cx_ag_0121omniture.html
Juls:
The solution I have seen for a company that wants to use Google Analytics yet still keep the data on hand for local usage/logging is to set your GA tracking code to “copy” your server all the data it sends to Google. This data can then be parsed with Urchin (if you buy a license), or by another program, or simply logged.
GA is far superior than Omniture. It costs 5 salaries a year less to set up, and they way it presents data actually makes sense! Omniture has crappy reports that need to be tweaked by PHD programmers before they make any sense at all… plus no out of the box bounce rates? no AVG Page view segmentations? seriously Omniture is useless Analytics tool. It is always in large companies where the top marketing VPs dont even understand the value of an analytics tool which is to get :INSIGHTS, not to mess around the technical aspects of installment.
Thanks for the post, and by the way, you may wanna update the GA pic to something more recent… that is the old urchin reporting images u got there.
Thanks for all of the great feedback and insight! Don’t hesitate to reach out to me at hguzman@zetainteractive.com or http://twitter.com/hugoguzman11 to talk more about GA.
Yes. It is very true that the “USABILITY” of GA is the best of what is available in the market today. We have been trying to understand ALL the available features of big guns like Omniture and Coremetrics but in vain
where as GA just needs a couple days to go through.
I was digital marketing manager for a large media company that had purchased Omniture simply because they figured as the most expensive it must be the best. I can’t tell you how frustrated I was with Omniture’s ‘out of the box’ lack of functionality for search marketing purposes. The only thing Omniture has going for it in my books is that it allows you to create very pretty reports for enterprise level reporting – i.e. things you might send to the CEO who isn’t involved directly in trying to improve performance, rather just wants to see results.
What?
I just stumbled across this posting and would like to correct a few points made specifically one point made by juls.
The fact that GA uses a first party cookie, while other options such as WebTrends, do not, is completely wrong. WebTrends was actually the first analytics provider to come out with a first party cookie, in 2008 – long before their comment.
This type of misinformation is a large portion of the reason that cookies have become a 4 letter word.
For somebody to sit there and claim that any major analytics suite is ‘useless’ (oggy) is equally as bad. I’m purely dedicated to WebTrends, however each analytics product has its own advantages and disadvantages. Its much like comparing Windows servers to *nix servers, both have their advantages and disadvantages and while one may be more comfortable with one, that doesn’t make the other useless.
As with any product, if you’re not familiar with it, not only will it not provide you the maximum benefit, but it will no doubt drive you mad. WebTrends (as one example) is an incredible tool, infinitely configurable as they say. But, if you don’t understand exactly what you’re doing, you can completely fubar your reports (essentially your entire installation). While I can understand the drawback to this approach, after many years working with Windows, the ability to do what I want, without the application telling me its a bad idea and not allowing me to do it, is refreshing. Unfortunately, this also causes it to be an extremely difficult tool to lean, and I don’t mean how to read reports (though that can be challenging occasionally). The best advice I can give, is if you aren’t sure about something, don’t do it!
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