Acoustic Tealeaf vs. Google Analytics

Tealeaf is a must for any site that has a key business process that drives revenue for a company. It is not limited to only capturing a small percentage of visitors to your site, it captures every visitor to your site. A lot has changed to the last year for Tealeaf for the good. There are many more options to for capturing data including a cloud and SaaS offering. Take a look again if you haven't seen it in a while.

Google Analytics is particularly well suited for tracking and analyzing customer behavior on a grocery e-commerce platform. It provides a wealth of information about customer behavior, including what products are most popular, what pages are visited the most, and where customers are coming from. This information can help the platform optimize its website for better customer engagement and conversion rates. However, Google Analytics may not be the best tool for more advanced, granular analysis of customer behavior, such as tracking individual customer journeys or understanding customer motivations. In these cases, it may be more appropriate to use additional tools or solutions that provide deeper insights into customer behavior.

• Speed of searching for web sessions and users. This particular feature seems to impress me the most. When researching incidents where users report to have difficulty on our site, all we need is any of the unique identifiers of a user (email address used, IP address, user id) and we can locate their session(s) almost immediately in TeaLeaf.
• Multiple conditional events - I really like how we can have events contain already existing events. This helps a great deal if issues being researched become even more complex.

• Multiple reports to see website use and behavior
• Allows you to customize reports with days, weeks, months, and years
• You can build out a dashboard to easily view stats from multiple websites in one place
• You can share analytics reports via the dashboard, automatically emailed PDFs or in other formats

Incentivized

• IBM is still working out a solution for seeing Mobile App traffic in Tealeaf. What they have now allows you to see the response and request, but it doesn't show where the customer is actually clicking. They've promised that newer versions will be better with this.
• Tealeaf is pushing a web based viewer, trying to make this the standard over the more robust and extremely useful desktop based Tealeaf Viewer. the Web Based viewer is slow and clunky and just not as flexible, but IBM insists on pushing customers towards it. Last I heard, they plan for their mobile solution to only work in the web based viewer.
• Recently IBM moved all the support documentation for Tealeaf to the IBM Support portal instead of Tealeaf.com where it has been for years. This completely broke the in application Tealeaf Help. At the time of my last use of Tealeaf near the end of November 2013, when you tried to search help from the Tealeaf web portal, you were sent to the IBM support site, and once you logged in, the search request was lost and you had to start the search again. The search of the help files is also nowhere near as good as the original tealeaf.com help site. Also, if your users tried to use help, they were out of luck because only the Tealeaf Admins have access to the IBM support portal. At first they insisted that they were not going to fix this for older versions of the software, but instead only release a fix when the next version of Tealeaf was release. There was a large discussion about this on the LinkedIn forum and IBM has said they're working on a solution, but I'm not sure when/if that will get release.

• Data sampling is somewhat inaccurate on the free tier - this is addressed in premium but is expensive.
• Some of the UI is very similar in naming when presenting different data, some in-situ information might be useful.
• Gotchas around filtering and data validation.
• Implementation can be tricky, it can take a lot of time and expertise to get a full, accurate picture of your metrics.

Incentivized

Tealeaf is a scalable product that works with complex user-facing environments. It is one of the leading products in the market that helps identify user pain points and increases defect identification. The user interface is simple, clean, and easy to use. Lastly, Tealeaf Support provides good customer service and is eager to help solve chalenges we face along the way.

We will continue to use Google Analytics for several reasons. It is free, which is a huge selling point. It houses all of our ecommerce stores' data, and though it can't account for refunds or fraud orders, gives us and our clients directional, real time information on individual and group store performance.

Incentivized

Google Analytics provides a wealth of data, down to minute levels. That is it's greatest detriment: find the right information when you need it can be a cumbersome task. You are able to create shortcuts, however, so it can mitigate some of this problem. Google is continually refining Analytics, so I do not doubt there will be improvements

We all know Google is at top when it comes to availability. We have never faced any such instances where I can suggest otherwise. All you need is a Google account, a device and internet connection to use this super powerful tool for reporting and visualising your site data, traffic, events, etc. that too in real time.

This has been a catalyst for improving our site's traffic handling capabilities. We were able to identify exit% from our sites through it and we used recommendations to handle and implement the same in our sites. We have been increasing the usage of Google Analytics in our sites and never had any performance related issues if we used Analytics

The Google reps respond very quickly. However, sometimes they can overly call you to set up an apportionment. I'm very proficient and sometimes when I talk to reps, they give beginner tutorials and insights that are a waste of time. I wish Google would understand my level of expertise and assign me to a rep (long-term) that doesn't have to walk me through the basics.

Incentivized

love the product and training they provide for businesses of all sizes. The following list of links will help you get started with Google Analytics from setup to understanding what data is being presented by Google Analytics.

1. How to Use Google Analytics for Beginners – Mahalo’s how-to guide for beginners.
2. A beginner’s guide to Google Analytics – A free eBook walking you through Google Analytics from setup to understanding what data is being presented.
3. Getting to Know Your Google Analytics Dashboard – The title says it all! This is a brief post with one goal: to introduce you to the Google Analytics dashboard.
4. Google Analytics for Beginners: How to Make the Most of Your Traffic Reports– This guide doesn’t cover setup, but it does a great job of helping you to better understand the data being presented.
5. Google Analytics Video Tutorial 1: Setup – A video presentation that walks you through Google Analytics setup.
6. Google Analytics Video Tutorial 2: Essential Stats – A video presentation that introduces you to some of the most important data being presented in Google Analytics.

I think my biggest take away from the Google Analytics implementation was that there needs to be a clear understanding of what you want to achieve and how you want to achieve it before you start. Originally the analytics were added to track visitors, but as we became more savvy with the product, we began adding more and more functionality, and defining guidelines as we went along. While not detrimental to our success, this lack of an overarching goal resulted in some minor setbacks in implementation and the collection of some messy data that is unusable.

I have not used Adobe Analytics as much, but I know they offer something called customer journey analytics, which we are evaluating now. I have used Semrush, and I find them much better than Google Analytics. I feel a fairly nontechnical person could learn Semrush in about a month. They also offer features like competitive analysis (on content, keywords, traffic, etc.), which is very useful. If you have to choose one among Semrush and Google Analytics, I would say go for Semrush.

Incentivized

Google Analytics is currently handling the reporting and tracking of near about 80 sites in our project. And I am not talking about the sites from different projects. They may have way more accounts than that. Never ever felt a performance issue from Google's end while generating or customising reports or tracking custom events or creating custom dimensions

• With the specific KPI's we report on, Tealeaf has helped shine a light on metrics we would not have seen in a normal analytics reporting tool.
• Tealeaf has helped us pinpoint areas of user struggle and vastly improved our website experience.

• It has helped us gain understanding of what is going on on our website.
• It has helped us determine areas that need fixing (i.e. pages with extremely high bounce rates may need to be redone).
• It has helped us understand our biggest avenues for bringing traffic to the website and business in general.
• It has helped guide our website redesign.

Incentivized