Adobe Analytics vs. Google Analytics

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Adobe Analytics
Score 8.2 out of 10
N/A
Adobe acquired Omniture in 2009 and re-branded the platform as SiteCatalyst. It is now part of Adobe Marketing Cloud along with other products such as social marketing, test and targeting, and tag management. SiteCatalyst is one of the leading vendors in the web analytics category and is particularly strong in combining web analytics with other digital marketing capabilities like audience management and data management. Adobe Analytics also includes predictive marketing capabilities that help…N/A
Google Analytics
Score 8.3 out of 10
N/A
Google Analytics is perhaps the best-known web analytics product and, as a free product, it has massive adoption. Although it lacks some enterprise-level features compared to its competitors in the space, the launch of the paid Google Analytics Premium edition seems likely to close the gap.
$0
per month
Pricing
Adobe AnalyticsGoogle Analytics
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
Google Analytics 360
150,000
per year
Google Analytics
Free
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Adobe AnalyticsGoogle Analytics
Free Trial
NoNo
Free/Freemium Version
NoYes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Adobe AnalyticsGoogle Analytics
Considered Both Products
Adobe Analytics
Chose Adobe Analytics
Adobe Analytics allows for the comparison of the same metric with and without various segments applied. Google Analytics is an all-or-nothing situation; either you apply a segment to metric or you do not. This makes it difficult for segment vs. non-segment and creating …
Chose Adobe Analytics
Google Analytics is good as well however I feel Adobe Anaytics is a premium Enterprise Analytics Solution and therefore comes with a price. Google dashboards and custom reports allow you to add visualizations together but only using simple correlations, and Google has …
Chose Adobe Analytics
Google Analytics (inc. 360): Target is less intuitive than Google on a number of fronts: layout, naming conventions, default reporting views, but offers more flexible reporting options without having to swap to tools like BigQuery. In a lot of instances, its faster than Google …
Chose Adobe Analytics
Google Analytics is free [there is a premium version] while Adobe has no free tier.

I find Adobe Analytics much easier to navigate and create reports in than Google - I find Google Analytics rather confusing.
Chose Adobe Analytics
Adobe analytics intuitively feels easier to use than Google Analytics and the functionality that allows us to create unlimited custom segments and derived dimensions is incredibly useful.
Chose Adobe Analytics
I just know that customization is something that Adobe Analytics is great at. It's like a deep dive into your website. Whereas my understanding of Google Analytics is that it just focuses more on traffic audiences.
Chose Adobe Analytics
I think one of the downsides for Adobe Analytics, when you compare to some of the other tools, is the support. It's not always the best. I think it has to do with the fact that there are so many people who use Adobe Analytics. They have so many clients, so many partners that …
Chose Adobe Analytics
So compared to Google Analytics, Adobe Analytics is more mature. It gives more insights in terms of implementation and collecting data. Adobe Analytics is more powerful than compared to Google Analytics.
Chose Adobe Analytics
The IBM tool was that we used, it had some nice things going forward, but they ended up spinning it off to a different company and so it was just one of those things that wasn't really getting the product development. Whereas Adobe Analytics is very obviously continuously …
Chose Adobe Analytics
In addition to Adobe Analytics, we also use Google Analytics. But as we've become more well-versed in analysis and reporting, we now understand how they are different tools. Both are needed, and it's important to understand how the data that is generated should be used for …
Chose Adobe Analytics
Google Analytics comes across more of a reporting tool whereas Adobe Analytics is more of an Enterprise level analytics tool. Contentsquare provides some traffic and flow capabilities but not to the same level as Adobe Analytics. However, Contentsquare's major advantage is its …
Chose Adobe Analytics
The Adobe Analytics functions are more responsive and very flexible especially on multiple data analysis and to manage different marketing content is simple. I like Adobe Analytics performance which is cost effective and gathering marketing insights is easy and quick. To import …
Chose Adobe Analytics
Adobe Analytics is just the easiest to read in my opinion. The drag and drop Lego set functionality of it to me is what makes it so easy to understand and it's easy to teach, too. Because you can just go in and real quickly show like, "all right, you search for things here and …
Chose Adobe Analytics
Adobe Analytics is better because there's just so much more you can do. A lot of those analytics tools, they're very narrow-focused. They're great, but a lot of times it's justextracting the data from those tools and then putting it in Excel and doing your own thing to it. …
Chose Adobe Analytics
They both can achieve in isolation. They both can achieve very, very similar objectives. There's a free version of Google. Many in the industry misconstrue that the free version is a better option than a paid version of Adobe. It's a misnomer because to do it at scale, you …
Chose Adobe Analytics
It helps to understand what channels and devices are users using and what route they are taking to convert. It helps to check the funnels and drop offs at each stage
Chose Adobe Analytics
Adobe can track the page level and click based tracking that helps us to improve our customer journeys and user interface which eventually improves our engagement and conversions too. Adobe needs to come up with more advanced features that over and above the competition. …
Chose Adobe Analytics
More or less all tools are the same however Adobe seems to be bigger brand and being used by business where analytics is being used very seriously
Chose Adobe Analytics
Google is Adobe Analytics direct competitor in this space and while I think they do a slightly better job onboarding new users in the space, I have found that Adobe Analytics is more flexible and powerful in the long term.
Chose Adobe Analytics
Adobe analytics provides great customer support with integration with third party apps very easily which makes it a reliable tool for analysing the data along with future forecasting of data using predictive analytics. It provides segment metrics which helps in understanding …
Chose Adobe Analytics
Though out of the box Google has a lot, the export of Google data is messy at best. We prefer the adobe export and it is much easier to work with.
Chose Adobe Analytics
They both have their perks. Glassbox has session recordings and interaction maps which are very useful to see what elements on the page users are interacting with. While Adobe Analytics provides are more analytical and statistical approach where you can learn about everything …
Google Analytics
Chose Google Analytics
We actually use both Adobe Analytics and Google Analytics in our organization. Each helps meet different needs; AA is useful because we have the entire Adobe Experience and Marketing Cloud licensed, so it ties in with those products. However, Google Analytics gives us data …
Chose Google Analytics
Google Analytics is free and easy to implement, so we use Google Analytics in smaller projects that have a limited analytics budget. However, Google Analytics has a relatively limited analytics capacity compared to Adobe Analytics so it is not being used for large-scale …
Chose Google Analytics
For our use case, Google Analytics is used to measure our blog traffic, while our company relies on Adobe Analytics for all other tracking/reporting.
Chose Google Analytics
Google Analytics is free! And while Adobe Analytics is arguably more powerful, it's paid.
Additionally, Google Analytics' integrations are vastly well known, thoroughly well (and more) documented, and used by more people. That means that it's also easy to find people that are …
Chose Google Analytics
Plain and simple - Google Analytics is a free solution with a robust amount of reporting capabilities. It only lacks as it provides a certain amount of reporting points out of the box compared to Adobe Analytics which is more of an enterprise type of reporting solutions. Adobe …
Chose Google Analytics
Google Analytics (free version) is typically my go-to recommendation for most companies. Small to medium size businesses, definitely. Larger organizations with need for a complex account structure / hierarchy and the need for highly customized analytics metrics, dimensions, …
Chose Google Analytics
We have been using Adobe Analytics for a while but the system seemed to be more complex when compared to super user friendly Google Analytics. Moreover, the option to add custom metrics and dimensions is lacking in Adobe Analytics. Google Analytics is good with transactional …
Chose Google Analytics
Adobe Analytics and Google Analytics 360 are both paid/premium options for website tracking. Though there are certain use cases when these might make sense (you operate entirely in the Adobe suite, you're a massive company/site that doesn’t mind the price tag on Google …
Chose Google Analytics
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 …
Chose Google Analytics
Ease of use: Google Analytics is known for its user-friendly interface and straightforward setup process, making it accessible for beginners. Adobe Analytics has a steeper learning curve and requires more technical expertise.
Features: Adobe Analytics offers a more comprehensive …
Chose Google Analytics
Adobe Analytics is good but it is more suited to people who are fully and technically into reporting and the solutions it provides. Google Analytics on the other hand provides a much easier way of setting up the Analytics. Most of the data reporting, charts and visualisations …
Chose Google Analytics
Built-in reports are beneficial but you can create custom reports if you need more details with different dimensions and metrics it also provides insights which is just little data about your site traffic in sentence format its the best way to know which strategy you are on …
Chose Google Analytics
Google Analytics had the best price (it's free for major of our clients), and it was easy to find professionals that had experience on using it.
Chose Google Analytics
Google Analytics is a bit cheaper than its competitors and provides a slightly different role as it tracks all channels. It has a close relation to Google and this makes the data a bit more valuable than those programs that are not.
Chose Google Analytics
Google Analytics provides everything you need in terms of straight forward analytics needs. The tool is not very flexible compared to other software such as adobe, and if you want to upgrade to premium or add in a bunch of custom situations, that can be become very [tedious] …
Chose Google Analytics
[Google Analytics] provides a broader appeal, combining what would usually require several different platforms, and as such is a bit of a jack of all trades in comparison, although often to a "good enough" level. If there is a particular aspect that you then find you would like …
Chose Google Analytics
Google Analytics is the industry standard, integrates seamlessly with most site setups, and cannot even be compared on cost. While it falls short in some areas like individual user tracking and cross-device reporting, it provides 80-90% of the needed visibility for online …
Chose Google Analytics
Google Analytics is the web's gold standard. We also use StatCounter for redundancy sake and because its visitor tracking and basic reporting are spectacular. But Google is a must-have no matter what else you end up using.

The redundancy issues plays out in terms of data …
Chose Google Analytics
Google Analytics has its advantages over its competitors. It is well suited to smaller companies.
Chose Google Analytics
Google Analytics stacks up as some of the best among the competition, assuming you're using it for its intended purpose. It's been the easiest to integrate into our applications, as well as the easiest UI to use. We selected Google Analytics for security and budget reasons, but …
Chose Google Analytics
Both are great, just different. Most clients believe Google is the golden standard due to the strong presence of Google's brand everywhere, but Adobe seems to have stronger, drill down tracking at the expense of a harder to use interface.
Chose Google Analytics
We like Google Analytics because it's free and powerful. And it works well for websites small to large.
Chose Google Analytics
We have been using Google Analytics for over 10 years. Over that time we have periodically reviewed our analytics platforms a number of times. For us, it made more sense to stay with google analytics primarily because if we migrated to another platform we would lose the …
Top Pros
Top Cons
TrustRadius Insights
Adobe AnalyticsGoogle Analytics
Highlights

TrustRadius
Research Team Insight
Published

Customers of both Adobe Analytics and Google Analytics have found they are proficient at tracking and analyzing website traffic. Users of both products have appreciated their robust data collection capabilities, which have been essential in assessing user engagement and behavior on their websites. Both products, according to reviewers, provide comprehensive insights into visitor demographics, user behavior, and marketing campaign success.

 

However, there are some notable differences in users’ experiences with each product. Adobe Analytics is often employed by larger organizations with more complex needs due to its high customization options and ability to handle high volumes of data. Users have praised its sophisticated segmentation and advanced analysis tools. On the other hand, Google Analytics is widely used by businesses of all sizes. It is preferred by users for its ease of use, affordability, and integration capabilities, particularly with other Google products.

 

Despite these differences, users have faced challenges with both products in terms of their learning curve and complexity. Adobe Analytics users have reported that it takes considerable time to understand the platform fully, while Google Analytics users have mentioned the necessity of understanding Google’s tracking codes and the structure of their property settings and views. It is clear that both tools offer powerful data analysis capabilities, but require a certain level of technical expertise to utilize fully. Therefore, the choice between the two may largely depend on the size and specific needs of the company, as well as the technical proficiency of the person using the software.

Features
Adobe AnalyticsGoogle Analytics
Web Analytics
Comparison of Web Analytics features of Product A and Product B
Adobe Analytics
9.0
4 Ratings
15% above category average
Google Analytics
-
Ratings
Lead Conversion Tracking9.24 Ratings00 Ratings
Bounce Rate Measurement9.14 Ratings00 Ratings
Device and Browser Reporting9.34 Ratings00 Ratings
Pageview Tracking8.84 Ratings00 Ratings
Event Tracking9.24 Ratings00 Ratings
Reporting in real-time8.44 Ratings00 Ratings
Referral Source Tracking9.14 Ratings00 Ratings
Customizable Dashboards8.84 Ratings00 Ratings
Best Alternatives
Adobe AnalyticsGoogle Analytics
Small Businesses
StatCounter
StatCounter
Score 9.0 out of 10
StatCounter
StatCounter
Score 9.0 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Siteimprove
Siteimprove
Score 8.7 out of 10
Siteimprove
Siteimprove
Score 8.7 out of 10
Enterprises
Contentsquare
Contentsquare
Score 8.6 out of 10
Contentsquare
Contentsquare
Score 8.6 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
Adobe AnalyticsGoogle Analytics
Likelihood to Recommend
8.3
(178 ratings)
9.0
(183 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
10.0
(42 ratings)
9.0
(51 ratings)
Usability
6.7
(33 ratings)
9.9
(8 ratings)
Availability
8.3
(12 ratings)
10.0
(4 ratings)
Performance
7.9
(11 ratings)
10.0
(2 ratings)
Support Rating
3.9
(41 ratings)
7.0
(42 ratings)
In-Person Training
1.4
(5 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Online Training
7.0
(5 ratings)
10.0
(2 ratings)
Implementation Rating
8.0
(10 ratings)
9.0
(7 ratings)
Configurability
-
(0 ratings)
6.0
(2 ratings)
Contract Terms and Pricing Model
7.3
(6 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Ease of integration
-
(0 ratings)
10.0
(1 ratings)
Product Scalability
9.9
(2 ratings)
10.0
(2 ratings)
Professional Services
7.7
(5 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Vendor post-sale
-
(0 ratings)
10.0
(1 ratings)
Vendor pre-sale
-
(0 ratings)
9.0
(1 ratings)
User Testimonials
Adobe AnalyticsGoogle Analytics
Likelihood to Recommend
Adobe
Adobe Analytics is better than some other tools as it feels better set up for actual "analysis", rather than simply "reporting". The power of Workspace allows you to drag 'n' drop at ease which makes you are far more in control of your own analysis/discovery/exploration. However, regards the final reports and dashboards' look 'n' feel the Workspace PDF output is lacking visually compared to other products like Google's Looker. To engage with less technical end users sometimes Looker feels the better, more polished option.
Read full review
Google
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.
Read full review
Pros
Adobe
  • They've been really an industry standard tool in analytics for a long, long time. They've got the trusted brand and the reputation, a wonderful community behind it. It is always nice, having that level of support where you can meet other practitioners. It's a great benefit because I can meet other people who have already pushed the tool a lot farther than I have. And it's a great place to get ideas in that way. We came from a world where we were running on a homegrown system that we'd use to do click tracking. You get some advantages on that of the customization, but losing out on community of support was one of the big reasons why we decided to move beyond that and implement Adobe Analytics instead.
Read full review
Google
  • 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
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Cons
Adobe
  • Most of the problems that Adobe Analytics as of now is having, it is getting addressed in a newer tool called Web Desk DK from implementation. They are already addressing that issue with the new tool and also the time data with the customer general analytics. So there is something not in workspace analysis and this is what they're addressing in customer general analytics. Which is good.
Read full review
Google
  • 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.
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Likelihood to Renew
Adobe
We've found multiple uses for Adobe Analytics in our organization. Each department analyzes the data they need and creates actionables based off of that data. For E-Commerce, we're constantly using data to analyze user engagement, website performance and evaluate ROI.
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Google
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.
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Usability
Adobe
Sometimes the processing times are very long. I have had reports or dashboards time out multiple times during presentations. It could be improved. It is understandable since there is a huge data set that the tool is processing before showing anything, however for a company that large they should invest in optimizing processing times.
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Google
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
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Reliability and Availability
Adobe
I do not ever recall a time when Adobe Analytics was unavailable to me to use in the 8 or so years I have been an end user of the product. My most-used day-to-day analytics tool Parse.ly however, generally has a multiple hours planned offline maintenance every two to four weeks, and sometimes has issues collecting realtime analytics that last anywhere between 15 minutes to an hour, and happen anywhere between 1 to 5 times a month.
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Google
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.
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Performance
Adobe
Again, no issues here. Performance within the day updates hourly. other reports are updated overnight and available to access by the next morning. Pages load quickly, the site navigates easily and the UX is quite straightforward to get command over. On this front, I give Adobe kudos for building a great experience to work within
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Google
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
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Support Rating
Adobe
I barely see any communication from Adobe Analytics. The content on the web is also not that great or easy to read. I would recommend a better communication about the product and the new addons information to come to its user by a better mean.
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Google
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.
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In-Person Training
Adobe
It was a one-day training several years ago that cost the organization several thousand dollars. There were only about 10 people in the training class. Adobe tried to cram so much information into that one-day class that none of our users felt like they really learned anything helpful from the experience. Follow-up training is too expensive
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Google
No answers on this topic
Online Training
Adobe
The online training for Adobe SiteCatalyst consists of short product videos. These are ok, but only go so far. For a while Adobe charged a fee for this, but recently made these available for free. There are many great blog posts that help users learn how to apply the product as well.
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Google
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.
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Implementation Rating
Adobe
One of the benefits and obstacles to successfully using Adobe Analytics is a great / more accurate implementation, make sure your analytics group is intimate with the details of the implementation and that the requirements are driven by the business.
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Google
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.
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Alternatives Considered
Adobe
I think Adobe's been around longer as a product but Tealium, from when I did research, it has auto-tagging. So one of my biggest pet peeves is when I'm rolling out new features, and whether it's an app or a website, is that I have to go speak with our metrics team or tagging team and we have to come up with these different strategies. Okay, how are we gonna tag it? What are we going to name it? It just seems like a lot of wasted time in my opinion. I want to track everything. I want to know every single thing these people are doing. We shouldn't have to have this conversation if we tag this, you might not have time to tag this right away for MVP. It's like that to me right now. That shouldn't even be a conversation. I should be able to release a feature, I should be able to just automatically go pull reports on that. And just figure out exactly what they were doing.
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Google
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.
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Contract Terms and Pricing Model
Adobe
Adobe Analytics is relatively affordable compared to other tools, given it provides a range of flexible variables to use that I have not found in any other tools so far. It is worth investing in if your company is medium or large-sized and brings a steady flow of revenue. For small companies, it can be overpriced.
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Google
No answers on this topic
Scalability
Adobe
My organization uses Adobe Analytics across a multitude of brand portfolios. Each brand has multiple websites, mobile apps and some even have connected TV apps/channels on Roku and similar devices. Adobe can handle the multitude of properties that have simple, small(ish) websites and the larger brand properties that include web, mobile and connected TVs/OTT devices.
Each of those larger brands has multiple categories and channels to keep track of. We can see the data by channel/device or aggregate all the data together. This gives our executive teams the full picture and the departmental teams the view they need to see their own performance.
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Google
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
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Professional Services
Adobe
The professional services team is one of the best teams for complex adobe analytics implementations, especially for clients having multiple website and mobile applications. However, the cost of professional services is a bit high which makes few clients opt out of it, but for large scale implementations they are very helpful
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Google
No answers on this topic
Return on Investment
Adobe
  • I like to think it's positive. It's a very steep learning curve, so we do face a lot of challenges with adoption inside of the companies. My team and I evangelize this and also who's in charge of data and advanced analytics, but it's very hard to leverage that with typical business analysis people. These are people who live their life in Excel and SQL and Power BI. They just use this very occasionally and by only looking at that sort of aggregate data, they miss out on behavior and what actually happens in execution. And because it's such a steep learning curve, we do have a challenge pushing it in there.
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Google
  • 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.
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ScreenShots