BrightEdge vs. Google Analytics

BrightEdge has been a long-standing partner with us. I have had 10 years of experience with using their platform. It is a very large robust platform that allows us to find the information we need and quickly. Unfortunately with the company being so large, they are unable to make quick changes and customers suggested enhancements as quickly as other platforms.

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.

• Strong analytics
• Integrates with other tools
• Instant provides real time research, ranking and recommendations
• The Client Success team is truly an extension of my team with experts in the industry to help support our team and growing the organic channel
• Education and career growth opportunity—constantly providing ways to connect with others in the industry, user groups, events, and conferences
• Onboard process is very thorough and customized

Incentivized

• 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

• The storybuilder feature isn't anything outstanding. I feel like I can get the same type of data and format from Google Data Studio.
• I feel like the Hyperlocal feature is still very junior compared to other features. It provides you good insights, but you have to set all the data fields before you can get a picture as well as it doesn't really give you an idea of how you can improve.
• The mobile SEO solution is a good concept, but it needs some tweaks to be better, especially when building out a mobile story builder. Some of the data isn't simple to read and the mobile keywords functions don't also account for voice searches.

Incentivized

• 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

I would renew, as I don't feel there is a product out there that would have the impact on our SEO efforts as effectively as BrightEdge. It provides the information I need and integrates with other tools like Google Webmaster Tools, to truly have the depth of information that makes their suggestions for SEO changes so valued.

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

Easy-to-use and intuitive design make using the BrightEdge platform a joy. Yes, I have familiarity with it and know where to go but there are definitely not a ton of extraneous bells and whistles or unnecessary tools which is part of the brilliance of their UX. Sometimes I get hung up on where keywords and keyword groups are under settings but it is typically because I am moving too quickly, and not because they've moved it.

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

This is a area where the BrightEdge team really shines. Their commitment to training and product support is unmatched not only for SEO platforms, but life in general. I often find myself wishing my internet provide and similar would go to BrightEdge for training on support and attitude. I would rank them an 11 if I could.

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.

For the most part it was seamless. The load time of clients was a little long, but otherwise was quite easy.

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.

While relatively expensive, Brightedge really does offer the best quality product but just as importantly (if not more so) the level of client/agency support. We have biweekly training with the entire team to continually stay up to date on Brightedge's offerings and strategies. They also offer the ability to do ad hoc reporting using some of their tools that can help us win new business and recommend Brightedge to additional clients, expanding our business as well.

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

• We have only started with BE a few months ago and so I don't have any hard numbers from an ROI perspective, but i can say that what we spent on BE is a fraction of what we were spending with agencies and we are actually getting results by doing this ourselves. From that perspective we have seen a cost savings.
• With focused SEO campaigns and projects we have been able to move the needle on our SEO rankings for specific products and services. This is going to have a great impact for us in 2019 as we have some specific product goals and campaigns for 2019 that we have been working to build up over the last couple months of 2018.

Incentivized

• 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