Commanders Act Enterprise Tag Manager vs. Google Analytics vs. ObservePoint

If you need a single place where you can handle all the third party pixels, this is a well-suited platform. As well as if you want to keep the deployment independent from all other (and more complex) deployments driven by IT. If you need a pixel to be fired not just when the page loads, but based on user actions, you should use the events and that's pretty complex to handle.

Incentivized

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.

ObservePoint is a great tool for automating page testing and standardizing campaigns to observe accurate customer insights. You can identify customer mapping journey. They also help in data protection and insights which are very important and essential these days. They should work more on easy interface designs. Overall, it is the best.

• Creating new pixels is very easy, as well as organizing all of them, handling prioritization between different partners' pixels.
• Defining the perimeters and constraints where the pixels need to be fired is a breeze.
• Deploying the container and keeping track of all the modification is very well done.
• The configuration of the deduplication rule is pretty flexible.

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 UI for ObservePoint is intuitive and robust. This makes training new engineers and using the product easy and productive.
• All Audit exports are formatted as tab delimited text files making the data easy to analyze and manipulate in a Spreadsheet or database.
• The list of tag vendors that are discoverable is comprehensive making it easy to interrogate most any tagging implementation.
• Standard reporting within the UI is robust and easy to consume.

• Reports. Tag Commander lacks in term of reports of what's happening. There is an additional module called Attribution Management System that gives you a lot of insights, but more basic reports to understand what has been fired will be useful.
• Support. Tag Commander support is very low responsive. It took several days to have the first feedback and generally, it takes a lot of emails to get what you need.
• Deduplication engine flexibility. The engine is there and it works pretty well, until you have a slightly different need. In that case you need to implement something custom in terms of implementation, reports, etc. A more flexible approach would be useful.

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

• Page details, although interesting, are not very useful as the data is too granular and not possible to integrate with other analytics data for insights.
• Some of the custom tagging may be a little complicated, so sometimes we need an engineer or an ObservePoint tech to help us out.

Incentivized

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

ObservePoint has a robust solution that is well supported and is continually innovating to meet new business and technology needs.

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

It's easy to navigate and learn. The reporting and output are intuitive and robust features for finding and identifying actionable insight.

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.

I've only experienced one system availability issue in the 3 years we've been using it.

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

Sometimes it can get a bit slow when auditing particularly huge sites but recent upgrades in infrastructure have done a lot to mitigate this behavior.

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

Support is very strong indeed and has been consistent over the last 4 years. They are also friendly and tag nerds like me!

Instructor was knowledgeable and delivered the content well.

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.

It's easy to find the information you need when you need it and it is easy to consume.

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.

Start with small audits until you have determined what you might want to filter out.

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

I have not used any other product other than ObservePoint for my requirements. there are a number of features for which it has proved helpful. Technology Governance ensures our data collection tools and processes are executing as planned, so our organization can make better decisions based on better data and so on

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

I have not reached an unreasonable product limitation as of yet.

• It let us deploy new pixels/fixes to pixels independently from the IT deployment process.
• It let us easily turn on/off and sort the pixel execution based on partners' priority, assuring better data tracking for more important partners.
• It provides out of the box pixel implementation for tons of partners, but really often we need to rewrite the pixel from scratch as they're not up to date.

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

• ObservePoint has helped us quickly (within minutes) catch when a process or pathing on the website breaks, which allows us to fix it quickly. Whether technical/dev or analytics issues, without ObservePoint, they could have been undetected for weeks.

Incentivized