Constructor.io Search vs. Google Analytics vs. HiConversion

Constructor.io Search takes all of the guesswork out of maintaining a search engine. As merchandisers or product teams, we have educated guesses at how search relevance should work but the customer is always king. We can't always predict the ways in which consumers will search or what their intent is. That's why the behavioral-driven approach that Constructor.io employs works so well. It means that merchandisers can focus on their sales and promotional responsibilities, instead of wasting time and bandwidth on base-level relevance questions.

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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.

HiConversion is a great tool for checking your A/B landing pages and sales pages. With the click of a button, you can check your sales forecast page to see any text, images, pages, etc. which converts better. This is a great way to explore different ways of selling and see which one brings you the most sales. The interface is simple and easy to use.

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• Optimizes for business KPIs, not string matches, so merchandisers can focus on strategy instead of maintaining a dictionary.
• Gives merchandisers control to curate the right customer experience per their expert understanding.
• Customer/technical support during and after implementation.

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• 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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• Allow us to do A/B and multivariate testing of various treatments on our website. We can see how individual changes perform and how they perform in conjunction with other tests on the site.
• Provide data to see where in the sales funnel there is room for improvement and how tiny incremental changes at each stage can have a dramatic affect on our total sales.
• Using their years of experience and knowledge of industry best practices, they help come up with both UX and UI suggestions for us to test for our specific site, audience and use cases.

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• Visibility of the personalization algorithm.
• Exposing detailed analytics within the customer-facing dashboard.
• "Top searches" available via API.

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• 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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• Nothing but Increase marketing to better explain the technology.

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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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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.

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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.

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We have not used or fully evaluated any competitors. Our free trial with HiConversion was enough to convince us to move forward with them. They platform will easily pay for itself

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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

• 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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• I was losing sales because I was not reaching out to all my potential customers, and HiConversion was able to help me improve my sales by using their test tool to create new predictive pages that work better.
• The tool makes it easy to create pages, and the results are real-time, so I can see how I do and make changes in my campaigns as I go.
• The tool was easy to get started with, and I see results, which is important to me.

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