Contentsquare vs. Google Analytics vs. RavenTools

ContentSquare [(Clicktale)] is best suited to deep dive understanding of how web users truly consume your web pages. For example, when a traditional analytics software informs you on exit rates, ContentSquare [(Clicktale)] helps you to understand if users left without interacting with their last page or if they in fact spent time reading, scrolling, clicking it.

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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.

If you are looking for a one-stop shop for MOST things related to digital marketing, RavenTools is a great solution. You will be able to monitor social media, Google tools, email campaigns, and much more from one spot. It really cuts down on time spent moving from account to account. If you are looking for clean and easy to read reports for clients, RavenTools is perfect for that as well. It provides tools and reports that can be used by internal and external teams alike.

• Heat Maps - we used and liked CrazyEgg in the past, and it was a cheaper tool that was easy to use. ClickTale gives us additional capabilities with better data about scroll reach, mouse movements, clicks and a summary report that shows what parts of our pages are getting attention. A product manager asked us yesterday for insights on how his product page was performing, and we were easily able to send him the reports in the heat map section.
• Visitor recordings - We get good data on our website using analytics tools like GA, HubSpot and ClickTale, but it is very helpful to watch actual visitor recordings for certain visitor segments. If we add a new page or new feature to our website and notice a trend, we can easily drill down and watch visitors and see how they are interacting with the page.
• Conversion funnels - We do a lot of our analysis in Google Analytics and you can set up conversion funnels in GA if you know how to do it. The problem is you can't segment the data and the aggregated data is not as helpful. ClickTale makes it very simple to do conversion funnels, and you can segment them with just a few clicks.

• 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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• RavenTools has teamed up with SEO services like Moz and Magestic SEO to provide detailed data about the SEO health of your own websites as well as how they compare to your competitors' websites. I can directly compare number of backlinks, page speed, domain authority, integration of Google Analytics, presence of robots.txt files, on-site social media engagement, and home page load time. This a great way to get an idea of how your site stacks up against others and what can be done to improve it.
• RavenTools' automated reports are mostly great (I'll cover the negatives later). You can create reports with as much data as you would like and schedule them to arrive as often as you would like. I have SEO, social media, and site performance reports delivered to my team and me every Monday covering the last 10 days, and a broader quarterly report arrives in the inboxes of a few executives once a quarter.
• RavenTools' graphs are often easier to read and decipher than graphs found in Google Analytics. Part of the reason is the graph height. Google Analytics graphs are fairly short, so it's difficult to see smaller variations in the data. Those variations are more pronounced within RavenTools using the data.

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• It's a bit difficult to navigate form heatmaps of one page on my sites to those of another.
• It would be useful to have data on what percentage of clicks for each link are bounces. If this is available already, it is not very easy to find.
• I have slight doubts about the accuracy of ClickTale's data based on some industry related articles I've read (i.e. http://redant.com.au/tool-reviews/clicktale-review-technology/). For the most part I feel like the data I'm getting is accurate, because it roughly corresponds to what I'm able to see on Google Analytics. It would be nice to see ClickTale address some of these issues.

• 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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• The data it gets from Webmaster Tools and Analytics is great and reporting on it is easy - however, when you're looking at the charts for keyword placement on screen the graphic can be hard to read and often I find myself just checking GWT and BWT separately for easier information if no report needs to be generated.
• RavenTools comes with an iPhone app so you can check on your campaigns and clients when you're not at your desk, however, the app crashes quite a bit when you get to the Google Analytics portion of the screen.

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At my former company I was able to upgrade our initial subscription level from bronze to gold without any problems after the first year. Unfortunately, the company I am presently with doesn't have a Clicktale subscription. I would have absolutely no hesitation in strongly recommending Clicktale to my current company if I ever get even a remote chance to do so. Clicktale is used in some of the statistics I use on my resume in an effort to quantify my results as a certified usability analyst. Clicktale has made a significant difference in my value to any team I work with.

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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A year ago or so, Raven abandoned many of their organic rank reporting tools in an attempt to favor some Adwords intelligence. The market rebelled, as did I; in our desperation to find an alternative to Raven, none could be found and a great majority of users didn't want/need Adwords data. Months later, Raven reverted. I'd renew with Raven not just because nothing else cuts it, but because they are both trying to innovate, and listening to customers.

I had some issues interacting with viewing recordings of a specific page by many users but my impression was that this was going to be fixed.

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

Certain areas, Social Media scheduling, could stand to undergo a complete overhaul. However, most of the RavenTools interface is easy to use. You will not have any issues getting up and running and should there be an issue, the customer service is really good. They also continue to preform updates that make the usability even better

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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RavenTools has some of the best Customer Support I have ever received. They are quick to respond and will keep you posted on the progress of your issue. You truly feel as if you are getting customized service. No human is perfect and I have had one situation in which I had to reach out multiple times, but overall I fully trust and approve of their process

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.

ClickTale is now a step ahead of the competition since it delivers insights based on pre-defined business KPIs and customer journeys that we have set up. We can also segment our traffic and easily sift through the many recordings finding the ones that match our lookup criteria. This paired with a good and reliable PII masking helps us with insight collection and drive business decisions which other solutions don't have. The new non-Flash interface is clean and simple to use and has all the functionalities centralized.

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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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I don't have a lot of experience with other tools although we have had a lot of demos of other products. We have often found that by utilizing features in Raven that we didn't know about we could have the same functionality without using another reporting tool. This allows us to continue using one integrated reporting tool.

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

• Rarely was actionable insight taken from the ClickTale tool that resulted in a better user experience on our website. We made small changes on different aspects of our webpages that typically did not show an improvement over the previous versions.
• The dedicated time and resources in the ClickTale tool did not justify the investment. The heat maps can be helpful but they are based on mouse clicks (Google Analytics can help with that). Watching recordings can get time consuming and don't always provide enough data for an actionable takeaway.
• If you take the approach of identifying a potential problem on your website first, then using the ClickTale tool to dig deeper in the issue, you might find the tool helpful. However, make sure you gather enough data on the potential issue before making changes to your site (and monitor the changes afterward).

• 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

• RavenTools has been invaluable in helping us improve ranking through website audits. The ease with which we can correct issues once they arise has resulted in approximately 35% increased productivity from our audit team.
• It would be helpful if the reports were nice enough that they could be customer-facing. We have to put the data into our own reporting forms for customer presentation.

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