Google Analytics vs. MarcomCentral

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.

Pros: I like that we can easily add products and how simple it is for our static products. It's easy to add users, products and cost centers. The approval process for products is easy and intuitive. It's a localized resource that our users can use. Cons: The back end of the product is fairly slow. It takes a long time to add products because of how slow it is at times. The reporting for the portal could be better. I know the Business Intelligence feature was created to solve reporting. Also sometimes we experience difficulty with customizable products. I feel like there's more options to build this out more based on the users needs. Overall: It's a localized place where users can find collateral and promotional items.

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 best part of MarcomCentral is its flexibility to solve many unique problems for our customers. It gives us the ability to build solutions that truly allow our customers to operate more efficiently.
• The best admin feature that I use all day, every day, is the Bulk Operations feature. This allows me to manage entire portals through spreadsheets allowing me to create and manage massive amounts of products, users, and images very efficiently.
• The reporting feature is second to none as well. Our most successful customers are paying close attention to the ordering history of their products. This allows them to fight obsolescence and focus on the products that their teams or customers are truly using.

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

• The uploading process is a bit clunky
• Overall user experience from an admin side could be refreshed to be more modern and easier to use

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

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.

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.

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.

Incentivized

We chose this program to test it out and decided to keep it. It helped in many ways and improved the quality of our marketing and digital marketing work essentially. We noticed not only that our ads and content became better, but we also noticed that our know-how improved by adding valuable insights to our news.

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

• 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

• Fully robust tool to help manage our internal assets, ability to customize digital assets or send them to print, a way to share assets across the entire enterprise in simple, easy user interface.
• Marcom's print-on-demand functionality is fantastic. There are so many possibilities that we are just beginning to explore. There are some integration hiccups but mostly on our end, and Marcom has worked to help us through those as best as they can. Also, they have been very open in discussing improvements that we are looking for and keeping us up to date on the progress of those updates within their own development schedule. The depth of this software is extensive and their customer support personnel are always very friendly and helpful.
• Very customizable and a lot of things you can accomplish in Marcom Central. They are always willing to help us work out any need we come up with and make it work in the system.

Incentivized