Google Analytics vs. Piano Activation

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Google Analytics
Score 8.1 out of 10
N/A
Google Analytics is perhaps the best-known web analytics product and, as a free product, it has massive adoption. Although it lacks some enterprise-level features compared to its competitors in the space, the launch of the paid Google Analytics Premium edition seems likely to close the gap.
$0
per month
Piano Activation
Score 8.6 out of 10
N/A
Piano Composer, from Piano Software in New York, allows users to design, test, deploy, and manage audience experiences based on scenarios, rules, triggers, and conditions, all without IT. It presents out of the box loyalty and engagement solutions, and allows users to engage customer segments on the content they find most interesting and valuable - based on page attributes, metadata, or URL conditions.N/A
Pricing
Google AnalyticsPiano Activation
Editions & Modules
Google Analytics 360
150,000
per year
Google Analytics
Free
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Google AnalyticsPiano Activation
Free Trial
NoNo
Free/Freemium Version
YesNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Google AnalyticsPiano Activation
Features
Google AnalyticsPiano Activation
Web Analytics
Comparison of Web Analytics features of Product A and Product B
Google Analytics
8.4
11 Ratings
4% above category average
Piano Activation
-
Ratings
Lead Conversion Tracking8.110 Ratings00 Ratings
Bounce Rate Measurement8.410 Ratings00 Ratings
Device and Browser Reporting9.211 Ratings00 Ratings
Pageview Tracking9.011 Ratings00 Ratings
Event Tracking8.311 Ratings00 Ratings
Reporting in real-time7.910 Ratings00 Ratings
Referral Source Tracking8.510 Ratings00 Ratings
Customizable Dashboards7.910 Ratings00 Ratings
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Score 9.1 out of 10
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Score 9.1 out of 10
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Score 9.3 out of 10
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User Ratings
Google AnalyticsPiano Activation
Likelihood to Recommend
8.6
(193 ratings)
9.0
(1 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
9.0
(51 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Usability
7.4
(19 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Availability
10.0
(4 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Performance
10.0
(2 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
7.0
(42 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Online Training
10.0
(2 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Implementation Rating
9.0
(7 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Configurability
6.0
(2 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Ease of integration
10.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Product Scalability
10.0
(2 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Vendor post-sale
10.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Vendor pre-sale
9.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
Google AnalyticsPiano Activation
Likelihood to Recommend
Google
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.
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Piano Software
Piano Composer is well suited to news publishers in particular currently, but in theory this tool could be used by any organisation that relies on a paywall or advertising to generate revenue. Their increasingly powerful segmentation tool would also be very useful to many companies, as you can target particular users very easily or rely on their algorithms to do it for you and learn to optimise over time. I also think that if you have a sales pipeline/funnel that you want to nurture users through, Piano Composer can help you to do that.
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Pros
Google
  • 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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Piano Software
  • Very easy to use interface
  • Powerful algorithms to improve targeting
  • Great engagement with clients about improvements and future roadmaps
Read full review
Cons
Google
  • 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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Piano Software
  • Acquires companies often and integration of these sometimes cause bugs and outages
  • Can be slow to load sometimes
  • Any custom work you need done by their developers takes far too long
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Likelihood to Renew
Google
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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Piano Software
No answers on this topic
Usability
Google
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
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Piano Software
No answers on this topic
Reliability and Availability
Google
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.
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Piano Software
No answers on this topic
Performance
Google
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
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Piano Software
No answers on this topic
Support Rating
Google
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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Piano Software
No answers on this topic
Online Training
Google
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.
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Piano Software
No answers on this topic
Implementation Rating
Google
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.
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Piano Software
No answers on this topic
Alternatives Considered
Google
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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Piano Software
Optimizely is a great platform for A/B testing with multiple variants and across a range of devices, browsers etc. What makes Piano Composer different is that you can add tests within your flows - specifying exactly where and why you want things to happen, whilst still building the rest of your experiences around this. The other huge benefit to Piano Composer is that it contains their Customer Segmentation engine and processing this data with their proprietary algorithms, so it is taking everything it knows about your users and including this in the segmentation process, which I think it much more powerful.
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Scalability
Google
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
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Piano Software
No answers on this topic
Return on Investment
Google
  • 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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Piano Software
  • Increased digital subscriptions substantially
  • Enables quick and easy testing, which saves lots of time
  • Is quite expensive as a tool overall, so you need to balance the benefits to the number of users you have
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ScreenShots