Google Analytics vs. Salesforce Marketing Cloud Email Studio

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.

It's great for large field sales organizations that lack the ability to automate email sends that are consistent and on-brand. The idea of templated emails (with the ability to build custom emails) really helps keeps the look-and-feel of each email similar to what the rest of the organization is sending to customers or prospects. This isn't the solution that you'd need if you are looking for an automation tool that easily integrates into other marketing channels. The dynamic content feature is lagging far behind other tools in the space.

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

• Sends client confirmations when they subscribe to a newsletter, sign up for a conference, or place an order with our company (SourceMedia). We don't have to hire an agency to send these for us.
• Manages newsletter subscriptions and allows us to deploy on specific dates/times.
• Helps us discover and manage the correct audience base per newsletter, and automates the distributions so we don't have to do it manually.

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

• (Lack of) Web Tracking - it offers minimal tracking capabilities for web visit(or)s and the ones that are in place don't provide an easy way to allow you to use that data in building reports or automation.
• No Web Forms - if most of your marketing campaigns include a call to action pointing to a web form submission, the SFMC doesn't have a "web form asset" per se that you can build. You could still achieve the same functionality by deploying cloud pages and/or microsite AMPScript pages that use Data Extensions as tables to hold data but that doesn't come out of the box.
• Customization brings Complexity - OK, maybe this is not a con but sometimes it feels like one. In order to build your own custom way of segmenting, importing, filtering data, having triggered sends, etc. you need to create a lot of assets on the platform. Think of it like small Lego bricks that you need to build first then combine them in a larger brick that is part of an even larger construction.

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

Exact Target has an exceptional team with great customer care. Whenever we have a question or concern they are timely in addressing it. They also perform annual reviews in person that provides us with market trends, new tools and features, performance metrics, and new content recommendations. We evaluate this by local market and at the international level

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

I think the tool is easy to use, protects a company from the spam legislation and manages subscribers very well. It is simple to create a non-complex email. I like the survey function on the email tool as well. Overall usability is quite easy and no necessary to have an IT background or extensive knowledge to use. It is helpful, though, to have an understanding of HTML for formatting at this point.

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.

Upgrades and timing of the upgrades were communicated well and planned during off hours for our work. If we did have a campaign scheduled during that time, it would kick-off after the system was back active. There were a few unplanned system down times, but it was a rare occurrence and those times were also short in duration.

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

This software is extremely limiting. The layouts don't give much flexibility and take a long time to set up. If you aren't a designer or know html (like me), the emails look unpolished and amateur. It takes forever for me to make revisions and sometimes when I send the test email, it looks completely different in the software vs. how the message looks in my inbox. Fonts are different sizes and aren't aligned properly, etc. The whole platform is pretty clunky and not very user friendly. The reports are pretty good - however there isn't much you can do when viewing the info. Ex: If you have 200 "Did Not Open" emails, there isn't an easy way to just click and quickly resend to this group. I like that it can sync with Salesforce.com - but I have no idea how to set that up in my account. Out of frustration I have been using Constant Contact which has easy to use drag and drop features, built-in templates I can choose from, survey/coupon/registration tools, tagging and responsive reporting. My company's creative agency even prefers Constant Contact vs. Marketing Cloud. I still have to enter www.exacttarget.com (the old address) to log on. Wondering when they will change it to the new name, which I don't like using. Exact Target is so much easier to say. Salesforce Marketing Cloud just doesn't roll off the tongue and - just like the software - is clumsy and awkward, so I just keep calling it Exact Target. Overall, pretty much dissatisfied with Exact Target and have pretty much stopped using it. Although I know eventually I will have to go back to it at some point since my company has invested in the automation features and we will have to use it for our marketing.

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

We are now only trying to get our money back and move on to a different system, but even though it was acknowledged that mistakes were made on Salesforce’s side, we are still waiting. Instead, Salesforce sends us standard training offers to get the most out of our 4 connectors - whatever - and still not even offering additional connectors to get our social accounts connected to our business so our digital team can get on with their job, requesting we pay an additional $50pm for each of these - crazy.

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.

Easy to implement, with simple emails and solutions initially created. More advanced usage of the tool and more advanced subscriber attribute usage was implemented during later phases when the knowledge of the tool increased. Monitoring success and results of email campaigns were done at a high level initially, but not fully used until the tool and email marketing as a whole was better understood in the corporation.

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 used Epsilon and I have evaluated Silverpop, e-Dialogue and Yesmail. From my analysis Salesforce MC is far more superior in flexibility, scalability and freedom to custom built initiatives. The AMPscripting is one of the driving forces in allowing the previous mentioned abilities. However, I can see from a marketers perspective where they simply want to send emails and segment easily. But given that effective email marketing requires a lot of different components and there is no simple way of doing it and I found that most companies that offer the out of the box solutions do a good job but there is no one size fits all and if you are trying to be really good at it which includes integrating your business such as registration, stats, CMS, API, etc. This is a much better solution.

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

We had approximately 20,000 recipients of most email campaigns, with some higher amounts and some smaller campaigns. The tools is easy to use and the recipient list size is really not a factor in the complexity or work to create and email campaign. Our campaigns could just have easily been sent to many more people, with virtually no additional work.

• 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

• Better execution/monitoring - when multiple steps are involved, IMH is great at dashboarding.
• Facilitates exploratory campaigns - it is great at instilling confidence when you're trying a new facet of a campaign, due to the process transparency.
• Cloud - can be a double-edged sword. Allows for on the go access, but isn't truly mobile-friendly, and can sometimes sputter. But certainly will improve with time.