Google Analytics vs. Salesforce Marketing Cloud Interaction Studio

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Google Analytics
Score 8.5 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
Salesforce Marketing Cloud Interaction Studio
Score 8.1 out of 10
N/A
Companies use Interaction Studio to tailor interactions with customers and prospects to increase loyalty, engagement, and conversions. Using real-time cross-channel personalization and machine learning capabilities, Interaction Studio adds to Marketing Cloud’s robust customer data, audience segmentation, and engagement platform.
$199
per month
Pricing
Google AnalyticsSalesforce Marketing Cloud Interaction Studio
Editions & Modules
Google Analytics 360
150,000
per year
Google Analytics
Free
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Google AnalyticsSalesforce Marketing Cloud Interaction Studio
Free Trial
NoNo
Free/Freemium Version
YesNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoYes
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Google AnalyticsSalesforce Marketing Cloud Interaction Studio
Considered Both Products
Google Analytics
Salesforce Marketing Cloud Interaction Studio
Chose Salesforce Marketing Cloud Interaction Studio
Evergage fills a space in the analytics market like no other product I've tried.

Chose Salesforce Marketing Cloud Interaction Studio
Contact Targeting: Customization allows to target contacts in various ways. The contacts can be targeted based on their first name and company name, which provides a personalized approach to the email and gives a better result in terms of performance. Another terrific feature …
Chose Salesforce Marketing Cloud Interaction Studio
Evergage is far superior to Optimizely in terms of customer support, usability, and ease of creating tests. When I was using Optimizely, the time to launch and build a test was multiple weeks. With Evergage, I had three tests up and running within the first two weeks. …
Chose Salesforce Marketing Cloud Interaction Studio
We use Kiss and Evergage simultaneously. Both serve different parts of the company.
Chose Salesforce Marketing Cloud Interaction Studio
Monetate. We are using both Monetate and evergage. Evergage is being used more on the control panel side.
Chose Salesforce Marketing Cloud Interaction Studio
We considered using Marketo's RTP product, but we weren't overly impressed with the user interface, functionality, or level of support that they were willing to provide for new users. As an existing client of Marketo, we thought their solution would be a great addition to the …
Chose Salesforce Marketing Cloud Interaction Studio
Implementation was way easier and the Evergage team seemed to care about our results and addressed all our pain points. From an implementation perspective, the UI is very user-friendly and campaign creation is a breeze, which was clear from our trial.
Chose Salesforce Marketing Cloud Interaction Studio
We are currently using the two applications in tandem. We are leaning towards Evergage as it feels easier to build campaigns and set up the segmentations within Evergage. Monetate has been running on the front of the site and Evergage for our authenticated customers.
Top Pros
Top Cons
Best Alternatives
Google AnalyticsSalesforce Marketing Cloud Interaction Studio
Small Businesses
StatCounter
StatCounter
Score 9.0 out of 10
Emarsys
Emarsys
Score 8.3 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Siteimprove
Siteimprove
Score 8.4 out of 10
Monetate
Monetate
Score 7.7 out of 10
Enterprises
Contentsquare
Contentsquare
Score 8.4 out of 10
Monetate
Monetate
Score 7.7 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
Google AnalyticsSalesforce Marketing Cloud Interaction Studio
Likelihood to Recommend
9.0
(183 ratings)
7.8
(47 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
9.2
(51 ratings)
10.0
(5 ratings)
Usability
9.5
(7 ratings)
9.0
(8 ratings)
Availability
10.0
(6 ratings)
10.0
(4 ratings)
Performance
9.5
(2 ratings)
9.9
(4 ratings)
Support Rating
7.0
(79 ratings)
7.6
(14 ratings)
In-Person Training
-
(0 ratings)
5.0
(1 ratings)
Online Training
10.0
(2 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Implementation Rating
9.0
(13 ratings)
9.6
(6 ratings)
Configurability
6.0
(2 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Ease of integration
10.0
(1 ratings)
7.0
(1 ratings)
Product Scalability
9.8
(2 ratings)
9.8
(2 ratings)
Vendor post-sale
10.0
(1 ratings)
8.0
(1 ratings)
Vendor pre-sale
9.0
(1 ratings)
10.0
(1 ratings)
User Testimonials
Google AnalyticsSalesforce Marketing Cloud Interaction Studio
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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Salesforce
Salesforce Marketing Cloud is particularly well suited for automated marketing that includes multiple touch points like email, SMS, etc., where we need to automatically send triggered messages to customers based on their behavior or recommend products by sending personalized messages. It is a great tool that allows us to easily create and manage campaigns and to track and analyze customer behavior in order to optimize the campaign.
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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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Salesforce
  • Evergage plays nicely with most code frameworks and has been very stable. The only situation in which we could not (yet) find a way to use Evergage is in conjunction with Handlebars.js templates.
  • Enterprise-level data security considerations are well-handled by Evergage. Trust me... as a top-level PCI compliant company that builds travel loyalty solutions for major US banks, we have no greater concern than data security.
  • "No flicker" synchronous integration is a VERY important feature Evergage offers -- I'm unsure if any other competitors offer the same as I think Evergage has a patent on this. So when the webpage loads, users don't see the original page contents flash before being replaced with personalized/alternate contents.
  • The powerful user interface is easy-to-use and comes in two flavors: a more traditional CMS-style "admin" view and an on-page WYSIWYG view.
  • Test use cases in the browser prior to going live.
  • It's easy to build and measure A/B/n tests, either as rule-based tests, or as % split testing.
  • I love the ability to create user segments based on "sentence-style" logic structures that incorporates actions, KPIs, even third-party data.
  • Evergage is built to accommodate everyone from non-technical users to coders. Use the WYSIWYG editor to bring things to life, build complex front-end use cases with Javascript/JQuery, or use the API for control from the server side.
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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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Salesforce
  • Some of the reporting functionality could use some work, but they are making vast improvements.
  • The catalog user interface for available promotable items could benefit from the ability to customize the viewable columns and add filtering.
  • The amount of time that Evergage considers a user's session to be active could be increased. I find myself having to log back into the tool multiple times throughout the day, as I will leave the tool to check emails and during that time, I get logged out.
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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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Salesforce
When you first engage with Evergage you have to make a choice on how you're going to use and deploy their product. Are you going to use it for, as is my case, an "in-app" deployment for your SaaS application or for your public facing website. We elected to use it for "in-app" first so we could build knowledge and have a measure of churn reduction. We've done well enough that we're developing a strategy for use on our public facing website now for better lead building and qualification. We're about to double our engagement with Evergage essentially. Evergage has been incredibly responsive. They use great customer service tools and eventually gave us our own account manager. As an IT person, once setup, I intentionally worked to remove myself from the product as a support means so our customer service people are working directly with Evergage and great things are happening. Evergage has just been constantly improving for the better.
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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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Salesforce
You won't find another solution that has as many features as Salesforce Marketing Cloud Interaction Studio. We all know Salesforce, we all know how big they are and it's not for nothing... Their tools do most of the things you want, need and even imagine. Using it is complicated, but the usability is infinite.
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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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Salesforce
We have never experienced an availability issue and the Evergage Javascript beacon loads very quickly with virtually no impact on page load times.
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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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Salesforce
Evergage is quick loading and very responsive. We always have concerns about page load time and the integration of Evergage with our websites has never once caused any issue in this regard.
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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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Salesforce
It would be a full 10 except for a couple of times when it took over a week to get a response. Otherwise they are very responsive, very knowledgeable and very helpful. They really have a great team overall, not just support but even account reps are always eager to help and provide ideas and best practices.
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In-Person Training
Google
No answers on this topic
Salesforce
Training program is not very well established. There is very little documentations. More often than not it's in-person training. I wish there were more video tutorials so that somebody can learn the system quickly. Their documentation is very much like an RFP. Long and very technichal. They should definitly improve on this area.
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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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Salesforce
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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Salesforce
From an IT perspective, once you set up the Javascript beacon and start collecting data there is a waiting game. During this time you can start labeling your site actions which can be labor intensive for a single person, but you don't really have the final end-users on the platform yet. We did a lot of training so users were experienced, but it wasn't until they had their first tasks to accomplish that they started using the system and had questions. I'd recommend setting up some immediate goals for an end-user to start segmenting for the purpose of displaying message campaigns so you can jump start end-user action.
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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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Salesforce
Appcues - I like them. Very easy to use, which is the one main advantage they have over Evergage. That said their simplicity means the tool is limited in what it can do compared to Evergage. Plus Evergage's data logging capabilities in addition to messaging make it more useful for my needs.
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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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Salesforce
We are using it for millions of visitors every months
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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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Salesforce
  • Positive: allows better functionality without hiring or diverting a whole team of developers, which would be extremely costly.
  • Positive: fits into our existing campaign structure neatly without needing a complicated separate process.
  • Positive: support has been excellent and responsive, quickly aiding and resolving problems.
  • Negative: can be too powerful, leading to campaigns that break if they are not thoroughly checked before deployment. Also, can become a crutch acting as merely a content management system when it's segmentation capabilities are not understood or explored.
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ScreenShots