Google Analytics vs. SimpleTexting

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.

SimpleTexting has been wonderful for the purposes for which we signed up. We wanted an easy-to-use platform that allowed 2-way texting, assigned a phone number, had the ability to collect phone numbers/contact easily (whether through an import or a user sign-up, spoiler SimpleTexting has both), etc. It has provided all of that and more easily, without a contract. And the platform is so easy to use for our team. One of the only issues we're having is wanting to expand our use of SimpleTexting, and using multiple options for texting (i.e., shortcode, toll-free, landline/business enabling) has been difficult on one account.

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

• SimpleTexting provides excellent value based on their messaging packages but also by allowing its customers to utilize multiple keywords. This is helpful for our organization because we utilize this software across many different departments.
• SimpleTexting analytics and reporting is a key strength of the software. The numbers they report weigh heavily on what we determine as a success of un-successful communication campaign.
• SImpleTexting has excellent customer service available at the click of a button. Their team has always been available and offered solutions when we have had questions or run into a problem.

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

• A lot of glitches and bugs, with promised fixes that keep dragging on for some time.
• Mobile notifications are very buggy. You have to keep force-closing the app and re-opening it multiple times to get the notifications to refresh.
• Constant toggling of 'Unread' and 'All' on mobile or desktop to get the notifications to clear and show up as opened, otherwise it will imply it's not read.
• Also, sometimes new notifications don't show up.

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

With SimpleTexting updating little things here and there almost daily. We reach out to their support team constantly. They have one of the best response rates I have ever experienced! Normally it takes less than a minute to speak to a real person, but even if they are busy they have an answer bot send you articles to see if you can solve the issue yourself first! One of the best support teams ever

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

SimpleTexting is just simple. From the pricing to the interface, it stacks up against the competition by just being as powerful and simple as possible. No extra distractions or confusion. For our company, we wanted texting software that we could easily upsell and integrate into our overall marketing campaigns and SimpleTexting did just that.

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

• Because we are able to reach more people through subscribing, our number of donations has increased and the number of volunteers has increased. We have gone from an average of 5 volunteers an even to 25-30. Our donations increased by 25%.

Incentivized