Google Analytics vs. Survicate

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.

Survicate is well suited for very basic intercept polls and is less suited for more complex surveying tasks (e.g., anything more than basic skip-logic or surveying niche cohorts) and longitudinal surveying (e.g., comparing responses from the same or similar cohorts year over year).

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

• IMO, the strengths of feedback lite is what it is called for - 'lite"... it is basic, simple, and easy to set up and use.
• Especially should be mention that it is easy to set up, and you can have it working in less than a few hours.
• Reliable - I don't remember even one "problem" or an issue we experienced with it.

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

• In my opinion, inconsistent and visually unappealing survey visuals (e.g., NPS and cSAT questions look completely different from each other, creating a disjointed visual experience)
• Poor customer service (in my experience, issue resolution can take weeks)
• Lack of clarity around API & other technical capabilities requiring engineering assistance
• Very limited maximum response limit per month

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

We use Survicate for now, over 7 years, and the tool is being constantly improved. New features and products has been introduced over the years. The team listens to our feedback we sometimes share, and improve the product based on that. We really appreciate being supported by the Customer Success, all the insights and help we got from them. And even though they introduced many new features over the years, the tool still remained super easy to use, even from new employees that join our team

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

It's rare to use products that offer wide range of features, and yet are really ease to use. Over the years, the product has changed a lot, they introduced numerous new features, but the product remained really simple to use. We know it, because new employees who join our team, have no problem in starting to use Survicate on their own, without and dedicated training. The UI is really clear.

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

We had a lot of issues during implementation that required help from Survicate's engineers. In my experience, it took us over 4 weeks to be fully up and running due to lag times in communication.

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.

Setup was simple. One-time installation for our website and inside the product. We used Google Tag Manager to implement Survicate. So within 2 hours, we were able to run surveys, and also all attributes and events were passed to Survicate, so that we were able to use them to trigger surveys

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

Considering the simplicity of the need, and the cost of such solution (~600$/yr), I don't think there was very deep research for any alternatives. The main alternative was embedding a feedback tool "organically" into our site, that option was taken off the table, for strategic considerations.

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

• We had a business need - to collect feedback on our support knowledge base content. Feedback Lite fulfills this need, with simple, easy to use, solution.

Incentivized