Google Analytics vs. Symantec Content & Malware Analysis

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.

If you have Symantec based environment including Symantec proxy and endpoints, Content and Malware Analysis is the obvious choice. You can't run the CAS-MAS as a standalone deployment, you need proxies or ICAP supported devices capable to send the files/URLS. It's not a network security device where you can flow/direct the traffic to C/MAS. It does not have UBA, NBA or NTR features, it is just working for analyzing files as expected.

• 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

• 0 day detection and prevenion
• Flawless integration with Symantec Ecosystem
• Integration with other vendors supporting ICAP is also working
• Custom and golden image support
• High performance on busy environments
• Many threats are already detected and prevented through the CAS, it improves the performance drastically.
• Already builtin virustotal integration
• Reference to updates and updates information where I can see the product/service detecting which APTs
• Multiple Antivirus engines which you can select/subscribe
• Manual submission of file is supported through the gui
• URL manual submission is also supported

• 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

• API support is lacking
• Symantec/Broadcom security vision in general
• Symantec support is not perfect
• You can't run the product as a standalone network device
• No packet capture capabiliy or work in span mode
• You need a dedicated hardware to make it run
• You need to buy

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

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

We have been using many solutions even tested nearly all available 0day sandbox solutions in the market. We choose Symantec CMA as we have already Symantec endpoint protection/EDR on the client, Symantec proxy for the web access, SCMA fits our environment. We have a big bargain when we puchase lots of equipment from the Symantec. Detection and prevention is very good at SCMA but some constant issues; like the product is not designed for heterogeneous environments, we can not integrate the SCMA with WAFs, it's lacking in api and request/reply calls. There's no file scanning, discover the option. SIEM integration is not smooth. I can not run some of the SOAR playbooks through the SCMA.

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

• 0-day and APT risk is covered by the SCMA
• As the SSL is inspected and analyzed at Bluecoat proxy servers, hidden threats, malicous files are passed to SCMA to be analyzed.
• Getting full visibility at file trajectory level
• As it's a full proxy and ICAP integration, we are sure that the files are to analyzed and scanned for malicious activity. This is a big plus compared to NGFW analyze concept, as the NGFWs have special failsafe mechanisms allowing bypass of file analysis. SCMA fully catches the hidden threats.
• Flawless integration with Bluecoat systems is a big plus, customers are getting the same type of messages within their browsers.
• A negative impact is the standardization when I deploy SCAM to one of our locations. Then the auditors demand the same coverage within other areas and it comes with the cost. Especially maintaining these devices on premise environment has a significant cost.