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Google Analytics

Google Analytics

Overview

What is Google Analytics?

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…

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Recent Reviews
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Awards

Products that are considered exceptional by their customers based on a variety of criteria win TrustRadius awards. Learn more about the types of TrustRadius awards to make the best purchase decision. More about TrustRadius Awards

Reviewer Pros & Cons

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Video Reviews

3 videos

Data Vs Information: Google Analytics Polarizes User
04:24
Easy to Train Clients: A Digital Consultant Gets the Most Out of Google Analytics
04:14
How Google Analytics Propels Marketing Capabilities to the Next Gen
02:43
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Pricing

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Google Analytics 360

150,000

Cloud
per year

Google Analytics

Free

Cloud

Entry-level set up fee?

  • No setup fee

Offerings

  • Free Trial
  • Free/Freemium Version
  • Premium Consulting/Integration Services
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Product Demos

The Most Useful Google Analytics Reports: My Top 6 GA Reports

YouTube

Path Exploration in Google Analytics 4 (practical examples and 4 ideas) || Path Analysis

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Google Analytics Tutorial (de) - Die wichtigsten Funktionen - Erklärt von einem Google Mitarbeiter

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Funnel Exploration in Google Analytics 4 (Funnel Analysis in Analysis Hub)

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UTM Tracking in Google Analytics | Lesson 13

YouTube

3 ways to view Funnels in Google Analytics

YouTube
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Product Details

What is Google Analytics?

Google Analytics Video

Google Analytics Overview

Google Analytics Technical Details

Deployment TypesSoftware as a Service (SaaS), Cloud, or Web-Based
Operating SystemsUnspecified
Mobile ApplicationNo

Frequently Asked Questions

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.

Google Analytics starts at $0.

Adobe Analytics, Contentsquare, and Coremetrics / IBM Digital Analytics (discontinued) are common alternatives for Google Analytics.

Reviewers rate Availability highest, with a score of 10.

The most common users of Google Analytics are from Small Businesses (1-50 employees).
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Comparisons

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Reviews and Ratings

(3711)

Attribute Ratings

Reviews

(1-23 of 23)
Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why
sandro merkvilishvili | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
In my organization, which is a grocery e-commerce company, we use Google Analytics to gain insights into our website traffic and customer behavior. The product addresses several business problems such as measuring website traffic and conversion rates, identifying where our customers are coming from, and which pages on our website are most popular.
Our use case for Google Analytics is comprehensive and covers all aspects of our online presence. We use it to track key metrics such as page views, unique visitors, time on site, and the sources of our traffic such as search engines, direct visits, and referral sites. This information helps us to optimize our website for better user experience and conversions.
We also use Google Analytics to set up and track goals, such as tracking sign-ups or purchases, to measure the success of our marketing and sales efforts. Additionally, we use the product's segmentation and reporting features to gain insights into the behavior of specific groups of customers such as mobile users or those who came from a specific referral source.
Overall, Google Analytics has proven to be a valuable tool for us in understanding the success of our website and e-commerce efforts and helps us to make data-driven decisions to improve our business.
  • Traffic analysis: Google Analytics provides a comprehensive analysis of your website traffic. You can see how many visitors come to your site, where they come from, how long they stay, and which pages they visit. This information is essential for understanding your audience and making informed decisions about how to engage with them.
  • Conversion tracking: Google Analytics makes it easy to track conversions, such as purchases or sign-ups, on your site. You can set up conversion goals and track how well your site is performing in terms of meeting those goals. This information can be used to improve your site's user experience and increase conversions.
  • Custom reports and dashboards: Google Analytics offers a wide range of customization options, including the ability to create custom reports and dashboards. You can create reports that are tailored to your specific needs and objectives, providing you with the information that is most important to your business. Whether you want to see which pages are most popular, which sources of traffic are most effective, or what types of products are selling best, you can create reports that give you that information in an easy-to-understand format.
  • Customization of reports and data visualization: Google Analytics offers a wide range of customization options to create custom reports and dashboards based on specific KPIs and metrics that are most relevant to your business goals. This helps you to gain a more in-depth understanding of your website's performance, allowing you to make data-driven decisions. The tool also provides a variety of visualization options such as line charts, bar graphs, and pie charts, enabling you to clearly communicate insights to stakeholders.
  • Integration with Other Tools: One area where Google Analytics has room for improvement is its integration with other tools. While it is possible to integrate Google Analytics with other tools such as Google AdWords or Google Tag Manager, it can be difficult for users to do so without technical expertise. Improving the integration with other tools would help organizations get a more complete picture of their data.
  • Customization: Another area where Google Analytics has room for improvement is in its customization. While Google Analytics provides many pre-built reports and metrics, it can be challenging for users to customize these reports to fit their specific needs. Improving customization options, such as the ability to create custom reports, would help organizations get the most out of Google Analytics.
  • Real-time Data: Finally, Google Analytics could improve its real-time data capabilities. Currently, Google Analytics only provides real-time data for a limited set of metrics, such as active users and pageviews. Improving real-time data capabilities, such as providing real-time data for all metrics, would help organizations make more informed decisions in real-time.
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.
Daniel Berry | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Google Analytics is the standard for accurate and in-depth website data tracking. Everyone in an SEO role should use it, as should any company interested in improving organic results. Since it's an arm of the world's biggest search engine, Google Analytics gives you data from the source, assuming you know how to find it.
  • Customizability (reporting, saved views, module adjustments, etc.)
  • Accuracy (all info is directly from Google)
  • Brand recognition (most companies are aware of it)
  • Security/sharing (difficult for agencies unless you have a password management tool; verifying devices multiple times is a huge pain)
  • Customer service (difficult to get in touch with someone about your particular problem)
Google Analytics is well suited for ANY company (of any size) that wants to improve online marketing results. It not only helps with SEO but with content, UX/UI, and conversions as well. Only the smallest of startups and companies might not find value in it initially, but everyone does with time.
John Kobel | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Google Analytics is used by our company to track the website traffic and conversions for our clients' websites. We also use it to track the effectiveness of our clients' ad spend in Google Ads to maintain a high level of ROI for our clients. Additionally, Google Analytics allows us to optimize our clients' digital advertising dollars so they can effectively spend money in the right places across today's complex digital universe.
  • Tracks website traffic and measures that traffic to the source of the traffic.
  • also measures audience activity once they arrive on a client's website.
  • can track conversions in whatever that measurement might be and the source of those conversions.
  • Training is on your own unless you want to pay a third party vendor for training.
  • although they do offer certification classes, they are not a good reflection of real-world situations.
  • Communication has decreased considerably since Google has gone public. The Help Desk is now outsourced to another country where English is not the first language spoken and the support team is not that well versed in the details of Google Analytics.
If you run a website for your business, you absolutely need Google Analytics to track the activity on your website. You need to know where traffic is coming from so you can make timely corrective actions to improve your marketing efforts for your website. You cannot effectively manage a website in today's complex digital environment without the detailed level of information that Google Analytics can provide. But, be prepared for the steep learning curve you will encounter once you begin using GA.
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
In our workplace, different online and offline marketing teams use Google Analytics. It allows us not just to analyze different channels but also gives us insight into our end users. So far, it's helped our desktop team understand where the user drops off and how we can improve those drop-offs. Based on the data we analyze, we create content that allows us to retain users for a longer period of time and reduce drop-offs.
  • Captures all the data from our site
  • Measure campaign performance
  • Segmentation
  • Can be a huge learning curve for some if never used Google Analytics
  • Setting up an alert system is missing
  • Better interactive notifications in taking actions quickly
Comparing to its competitors, Google Analytics has all the bells and whistles. Some components are missing in terms of customizations. Some of the other analytics platforms allow you to have a lot more customizations compared to Google Analytics. However, Google Analytics is great for tracking users in real-time to measure your acquisition channels for the basic needs. You can link Google Analytics to your Google Ads account to go further in analyzing data and getting a better insight into your existing users/new users for more advanced users. Conversion tracking is OK. It seems like it is a bit out of touch with reality, and the numbers seem to be overly inflated. Also, setting up Goals can be tricky per our experience.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
With Google Analytics, we are primarily tracking the inbound traffic on our website from different sources. This is being used across multiple teams in the organization. It gives us a clear picture of where we have to focus more. Google Analytics is the single platform for us where we can see the data for different UTMs we are using across different channels and campaigns. We also use it to create goals that resonate with our business objectives. We track the goals on Google Analytics and use these to optimize our paid media campaigns. It is simply an amazing tool for tracking and attribution purposes. We are also using it for reporting and automated dashboards, which give us real-time data and make it easy to make decisions.
  • Google Analytics helps you know where the traffic on your website is coming from. You know which campaign, whether paid or organic, is performing. You can get the real-time data of traffic on your website.
  • It allows you to create your own custom goals and track them. You can also use the same event/goals to optimize your paid media campaigns on Google Ads.
  • Google Analytics can be used to generate extensive reports and also to create real-time custom dashboards.
  • Using Google Analytics, you can change the attribution model to more accurately distribute the credit to different touchpoints that led to a conversion.
  • It takes time for a new person to get acquainted with the interface since there are so many options available. It can be confusing for the new user to navigate through the platform. The UI can be further made easy.
  • It takes time to get the support for any troubleshooting. It's not always available on chat/phone. Most of the time we have to rely on emails.
  • There are limited number of audiences you can create on analytics. For a large website with multiple verticals, they would need this limit to be increased.
  • Creating a funnel is still a mystery for many people. This is a feature many of the users are not leveraging. Google should make the setup process easy and also should make people aware through tutorials/guides.
This is amazing if you have to know about the traffic source on your website. Once the setup is done, it gives you real-time data of traffic on the website by different cuts like devices, geography, language, browser, network, etc. By analyzing this data, you can get to know which feature people are looking for. You can refer to user flow and it tells you how the visitors are navigating on your website. Also, once the UTM setup is done across different channels, Google Analytics can be referred to as a single source to see the performance of all UTMs. It is also quite a handy tool for event tracking.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Google Analytics in all departments. Marketing can use the data to look at campaign and landing page performance. Sales uses it to track prospect activity on our pages. The product team uses it to measure feature adoption, and engineering can use it to track errors in the app. We give everyone access to Google Analytics so they can answer their own questions using the readily available data.
  • Tracking usage in different dimensions and segments
  • Custom segments and reports
  • Tracking A/B test results
  • Attribution
  • It's complex when you start learning how to use it, but once you get to know it, it's really useful
  • The motion chart feature does not work and I cannot find any online documentation to tell me why
  • The help docs are very outdated
It's really appropriate to use in any industry and company size.
Tegan Jenner | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Google Analytics is used within our media & analytics team to track website performance, both on the macro scale, and when looking at the traffic that our paid media campaigns are driving. We also use the Google Analytics plug ins in Google Data Studio to report a live feed of website performance to our clients. We set up events and goals using Google Tag Manager that we they pull and report on through Google Analytics.
  • Flexibility, especially with site tagging
  • Thorough data fields, if properly set up
  • Interesting visuals, like time series, pie charts, website flow visuals, etc.
  • The UI is a little clunky, and I always have to spend a second trying to remember how to find the data I'm looking for
  • I haven't personally found a good training guide on Google Analytics. So learning it was/is slow and cumbersome.
  • I would like to see some more customization options when it comes to reporting and setting up custom reports.
Honestly, it's not the easiest tool to learn and use, but it's free and has become the industry default. The fact that is also seamlessly integrated with the other Google properties like Tag Manager and Data Studio makes it hard to consider any other option for website performance tracking. I would recommend Google Analytics for anyone who is looking to get basic traffic performance for a relatively simple website. If your site is particularly complex and you have complicated events and goals that you want to track, you may consider looking into a paid tool.
Chris Williams | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Google Analytics is being used by the marketing department to track and analyze traffic to our website from various sources. We use this to see where our traffic is coming from, how that traffic is interacting with our website to make informed decisions on our SEO strategy. We also use Google Analytics to track conversions from our website and Google PPC. This allows us to see what conversion percent we are getting from our traffic to make conversion optimization decisions.
  • Very in-depth platform to track a multitude of website analytics
  • Easy to understand metrics to allow informed decisions
  • Great for making reports to present to people
  • Easy to collaborate with multiple users if needed
  • Has a ton of integrations with other marketing products
  • There is a learning curve if you want to get the most out of the platform
  • Setting up conversion tracking can be tricky
  • You may need a webmaster to install the tracking code if you don't have web experience
Google Analytics really stands alone as the best product to track your website traffic. Of course, there are other marketing platforms out there, but most of them connect to Google Analytics together with the data needed to perform best. If you really take the time to learn the platform you will gain invaluable insights into how your website is performing and improvements you need to make to do better. If you are new to this, Google's insights are also helpful to tell you where you are being successful and items you need to improve. Connecting Google Analytics with Google Search Console is also a powerful way to understand your organic traffic and rankings.
George Bounacos | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Google Analytics to measure all of the activity on sites that we own and sites that we manage for clients. Over time, Google's reliability and reporting tools have enabled us to move away from having to study server logs to understand what is happening. As the largest free analytics software online, they've radically improved how data is used to manage digital businesses. Making an organization data-driven is the first step to improving profitability.
  • We set up conversions for each organization even if they do not engage in direct sales online. This has the benefit of holding everyone accountable to the same mission.
  • Google Analytics also becomes the permanent database of the organization's digital activity. Need to easily compare this month's sales against prior years and cart the impact of seasonality. It's easy to set up fast and easily saved for future retrieval.
  • Handling the data from millions of sites has allowed Google to see what information is requested and then prompt users.
  • There are definitely some data vagaries around URLs and channels. Subdomains can easily be misconfigured as can referring sites.
  • Years later, we all still mourn for the missing keyword data. Yes, we used to get keyword information from every Google search. That loss is only somewhat mitigated by linking Search Console with Analytics.
  • There is still a lot of user confusion around how Google Tag Manager works. We understand, but we're in that business. Setting up Analytics to work on your sites isn't as easy as looking at an FAQ.
  • The entire configuration process could be easier for micro-businesses. There are small businesses that could use these tools, but have a steep learning curve and often don't have the budget to pay someone to handle things for them. It seems like a basic turnkey solution could be available to them on certain platforms.
If you've moved beyond keeping receipts in a cigar box, you need to use Google Analytics. That's true even if you don't directly sell on the internet because Google Analytics will tell you what people are interested in on your website, how they get there, and even some limited information about where they are and their interests.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Google Analytics helps us to understand how people use our sites, we collect audience data, organize insights, and take action to improve experience, sales, major KPIs, etc. It also helps to bring together all major reporting with other modules like advertising, trends, conversions, etc. We use it to integrate wtih data studio, adsense, Google ads, ad manager, and search console.

  • Innovation - clear leader in this space with constantly evolving solutions
  • Custom reporting - drill down to very granular metrics
  • robust insights - access to many insights that are not available anywhere else.
  • convoluted eco-system of apps - not always clear how they're different.
  • steep learning curve - courses are helpful but new apps are frequent
  • Limited 3P integrations
It's really the gold standard in terms of analytics solutions due to its connection to the Google search engine. Obviously, they will have the most data/insights if most of the internet search data is being gathered from their site. We get the most benefit from using analytics to drive decisions around our advertising campaigns.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Google Analytics on a daily basis for multiple reasons. One, we like to view the amount of traffic on our website in real time. We also like to view which marketing channels are driving the most traffic and revenue which helps us make better business decisions. Having the opportunity to view what our highest visited pages [are] helps us understand user behavior, as well as understanding what technology they're accessing our website from.
  • User Demographics
  • User Acquisition
  • Marketing Channel Reporting
  • Hard to setup custom configurations
  • Lack of Organic Keyword data
Google Analytics is well suited for businesses looking to understand their website traffic, their top visited pages, and understand where traffic is coming from. Google Analytics will not provide recommendations on paid media campaigns or provide much insight into the top organic keywords that drive traffic to your business. It will help you understand your user base demographics and locations they're accessing your website from.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Google Analytics is deployed across our entire organization. We have about 44 country websites and having visibility into our web traffic is everything. Google analytics helps you gain valuable marketing insight to how our content and pages are performing. We use all the web stats to drive change and improvement - which are deployed globally. I utilize a [Google Analytics] plugin so I am constantly reviewing metrics when i am combing our sites. See as there are thousands of pages, quick searches, friendly dashboards, and numerous tools and customizing to help direct editors to make improvements and address fixes.
  • Allows you to take a deep dive into how users are engaging with the website.
  • You can create custom goals and dashboards
  • You can also generate reports on all the metrics you desire.
  • All the tabs and options can feel overwhelming sometimes
  • There is a scale to climb as far as learning what all the lingo means. This is needed to understand the data and how to improve it - though they do define many terms
It may be tough to find other analytical tools for web outside of Google Analytics that will have you covered as far as full insight to the performance of your website. Our organizations setup includes many users and multiple instances per each country. So definitely for a large organization, you will want to have GA setup and running.
Mehdi Aherraki | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We offer web and digital services to our clients so Google analytics is at the center of our offering it provides us with the necessary data for tracking on our websites and our client's website for a more effective SEO strategy development and also as part of our digital advertising campaigns.
  • It offers a clear and effective way to determine conversion rates for our websites and those of our clients.
  • Tracking of social media ROI (different campaigns all in one single dashboard).
  • Content Performance Analysis for a good SEO strategy building.
  • Tracking and organization of data by devices.
  • The feel of the platform can be overwhelming at first sight and the learning curve can be hard for a new user.
  • Absence of clear support.
  • Big price tag to move from the freemium GA to the premium service.
  • Absence of color customization for the platform (it can look more beautiful than this).
  1. Freemium and easy to start using it right away.
  2. Good determination conversion rate that helps develop a better marketing activities and campaigns.
  3. Social media tracking all in one place.
  4. Helps determine the monetary value of conversions for social media which is very helpful while working on campaigns.
Dan Hanna | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Currently, we use Google Analytics to monitor all of the traffic that visits our website. We are able to view all of the sources that send traffic our way. Also, it is helpful to learn about the users who come across our website. The breakdown that Google Analytics gives us is by far superior to anything else we have used that is on the market.
  • The software tracks exactly where every user is sent from whether it is a Google search or social media.
  • The data that Google Analytics gathers from each user is detrimental to the success of our business. It offers unique incite from each user in regard to demographics.
  • It makes it super simple to find out what demographic we need to spend our resources on retargeting.
  • There was a bit of a learning curve to implement the software on our website.
  • Some of the reporting functions can be difficult for a novice employee.
  • There can be a small lag when trying to run larger reports.
We use Google Analytics every day to track everything about our website users. From what source each person comes from, to all of the demographics about each user. We then take it a step further to see what "user" is buying our product and then replicate that customer in targeting new business.
Reita Silvis | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Our constant contact relies mostly on Google Analytics in regards to measuring engagement with our brokers and agents, especially when it comes to bonus opportunities to bring in new business accounts to underwrite. We noticed that since analyzing our outreach through Google, it's helped us pinpoint where we could improve in order to get more of a response and become more personalized to our biggest agents.
  • It's a great platform for mobile app analytics and not only on desktop/website
  • It's a good free option but also the paid version is not outrageous
  • There is a learning curve and not much support or guidance
  • The free version doesn't analyze as many data sources as our previous IBM analytics
In the free version, it's less helpful as the data it's using is limited compared to other software out there. It doesn't help us pinpoint where to focus our campaigns on, however, which has helped a lot in getting agent participation up.
Kyle Reichelt | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We've used Google Analytics to set up and optimize sales channels for customers, we use Google Analytics to optimize our own website, as well we've integrated GA with our ETL & BI solution, OnMetric.
  • GA tracks user behaviors wonderfully
  • GA provides invaluable insights regarding the geographic dispersal of customers.
  • Paired with embeddable click events, GA is an indispensable solution for website conversion optimization.
  • The learning curve is steep.
  • There are so many features, you really run the risk of information overload.
  • There is little effort made to provide context, and so one must draw their own conclusions to drive actions.
For optimizations of anonymous tracking, google analytics is second to none--and it's free! Unless you have extremely high traffic... then it get's very expensive very fast. It is well suited for tracking multiple sales channels, across multiple devices, and allows for very granular tracking. GA supports annotations, providing invaluable context when viewing trends.
Vikram Balaji | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Google Analytics to measure the effect of our sales and marketing campaign and also to track key metrics of visitors to our website.Thereby, serving as a guide towards knowing how best to tailor our sales and marketing efforts for maximized effect.
  • Google Analytics is free.
  • Enable us to set up reports via channels; enhancing our ability to track the efficiency of our sales efforts towards user conversion.
  • Simple integration; Integrating Google analytics on our website took less than five minutes. We simply copied and pasted the Analytics tracking code to our HTML code, and that was all.
  • Steep learning curve; Takes a bit of time to get accustomed to the work environment(dashboard) of this tool. No thanks to the user interface, which is very much clustered.
  • Poor support: I wish there was a go to support team for the free version of this tool. Currently what we have available is just basic documentation.
Google Analytics is perfect for measuring marketing campaign performance, monitoring web traffic sources and is a great tool for monitoring month to month comparison performance.
Matt Howarth | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Google Analytics is being used by my organization to track all of our site metrics, from visits to conversions and revenue. We use Google Analytics to segment and the analyze our site data in many different ways. Some example include desktop vs. mobile, time of day, day of week, source, medium, etc.
  • Google Analytics allows us to easily view site visits, conversions, and conversion rate by source, medium, campaign, keyword, and/or content. This is extremely important when considering how to spend our time and money.
  • Google Analytics is able to provide data in real-time. This is vital when launching new initiatives and wanting to find learnings as soon as possible.
  • Google Analytics allows us to compare conversion attribution models very easily. This is important because it allows us to better understand our users' conversion path and our website conversion funnel.
  • Google Analytics could allow more rows to be exported at one time. If a report is more than 2000 rows, it must be exported in chunks and combined into one spreadsheet.
  • Google Analytics could link with other popular advertising channels (ex. Microsoft BingAds). This would provide greater insight and help improve business ROI.
  • Google Analytics could make recommendations for our website based on data (ex. focus on a specific webpage due to high bounce rate).
I would recommend Google Analytics to anyone who has a website. It's not necessary to need to analyze your data all the time, but to have the option to view site activity down to the specific page and know how each traffic source behaves on that page, that information is invaluable to a growing business and/or website.
John McElhenney | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Google Analytics is the starting point for all good digital marketing strategies. It's free, it's fairly accurate, and it's the benchmark everyone knows and uses for things like Unique Views and Page Views.
  • Charts and graphs are good in GA. You can load your presentation or report with hard numbers and nice charts. BUT, this is also the problem with GA, there are so many charts and graphics, and they look so good, you sometimes forget you have to actually analyse them and make actionable suggestions for improvement.
  • The basic numbers from 50,000 down to granular analysis are all available in GA.
  • You can build very sophisticated dashboards, lead funnels, and eCommerce reports inside GA. The learning curve for these types of uses are high, but free and extremely valuable.
  • Connecting AdWords, AdSence and your eCommerce wins to GA, gives you a massive overview of your digital business.
  • Don't rely too much on the top-level dashboards. They are nice and broad, but often don't give you much to go on for building recommendations.
  • The eCommerce connection between GA and your shopping process is not always accurate and may take several tries to get it working. Just reporting the presentation of a Receipt page does not really equal a definitive sale.
  • The depth of the rabbit hole in GA is amazing. You can spend hours, days, weeks, building tools and maps and strategies, and still miss the actionable goals. Don't be mesmerized by the charts and graphs either. Dig into the WIN for your client, and focus all your efforts there.
GA is free. If the client has a different system (one tied to their shopping cart, for example) you might not use GA as you complete reporting solution. But you have to know your GA numbers.
Gracie Wardin | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Google Analytics is being used across the entire campus of the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh - encoded in every webpage we have in order to look at traffic we get on the web. If certain webpages get more traffic, we can tell by Google Analytics and take the techniques used on the successful page and implement similar techniques on the sites that are not as successful in web traffic. It addresses the problem of websites not getting traffic - it helps significantly.
  • Implements HTML5 code into your website's source code to track specific information about who is visiting your site, when, and from where.
  • Without Google Analytics, bloggers, businesses, and all professionals wouldn't be able to track how useful their website is to other people.
  • Since many people aren't familiar with HTML5 coding, and although Google Analytics makes it somewhat simple, they could improve the directions on where exactly to put the code (and what code specifically) on your website since every website is different.
  • Google is such a large and powerful company that they should be able to cater to each user's needs, therefore having steps for the HTML5 or iFrame tags for each browsers and for each type of website.
  • These types of websites could include both responsive and non-responsive, but Google Analytics should focus on responsive sites since mobile is becoming a fanatic trend.
It is suited well for both technical and non-technical users, but if a more technical user uses Google Analytics as a resource they can learn and find out many things that it can do. But it is appropriate for non-technical users as well, as it has directions for each step. The homepage after you get your code set up can be intimidating at first, but the usability is great after learning more and more about it.
John Loftis, CFE | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Using web analytics is critical in understanding how people use your website. Whether you are trying to analyze customer behavior, find out how people are navigating to your website, or even success of marketing campaigns, Google Analytics has proven to be an essential tool that I use on a daily basis.
  • Evaluate the success of marketing campaigns using conversion tracking.
  • Monitor sources of web traffic to ensure our organic traffic, PPC advertising, social media campaigns etc. are performing consistently.
  • Identify emerging markets by monitoring web traffic by country.
  • Test A/B splits on landing pages. We use Google Analytics to compare performance of each page.
  • Identify trends by monitoring organic keyword searches.
  • Evaluate overall performance of website based on traffic tracked in Google Analytics
  • My main complaint would be that there is a bit of a learning curve with Google Analytics.
Google Analytics is a fantastic tool for web analytics, especially when you're working with a limited budget.
Eric Karkovack | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
I'm using Google Analytics to gather information for both my own website and the websites of my clients. It's mainly being used for finding the total number of page views, unique visitors and referrals from outside URLs. The majority of the time, I'm using it just for the basic tasks and don't get into the minutia as much.
  • It's great for detail oriented reports on web traffic and related info.
  • The maps indicating where users are coming from are particularly useful.
  • Very easy to create custom reports.
  • Easy integration with just about any type of website.
  • Ability to distinguish between mobile and desktop users.
  • The fact that so many search terms have now been blocked out of Google Analytics is a little troubling.
  • Even as a long time web professional, I still get confused about how to setup goals and other, more complicated features.
  • Documentation is not always as clear and concise as it could be.
  • When integrating with WordPress, it's better to use a plugin to help turn on some of those extended features.
It's useful for pretty much any type of website. Frankly, Google Analytics is the standard bearer at the moment. Despite some areas being tough to figure out (for me, at least), at the very least it's great for getting that basic data that everyone is interested in learning more about. And, if you do want to dig deeper (and are willing to spend the time learning all of the intricacies), you can find out some interesting metrics.
Michael Silva | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
We use Google Analytics as a tool to help us track and measure overall e-Commerce performance. It is mainly used by our Marketing Department. This tool has helped address the problem of being able to better understand traffic patterns, marketing campaign performance and who our visitors are and what they are doing when they get to our website.
  • Segmentation - GA provides numerous ways to really segment your data to better understand your traffic and campaign performance. Allows you to really drill down into your data.
  • Useability - The tool itself is VERY user friendly. Training was easy and I found the learning curve of this tool to be much smaller than other Analytic tools.
  • Reporting - It's very easy to set up custom reports and have them emailed to individuals on a timely basis.
  • It would be nice to have a training or robust help section with in the tool.
  • The setting of date ranges can sometime be a bit clunky and feels glitchy.
I believe Google Analytics is a well suited tool for any e-Commerce team.
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