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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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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

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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

(1-25 of 96)
Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why
Hash Moody | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Google Analytics is one of the best website analytics tools on the market, and it can help businesses measure and improve their online performance, as well as solve a variety of business problems, such as attracting more visitors to your website, increasing conversions and sales, optimizing marketing campaigns, understanding customers' behavior and preferences, and identifying and fixing website issues. It may give you with very advanced user segmentation and reporting. Additionally, you may add several websites to watch. All of these enterprise-level capabilities are accessible on the free edition, which, in my opinion, are overkill for SMEs. If you own a web design or marketing firm, GA might become one of your best buddies.
  • Optimize marketing campaigns.
  • Understand customers' behavior and preferences.
  • Identify and fix issues on your website.
  • Increase conversions and sales.
  • Make it simple, because the majority of GA users are SMEs.
  • Reduce features SMEs don't need, maybe which can reduce their carbon footprint.
  • GA gathers and maintains user personal data such as IP addresses, cookies, and device identifiers, which leads to privacy and compliance problems.
  • Natively introduce heat maps.
I believe it is best suited to web/marketing agencies with adequate understanding of running and maintaining websites, as well as marketing and promotion. For SMEs, I feel that something simpler, such as Microsoft Clarity, should be utilised; it does not have all of the functionality that GA provides, but it is basic, straightforward, and contains all that a small or medium-sized firm could want. If you perform SEO for other companies, GA is unquestionably the finest.
Alex Nejako | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Google Analytics has been very important for tracking Web traffic to our Web properties as well as which Keywords people were using when they visited our Sites. It brings visibility into how Web pages are performing across multiple Google Analytics properties and the history of how they have performed in the past.
  • Web Analytics
  • Web Content Performance
  • Reporting
  • Data Export
  • More wizards - guided version for brand new Users of the platform
  • Productized integration with Marketing Platforms. Something that can be put on the App Stores of HubSpot, Salesforce Marketing Cloud, and then purchased for integrated usage with the platform.
  • More alerts on when Content is underperforming.
Google Analytics is one of the best Web analytics platforms out there. It is well documented and it is relatively easy for Web content creators/Web masters to learn and use. It may not be appropriate for organizations that have used another Web platform for a long period of time or where they do not want their analytics information accessed via the Web. If an organization has been using another platform for a long time, there may need to be some work done to prove out the case for the transition, as well as implementation work needed to get Google Analytics set up properly.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Google Analytics is used across the business for keeping track of customer behaviour on website, from source channels to target destinations. This ranges from simple use cases like knowing session count of a user to complex use cases like keeping track of conversion goals of purchase & revenue targets in the end. Custom use cases also involve tasks like creation of custom user journey funnels such as login funnel, sign-on funnel, order funnel to more complex use cases like cross-segment or cross-sequence comparison across various temporal bases of customer journey. The scope of this tool is the broadest of all - this software turns out to be the bread and butter of everything we do and plan. This not only helps in direct integration with visibility on tools like Google Ads and ads performance, but also helps in planning downstream applications & strategies, keeping in mind the current customer behaviour on website, including bounces, duration spent as well as total transactions made & orders revenue placed. Moreover, custom integration of Google Analytics with other tools & softwares helps in expanding the scope of usage of this software across domains.
  • Tracking Customer Behaviour
  • Tracking Financial metrics like transactions & revenue
  • Tracking custom user journey funnels like login funnel, order funnel, etc.
  • Seamless integration with other Google services like BigQuery, Google Ads, etc.
  • Ability to create custom reports based on use case requirements
  • Ability to export reports for custom analyses at user's end
  • Export functionality can be improved - currently custom reports can't be shared in live condition, rather in formats like PDF etc.
  • Ability to integrate with more 3rd party apps, which don't belong to the Google environment
  • Currently, the UI is cluttered with not-so-helpful values. A simple user experience by default in terms of navigation is required
  • The auto-search option at the top bar doesn't work as expected most of the time, that should be improved.
  • Some definitions of Google Analytics are not self-explanatory, a lot of research is required to process the field meaning.
  • Ready-to-use glossary for tackling complex use cases like attribution handling
It is best suited for scenarios wherein customer behaviour is to be analysed in a minute manner - the use cases can range from simple tasks like tracking sessions & duration of time spent on website to more complex use cases like tracking successful conversion purchase percentage, login conversion page funnel & goals as well as targets performance against expected numbers. This can be helpful in deciding further CTAs like downstream strategic planning on customer behaviour enhancement, driving up engagement as well as revenue ultimately in the end. There are some scenarios wherein GA is not particularly suited well to perform the best in most scenarios. And those use cases will almost always deal with things which are related to 3rd party apps. For instance, linking 3rd party ads data sources is sometimes a hassle while viewing the data in unison with Google's data in the console. There can be say missing campaign IDs but campaign names would be present, making it hard to make sense of data holistically. Data Export is also an issue when working with data outside Google Analytics, as export formats are limited in nature.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Google Analytics is a gem when it comes to site data reporting, traffic analysis and much more. We are currently using Google Analytics for tracking down all of our custom events (whenever we have some custom elements they need to be tracked using custom tags and triggers using tag manager). And this data is visualised using the native Looker Studio that Google provides. Not only it had helped us identified many problem areas, it had also helped us updating our sites to handle traffic better, increase throughput and lower web transaction times as well. The free version provides much functionalities that any starting team can benefit from. The premium version's analytics is profound never to say.
  • Detailed site data reporting and visualisation tools
  • Supports up to 100 properties at a time in a default account
  • Custom event tracking setup is effortless
  • All events are captured as one. If Google Analytics could segregate them without custom metric that would have been great
  • The new Google Analytics 4 doesn't have that much flexibility that UA provided
If you have a lot of sites and need to have an overview on how they are performing and in general how much interactions are going on in your sites then Google Analytics is the best solution for this. This had also helped us with Ad revenues. Coupling Analytics with Ad Sense and seeing your site grow in terms of traffic handling and revenue generation is a boon for a lifetime
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.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Google Analytics gives us real-time data where we need and allows us to quickly pick up on search trends, purchase behavior, and more
  • User behavior tracking
  • Detailed data
  • Certain areas are hard to find
  • Using secondary dimensions and other advanced tools can be challenging
Google Analytics is good for any size business but may fall short if you're looking for super-detailed information. The reports and data can be helpful, but at times is lacking for our needs
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Google Analytics to track and monitor use of external websites, internal websites and recruitment marketing efforts. It allows us to see what content is most successful, channels we should focus on and what’s actually being used on our sites. Without the data from Google Analytics we wouldn’t know what impact our efforts have on bringing new people to the company.
  • Tracks and gathers data
  • Provides insight on user/customer behavior
  • Is customizable for reporting and tracking
  • One of the most powerful features is using RegEx, which takes some time to learn and is not always intuitive
  • It is a complex and large system and can take time to learn
I think that Google Analytics is a great tool and don’t know why everyone wouldn’t use it on their websites, apps, etc. It’s free; just takes the time and effort to learn how to find the information you want once it is set up. I especially like how you can set up custom goals and reports for anything you are interested in seeing. I often find that I track the pages on my websites that are visited the list often and what marketing campaigns are bringing people to my site.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Google Analytics was used only by my department in my previous company. My department was digital marketing. We used Google Analytics to do website analytics like, monitoring traffic by sources/medium, monitoring conversions on landing pages, etc.
  • Traffic analytics
  • Goal conversions/Landing page conversions
  • User Behavior Analytics
  • Google Analytics is for technical people, some help in creating the expressions would be helpful
  • Drag and drop graphs will be helpful too
  • User behavior analytics could be simplified
A Marketing analyst or paid media analyst is the right person to use Google Analytics. An analyst needs to be technical enough to write the right expressions to fetch correct data. Suppose they are Google Analytics certified, then great. Consumers of this data will be digital marketing managers. The main use case of Google Analytics, as I see it, is web analytics. They can't be used to do campaign analytics or attribution. Though Google Analytics offers these features, I don't find them easy to set up.
Ellen Moon | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Google Analytics is definitely one of the top analytics software in the market for digital advertising. It has a lower barrier to entry for clients because it builds in and syncs with google ads and GSP automatically. There is a decently robust free version that a lot of advertising accounts lean on as the source of truth.
  • Cookie cutter features
  • Robust set of free tools
  • Auto tagging for google properties
  • For anything custom, it is difficult to build
  • Free version does not have accurate cookie reporting (only sampling)
  • Cookies can display up to 10% variance compared to other tags
Google Analytics is really great for small to medium business with a small team. If you have a smaller, straight forward set of conversion events and/or are an ecommerce client where there is no complexity to data that is passed back, Google Analytics will work great out of the box[.]
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Google Analytics to manage our websites, drive content decisions, and determine which areas we should focus on with website redesigns. I have Google Analytics on over 40 different program and department websites and we track behavior and see which of our resources work for our audiences and which need to be redesigned.
  • 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
  • Changes to Google Analytics mean that the trainings they offer really are necessary if you're going to make the best use out of the software
  • There are two different ways to set up analytics on a website and it's confusing
  • I use a third-party software to link analytics to some of my websites and it stopped syncing randomly before and needs to be reconnected so we watch it closely
Google Analytics is the industry leader for websites and really needs to be used to remain competitive and have the best overall picture of what your websites are doing. Because it's used so widely, everyone understands it and reports are easy to read. You can also sync multiple accounts/pages into one dashboard, making the admin job easier.
August 02, 2021

Google Analytics

Víctor Garnica | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
My team and I try to guide and implement the end customers to answer business questions regularly to the Marketing team and sometimes IT. The typical problems between organizations are related to bringing more clients and increasing the LTV of current clients.
The business problems that Google Analytics helps us regularly are demographic and technographic knowledge of users. Also, the behavior with interactions on different products on the sites, increasing revenue up to 400% compared to previous periods. In some cases, we have managed to reduce expenses by around 25% during the campaign with optimizations on sites that allow navigators to have a better experience around them.
  • Simple to use. The clarity of its reports allows rapid adoption of users without knowledge of Marketing as with experts.
  • A large percentage of the metrics and dimensions appear only with the snippet. It is simple, either with direct code or with Google Tag Manager (recommended). If you have access to the code of your site, it is a process that you can carry out in less than an hour to know a large number of insights for the first steps, including the measurement Advanced in Universal Analytics is not that complex (possibly with GA4 this changes slightly at the event level)
  • Connect with your infrastructure. As well as universal analytics, google analytics 360, and now with GA4. Every version looks for a way for their tools to connecting with their ecosystem: Ads, Google BigQuery, and other services.
  • Connection with offline sources. Apart from making adaptations in the data sources, they also need to be handled with care because it is easy to make mistakes, and the result is not always what is expect. They need to work more like a CDP.
  • With GA4, many things will change, but in the Universal Analytics version, the event fields were limited. If you need detail, you had to make some adjustments around that. With the standard version, sometimes you cannot reach the next level in non-eCommerce topics with the limitations of custom dimensions.
I would recommend it in the following cases:
1. If you are a small or medium company with a site used to generate a business objective, you must use it. If not, you should also use it to improve your site and achieve business objectives.
2. If you are a company adopting the digital culture, it is an excellent way to understand the concepts necessary to give a better customer experience.
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.
Jasmeet S Babra | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
GA is being used to track analytics for our support site. The teams using GA are customer support and business support.
We use GA data to report on and identify who visits our website and what content they consume. This helps us in making decisions on how can we improve the experience of our users who consume our content.
  • reporting
  • scheduling reports
  • trends identification
  • Analytics
  • NA
Google Analytics works great when trying to discover trends on who, from where, what articles, what content etc are being consumed on your website. GA has great reports and charts which are easy to understand and comprehend. Any domain or subdomain is easy to set up to use Google Analytics and within hours, you start to receive data. If you need to find who uses your website and how to improve on technical aspects like page load speed, errors etc, it is a great tool
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Google Analytics is used as one of the main reporting engines for our company. It quickly gives us insight into where are traffic is coming from, breakdowns of who is purchasing, and detailed, itemized sales history. We also use Google Analytics to track individual marketing campaign performance, like ad hoc emails or social campaigns.
  • Gives detailed demographics
  • Allows you to segment out traffic to analyze
  • Shows where your traffic is coming from
  • Can't accurately track returns / fraud orders
  • Can be difficult to set up correctly sometimes (especially in the new interface)
  • Mainly uses last click attribution
Google Analytics is free, which is one of the best parts about it. Once set up, it provides access to a large portion of the information you would need to optimize marketing campaigns and your website overall. Knowing who is visiting your site is the first step to optimizing your marketing efforts and GA does exactly that.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Our company used the free version of Google Analytics to monitor and report on website visitors and e-commerce conversions. We would regularly generate reports based on the data contained within the platform, and use it to inform website development, issues and tracking of various KPIs. For this reason, it was crucial to our commercial performance measurement and a major contributor to future planning for different business functions. We also made some of the data available to third parties for the purposes of retargeting and advertising.
  • Clearly segmented dashboard for visits, commerce, performance metrics etc.
  • Relatively simple user and property management.
  • Useful exporting options for external integrations and analysis.
  • A variety of viewing options for different data, so that it can be understood better or drilled down into.
  • Intuitive UI for navigating historical data.
  • 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.
For a free product, [Google Analytics] is an excellent offering that is difficult to compete with out of the box. Simple integration is very quick and easy with gtag as a website snippet, or even via Google's tag manager. A more complex, detailed integration can be more costly and time-consuming, but it is always possible to opt in to various bits of data over time, so it is quite extensible in that sense. This makes it suitable for small sites and businesses starting out, and when you get to a scale where GA may no longer be fit for purpose in this state you can then evaluate versus other platforms and possibly upgrade to premium if desired.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We primarily use Google Analytics within the Marketing department. It was decided on and implemented by the web development group, and is used by the whole department in various forms. It has proven to be an effective and integrated tool for our web performance analysis work across multiple web products.
  • Basic performance measurements
  • Traffic sources
  • Demographic data
  • Data Studio integration
  • Optimization
  • Multi-site setups
  • Connection to non-Google products
Google Analytics is a free option that keeps up with much more expensive and difficult to use competitors, so it's hard to argue with that. If you are using other Google products or have limited technical capabilities on staff, it is absolutely the way to go. If you have a more complicated optimization or tracking program, it probably can't keep up with your needs.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
It always helps identify usage, trends, and opportunities for growth. You can stay high level, or get pretty granular in order to dig into trends and patterns that will help your business thrive. It bridges the gap between what you "think" is happening and what actually is happening. It allows us to communicate more effectively with our clients as a result.
  • Traffic analysis
  • Demographics
  • Geographic usage
  • User training
  • Get rid of the new version
  • Provide quick and easy onboarding
It's particularly suited to brands, individuals, and businesses who want to know more about their business and how to grow it. We always set up at least a rudimentary implementation, even if they don't decide to move forward with deeper analysis. This allows us to have something to fall back on.
Heide Rembold | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Google Analytics is often used by one individual (myself) with occasional consultation and sharing with other members of the staff. As the Director of Marketing & Analytics, I use Google Analytics to track data on our website and relay that information to our team, as well as use it to come up with ways to increase traffic to our website and business in general. The business problems we address as the questions of how consumers are getting to our website, what they're doing once they're on it, and when and how they leave.
  • Has details on everything
  • Raw data, up for interpretation
  • Multi-user functionality
  • Courses available for education
  • While raw data is nice to have, I do wish there was an easier way to provide reports from Google Analytics directly. Something that could answer questions straight-forward for people.
  • I would appreciate "helpful hints" or a cheat sheet of some sort, so when quickly searching for something such as time on a certain page, I can find it quickly.
  • I really don't have a third point!
I am highly likely to recommend Google Analytics to a friend or colleague if they have the goals of knowing what is going on in their website and how they can improve the layout, design, or working of it to increase attention, sales, et cetera. The many functions that Google Analytics provides make it a fantastic platform to record and present data, including the "goals" setting.
J.P. VanderLinden | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Analytics is a first step for anyone actively marketing their site with online efforts. It allows for a clear understanding of website user behavior and content performance, broken down by factors like source, campaign, geography, and time. Regardless of whether you manage paid media campaigns, organic social or search efforts, or website UX/UI and Conversion Rate Optimization, Google Analytics has some value to provide you in its tracking and reporting.
  • User pathing and flows can help a site manager understand better how site visitors move through their content in order to streamline and present a better experience
  • Acquisition reporting shows not only where traffic comes from, but also how visitors from particular sources engage with the website as compared to each other.
  • Ecommerce conversion tracking goes beyond simple revenue reporting to show how different products or product categories sell, and how the checkout and cart process could be better optimized.
  • As a legacy user of Analytics, it still rankles that keyword tracking was removed, especially if you're managing SEO and organic search efforts.
  • GA does not yet have a good solution for cross-device user tracking; Facebook has been able to figure this out with smarter cookies, you'd like to think Google could as well.
  • Analytics defaults to last-click attribution, and while there is an attribution modeling section, it doesn't universally touch the entire platform, only a small subsection of reports. Allowing changes to the attribution across the entire set of reports would be a big lift.
It's going to be hard to beat this offering for the price (free). Even if it falls a little short in some areas, the savings compared to something like Adobe Analytics or Mixpanel over time really adds up.

That said, it is particularly useful for anyone running a website where the key actions are tracked online. For example, a lead-generating site where a form is filled out on the website or a meeting is booked; an e-commerce store where products are bought and sold directly on the site; or a SaaS organization where the signup completely happens online.

On the other hand, if your main customer activity happens in-person or over the phone, it's going to be harder to connect site activities to the ultimate goal, which is going to decrease the value Analytics brings.
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.
McKay Salisbury | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Google Analytics on our website. It helps us understand where our traffic is coming from on our website. There is also some information on how customers on our website are interacting with the site. We're not the kind of business that gets a lot of website traffic so Google Analytics is great since it's free and gives all the important information we need. It's also so widely used in the industry that everyone who works on the site is familiar with it and how it works.
  • It shows the sources of your traffic, such as organic search, referrals, or direct.
  • It shows the website flow in a really useful way that helps you understand what customers do when they come to your site.
  • It's simple to setup and very widely used by SEO professionals.
  • It picks up a lot of bogus traffic from spam bots.
  • A lot of the specific information is not shown. For example, for 95% of the organic traffic, you can't actually see what keyword they typed in to find your site.
  • A lot of traffic can't be tracked and is simply shown as "direct."
It's really useful for anyone with a website. It's probably definitely the right option for a business that doesn't get a lot of traffic. I'm sure there are better options out there that cost money, but obviously, if you only get a few hundred people visiting your site, it's not worth it and Google Analytics does the trick. It's also useful if you're running Google Ads. If you're totally non-technical, I'd have someone set up google analytics for you and show you how to log in and see traffic. There's not a lot of situations where you wouldn't want to use Google Analytics.
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.
Sean Patterson | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Google Analytics with a lot of our clients that want to get detailed information about their viewers and their basic browser metrics or profiles. Additionally, we will track user traffic within their site. Gathering these metrics helps identify which sections of the site needs more growth, which sections could be trimmed, and also helps target code optimizations based on the browser base of the users visiting their site.
  • Quick and easy to set up.
  • Powerful metrics and traffic flows.
  • Ability to enable detailed metrics through action tracking.
  • Visualizing metrics on detailed actions can be tricky to set up.
  • Exporting dashboards/reports could be a little more emphasized.
Google Analytics can easily be recommended for most websites, particularly if the goal is to gather basic metrics about the visitors and their flow. Having basic actions in place, particularly when refining the tracking of user flow, would also be a good candidate for Google Analytics. Google Analytics would be a little less appropriate when you're trying to get a full tracing stack of analytics and performance in something like a web app.
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