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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 Mid-sized Companies (51-1,000 employees).
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Comparisons

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Reviews and Ratings

(3711)

Attribute Ratings

Reviews

(1-25 of 123)
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.
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 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Google Analytics helps us to make decisions about what marketing campaigns are working for our website like organic or paid ads. It helps us to find which traffic source is working well for us and where we need to optimize our pages as per user query. Moreover Google Analytics helps us to give quick goals conversions.
  • Traffic Analysis
  • Goals Analysis
  • Remarketing
  • I think i do not have any suggestion, its already have all the features.
Before using Google Analytics we were unable to find the source of leads, but now we can now find the source of forms to fill on our website, click on CTA, which is helpful.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Google Analytics is used to track the success of our company websites. It's easy to use and filled with data to help you better understand your audience/customers. However, it is pretty general demographic data which makes it hard to really understand user experience/how the consumer navigates the website pages. We really enjoy the real-time traffic data!
  • Reporting on where traffic is exactly coming from (location, device, etc.)
  • Custom reports/exporting to excel
  • Real-time Data
  • Dashboard Organization
  • Training/Implementation of Insights
  • Detail of reporting - very high level
Google Analytics is a great free resource everyone should at least be aware of! Although the reporting isn't as in depth as a marketer may want, it still provides basic data that allows you to make valuable insights for the future of your business. It is just another tool that helps marketer connect ROI.
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
Google Analytics is an amazing software to track website visitors, it's upgrade version GA4 is too good as it already provides event tracking that will give more in-depth information about user behaviour like where they are clicking or where they scroll most. Moreover, GA4 script is loaded quickly over a website that fixes the website speed issue.
  • In depth user behaviour
  • User Tracking
  • Need to improve application user interface
There is nothing like google analytics, it helps to keep track of user like where they are coming from and what they are doing on my website, and helps me to fix the website elements where it is lacking information.
Martha McNeil | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
It helps me to further analyze which product of our company, it also helps me a lot to understand the behavior of the users, the traffic from different channels, the acquisition on different devices and locations, it has helped us to identify which keywords we should focus on every time. we do our blogs it's important to know and recognize the benefits this tool offers live onsite analytics help you see where people are clicking on your website in real time also when a new page is launched it's important see if it is working as well as the previous page.
  • On-site live analytics help you see where people are clicking on your website in real time.
  • One of the most important features is which link users click on a site.
  • Help you slice and dice data based on the personality of users.
  • I wish the UI was less cluttered.
  • Many manual settings are required in this tool.
Tracking cities has helped us add new locations and reach new people, it helps with SEO purposes and allows us to better serve our customers and reach their customers, it also helps us to know what they do while they browse our websites. , is simply one of the most reliable, accurate and affordable solutions for audience outreach and strategy.
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.
September 03, 2021

Google Analytics - Love It

Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Google Analytics is currently being used to track the number of users and multiple conversion points across our site, across various channels, including but not limited to PPC, Paid Social and Organic. It helps to bring all the conversion and revenue numbers together for all the channels as a total, which helps the client see how their business is performing as a whole.
  • Google Analytics allows for very detailed remarketing lists that can be pushed in AdWords.
  • Tracking of the traffic and various conversions through each channel.
  • Google Analytics tracks users that are not only in your country but across the world. This helps when you are building a strategy that has an international component.
  • Great attribution section, which shows the user journey for each conversion.
  • It would be good to see labels from AdWords to be visible in Google Analytics.
  • The dashboard and unique features can be a bit cumbersome and difficult to use if you are using it for the first time.
The reason I'd recommend Google Analytics is because, firstly, it can track the traffic from multiple channels, such as email, paid social, as mentioned earlier this helps when planning strategy or deducing reasons for lower traffic or conversions for a particular channel. Secondly, the remarketing lists and custom reports section works very well when it comes to creating and reporting on campaigns.
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.
Thomas (TC) Riley | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Google Analytics for marketing and website tracking both internally and across hundreds of our clients. Google Analytics is the free, gold standard of website reporting that every company should have. It provides critical data on on-site visitors, interactions, and visitor behavior in an easy-to-use platform that integrates with nearly every platform out there.
  • Website Visitor Tracking
  • User Behavior
  • Website Funnels
  • Website Conversion Tracking
  • Integrates with everything
  • Custom event tracking on website
  • Detailed visitor information
  • Almost too robust of an interface that can be challenging for new users
Honesty, there is no reason that a company wouldn’t want to implement Google Analytics. The regular version is completely free, is very easy to configure, and provides immense volumes of website data. There are also tangible benefits to the other Google tools it can connect to, and it integrates with any BI/data platform that you might use.
The only time I’d advise not using standard Google Analytics is if you’ve purchased Google Analytics 360.
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.
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
Google Analytics is used mainly in the sales and marketing department of the company. It's used in the software development department to get feedback from the user behavior and make necessary tweaks accordingly. It helps in channelizing the focus and energy toward the goal by giving data insights in the most useful and meaningful way possible.
  • Strong data tracking
  • Easy to use and integrate
  • Good documentation and videos by experts
  • The metrics and dimension parts are quite confusing at times
  • UI can be improved
  • New features
  • To know the result and the current user behavior based the marketing campaign
  • To track the traffic on website and to know how users behave
  • How well the site is engaging the users in terms of content
  • The website responsiveness and user friendliness can be found out using the tools in the Google Analytics, and that helps the developers to make necessary changes with regard to UX
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 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Google Analytics to track goals and events. We have different domains that we need to track within the same account and each with different currencies. With [Google Analytics] we can use sophisticated cross-domain tracking to accurately measure conversions for each of our marketing channels and figure out what is working on what is not and revise our marketing dollars accordingly.
  • You can figure out conversions rate for each of your marketing efforts
  • You can review content engagement and see which piece of content your viewers like the best
  • You can track the impact of mobile users to your online business
  • Google Analytics can't guarantee that robot visits will not pollute your reports
  • Google cannot track everything that happens on a web site
  • Some of the tracking in not easy to implement and requires additional training
We use Google Analytics all the time as it is critical (in my opinion) for any online business. For larger online business then there is the Premium version of [Google Analytics] which comes with a price tag of about $150,000. In that case there are different options like Adobe Analytics.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
I use Google Analytics for websites, for HTML5 games hosted on web platforms, for mobile apps and games. It is essential to measure Key Performance Indicators for your site or app. Google Analytics can show your basic stuff like page views, sessions, etc and also more complicated configurable indicators like funnels, events, etc.
  • shows basic indicators like page views, sessions.
  • provides breakdown by country, city, languages.
  • real time data
  • retention data display is not very convenient
  • it is relatively hard to organize events
  • it is relatively hard to switch from one property to another
Google Analytics is well suited for websites, web applications, and games. Google Analytics is less appropriate for the scenarios involving mobile native applications and games even though it is usable - there is just room for improvement. It is less suited when a lot of events are submitted and it is relatively hard to organize events.
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 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.
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.
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