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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

YouTube

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

YouTube

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

YouTube

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

(3712)

Attribute Ratings

Reviews

(1-2 of 2)
Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why
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.
  • Sales by Channel
  • Ecommerce Product Performance
  • Realtime visitor info
  • GA is free so there is a ton of value
  • Knowing your audience leads to better marketing
Google Analytics is free and also is a leader in the analytics world. The amount of data captured is remarkable and the ability to segment out different sets of traffic can provide much needed insight into your customer base and website traffic. We have not explored other analytics tools since GA accomplishes all the things we need it for - and does it at no cost.
50
Our users of Google Analytics are typically split between our marketing team (seven people), client services team (over twenty-five people), and Business Intelligence team consisting of four people. Engineering and creative also have access, but don't use it as much as the other departments; we are aiming to change that.
3
We have several admins of our over arching Google Analytics account(s) that help set up new accounts, add new users to existing accounts, and stay abreast of any day to day changes that may need to happen. In general, once it's set up correctly, it's mostly a set it and forget it use case.
  • Tracking Traffic Sources
  • Monitoring Campaign Performance
  • Seeing Sales Data
  • Identifying User Behavior
  • Focusing on specific platforms where the users are
  • Identifying Sales Trends
  • Following traffic sources
We will continue to use Google Analytics for several reasons. It is free, which is a huge selling point. It houses all of our ecommerce stores' data, and though it can't account for refunds or fraud orders, gives us and our clients directional, real time information on individual and group store performance.
No
  • Price
  • Product Features
  • Product Usability
  • Product Reputation
The fact that Google Analytics is free was a huge factor. We have experimented with other data and analytics platforms, but ultimately these are just tools and it all depends on how you use them. For our needs, Google Analytics in combination with our in house reporting tools gives us all we need.
I would not change anything - I would stay with Google Analytics and not even bother with other analytics tools.
  • Implemented in-house
No
  • Linking all of our stores into one master GA account
I didn't have to do it personally - but our team can quickly launch Google Analytics for new accounts very quickly.
  • no training
You will need some guidance to get up and running. If there isn't anyone in house that can help show you around Google Analytics, there are plenty of YouTube videos that can teach you the basics so you will be up and running quickly.
It is just right for our ecommerce stores and since Google Analytics is free, there is zero complaining about the feature set. If we needed something else, we would have to go pay for it.
No
No - we have not done any customization to the interface
No - we have not done any custom code
No
It mostly falls on us to correctly set up and support Google Analytics. That said, it is not a particularly daunting task to get it set up correctly, and once it is, there is little to no extra work to maintain that connection. Google does have some help offerings but we haven't had to use them.
We have not purchased premium support for Google Analytics; our in house team has been able to successfully navigate any and all issues.
No
I cannot.
Google Analytics is a great tool to give insight into your websites. That said, it is exactly that - a tool - so you will need to learn how to best use this tool for your specific needs. For our ecommerce sites, Google Analytics provides many ways to slice and dice our web traffic so we know what's happening in our stores.
  • Identifying marketing channel performance
  • Identifying Product Sales
  • Identifying web traffic demographics
  • Some segmenting
  • Honing in on specific user behavior
Yes
Some aspects work really well, but desktop is a much cleaner and easier to use interface. For real-time stats on the go, the mobile interface is a nice addition for us internally and clients externally. It is much harder to get specifics on mobile than it is desktop, but still a nice addition to the software as a whole.
Google Analytics runs 24 hours a day and rarely do we see any issues with going down or missing particular data.
There are rarely any outages or application errors. If there are errors, the vast majority of the time it is user error and not the fault of Google.
When creating segments, sometimes Google Analytics will take a bit or more than likely slow down older computers a bit. That said, in general google analytics is extremely reliable and is there when you need it.
  • Proprietary Ecommerce System
It was not difficult
  • No
N/A
N/A
Our team can quickly and easily set up Google Analytics for any new store in a matter of minutes.
If you are not technical, spend some time watching YouTube videos on how to set up Google Analytics or pay someone to knock it out for you.
Google makes it very easy to set up Google Analytics without their assistance.
This software is free so there was no sale.
N/A
N/A
No
  • Good for those who have Apps
  • App insights
No
No
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Our business is an online website. We use Google Analytics to track site traffic, overall engagement on the site, key events that happen -- all with an aim toward understanding our user base and what is working and not working on our site and our efforts to increase traffic and engagement (and monetization!)
  • Aggregates statistics along multiple dimensions for quick analysis -- geography, traffic source, campaigns, landing pages, etc.
  • With goal tracking, it allows you to see conversion rate metrics (be they site registration, purchase, or whatever) across various landing pages or audience segments
  • It's very simple to create sets of queries and group them together in dashboards of key metrics and trends and share them with colleagues across the organization
  • Google Analytics does allow you to filter results based on a primary or secondary dimension (e.g. landing page and source) -- but it would be better if the user could pick finer grained segments utilizing more dimensions (e.g. "visitors from Canada who visited Landing Page X via Inbound Referral Link)
  • Comparing results over time (week on week, etc) should have shortcuts for common analyses (vs same day last week, vs same month last year, etc)
  • With Google Analytics (and all their products really), Google will change things by adding functionality or changing the names of concepts (recently they changed "Visits" to "Sessions") without so much as a peep alerting the user base. While most of the changes are for the better, a heads-up would be professional and appreciated.
Google Analytics is a very solid tool. It is appropriate for web sites of zero to moderate size -- after some tens of thousands of events or visitors in a short period they can subject you to sampling. So if you're running a Top 100 website with millions of visitors another larger solution is probably better for you. But if you're just starting out or dealing with tens or a few hundreds of thousands of monthly uniques and a relatively straightforward site structure and set of events [which is 99% of us] then Google Analytics is a great tool. Especially given that it's free!
  • We spend far less time assembling quick views of web data for ad hoc analysis than we otherwise would.
  • We are able to track website conversions at a fairly high granularity with far less effort than we would otherwise require
  • Because it's free we can give access to Google Analytics to all our employees and bring more transparency to our operational performance and enable the curious to discover new insights.
KISSmetrics is best suited for instrumenting specific conversion funnels and looking at individual user behaviors. This type of by-user analysis is impossible with Google Analytics, which is understandable given the amount of data storage that would be required (for a free product!). Ultimately the tradeoff for us was that aggregate statistics along multiple dimensions was 'good enough', though we may revisit KISSmetrics [or Mixpanel or another similar solution] in the future. I don't see them as mutually exclusive. But given our time constraints and desire to deal with only one solution, we went with Google Analytics.
6
Operations, Business Development, Finance, Development, ... basically the entire company uses (or at least has access to) Google Analytics.
1
Really you just need :

  1. Web development help to get the tracking snippet embedded in the right page(s) on your site (and embed any event tracking you want to do)
  2. An analyst or someone with good analysis skills to setup a set of key views and dashboards for measuring performance
After that supporting it is quite simple (just changes over time). It's getting it setup correctly that's the key thing.
  • Analyze web traffic (visits, pageviews) by source
  • Analyze site engagement (pageviews, time on site, bounce rate, etc..) by source and page type
  • Analyze conversion rates (site registrations, purchases, etc) by source and page type
  • We developed a widget that allows other sites to embed pieces our content (as a teaser to click through to our site). By setting up a separate Google Analytics instance for exclusive use by the widget, we can isolate views and clickthrough rates on the widget without having to filter them out of our other site traffic (which we would have to do by default everywhere otherwise). So my suggestion is make use of the ability to setup multiple Google Analytics instances where appropriate.
  • By using non-interaction events, we are able to measure engagement and time on pages that would otherwise count as bounces with zero duration. This is important for separating the effect of a true bounce (this page wasn't useful to the user and they immediately left) from a softer bounce (they came and read the page for 5 minutes but then didn't see anything else interesting and so left the site). We set a threshold internally and ping the GA server every 30 seconds or so but only send interaction events after a minute to ensure the person was really engaged before we "debounce" them.
  • With Universal Analytics, we're able to send analytics events from the server side of our application to the same Google Analytics instance, which can be very useful in avoiding client-side race conditions and other threading issues. UA can also be used for tracking across not just server (vs client/browser) but mobile apps as well. If you haven't upgraded your Google Analytics instance to Universal, you should.
  • We plan to make use of the audience segmentation features (to differentiate between behavior of registered vs non-registered users).
  • We plan to make broader use of the Content Segmentation features which are quite handy when you have a site like ours that is dynamically generated and contains tens of thousands of pages (and growing).
Did I mention that the main version of Google Analytics is free? It's useful as well, and if they wanted to charge some reasonable amount for it, they probably could.
No
  • Price
  • Product Features
  • Product Usability
  • Prior Experience with the Product
  • Vendor Reputation
Since we used Google Analytics from day one as a startup, the fact that it was free obviously played a major role. But beyond that, I had familiarity with Google Analytics from a prior company / role, and knew that as we looked for SEO and other consulting help, that virtually anyone who knows anything about web analytics knows how to use Google Analytics. The ecosystem of practitioners is strong. So even if you "graduate" to something else later, Google Analytics is always a fine place to start.
I would not have spent as much time looking at KISSmetrics honestly. We may revisit it as an add-on for deeper dives into individual user behaviors but Google Analytics gives you a lot of runway for instrumenting, analyzing, and improving a site (or app) well before you need to think about replacing or adding to it.
For the free version, Google Analytics gives a good deal of customization options, including the ability to fire custom events, add custom dimensions for richer data analysis, categorize content ex-post in the back-end by URL, track conversion events & values, setup user accounts. There's lots of configurability for access control and to make Google Analytics "your own".
If you've got a large or complex site that's dynamically generated, make use of the content groupings dimensions which will make it far easier to track behavior.

Instrumentation using custom dimensions is also recommended (for user IDs or other attributes about their user or their session or even experimental page treatments).
Some - we have done small customizations to the interface
You can setup custom dashboards, but they're really only good for very high level directional views.

Once you drill into an analysis view, there's very little to zero UI customization -- you can just enter query parameters etc.
No - the product does not support adding custom code
We built a wrapper around the client-side code that fires google analytics events to also fire them to other systems (like Pendo for product adoption tracking, Optimizely for A/B testing segmentation, etc), but no custom code within Google Analytics itself.
  • Analyzing traffic and its relative performance along multiple dimensions
  • Setting up dashboards of commonly reused analyses is quite easy
  • Analyzing traffic along two dimensions (and possibly filtering on either or both) is fairly cumbersome and requires too many clicks. For instance, looking at traffic by landing page type (a content grouping) and then narrowing down into traffic that came via SEO requires a bunch of repetitive steps (vs there being a shortcut dropdown for traffic source type as there is now for content grouping... )
Yes
I've not installed any dedicated Google Analytics mobile interface, but the standard web interface works pretty well on an iPad. It is not a good experience on a smaller mobile device (e.g. iPhone) -- be prepared to use the pinch and stretch a lot.
It's pretty good, but there are some things around the edges that require more clicks than I'd like, such as very common multi-dimensional drills (like traffic source and page type), or very initial traffic exploration (where all the menus on the left start collapsed and you have to remember where your dimension is among some vague terms like "Acquisition" and "Audience" and "Behavior" etc)
Yes
We upgraded from the older Google Analytics to the Universal Analytics.

There was a completely unexpected impact in that the event logging mechanism changed but the change was not clearly documented and the old code failed silently on the new platform. Specifically, marking events "non-interaction" uses a different semantic in the newer Universal Analytics version, and if you use the old syntax in your event logging, it not only won't work, it will fail silently. That's a bad design.
  • Universal allows us to log events from the server side of our application more cleanly (and mobile in the future)
  • Since they tend not to announce new features or interface changes before just springing them on the user base, who knows?
No
No
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