Google Analytics

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.

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.

I didn't have to do it personally - but our team can quickly launch Google Analytics for new accounts very 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.

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.

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.

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.

Our team can quickly and easily set up Google Analytics for any new store in a matter of minutes.

Google makes it very easy to set up Google Analytics without their assistance.

This software is free so there was no sale.

In the free version, it's less helpful as the data it's using is limited compared to other software out there. It doesn't help us pinpoint where to focus our campaigns on, however, which has helped a lot in getting agent participation up.

We were very happy with IBM Analytics, it was just the price that we were deterred by, but GA is a good alternative, even for the free version.

I don't think we spent enough time work GA before switching from IBM

We typically have to go to a third party for support

It's not as user-friendly, but I think it's just due to the learning curve from switching to a new product

Google Analytics is free and developer friendly to work with.

Overall, it's good.

It's good and easy

Overall, it's ok.

I unfortunately have very limited experience with other analytics services, so in that regard my opinion is slightly biased. As a free product, Google Analytics is hands down a fantastic value and a terrific tool for everyone from professional marketers, to beginning bloggers or search engine marketers.

Having used Google Analytics for the last 9 years, I have no intention of discontinuing my service. Google Analytics is a fantastic product that provides me with almost everything I could wish for. The positives in this product outweigh any negatives that you might find. I can not think of a single reason to not immediately start using Google Analytics for your business.

I think my biggest take away from the Google Analytics implementation was that there needs to be a clear understanding of what you want to achieve and how you want to achieve it before you start. Originally the analytics were added to track visitors, but as we became more savvy with the product, we began adding more and more functionality, and defining guidelines as we went along. While not detrimental to our success, this lack of an overarching goal resulted in some minor setbacks in implementation and the collection of some messy data that is unusable.

Google Analytics is an excellent solution. And it's free. As long as Google provides the information we (and our clients) need, it's difficult for most companies to justify the cost of an analytics application. It's a matter of implementing the tracking codes on every page and within each marketing campaign. If that's done, the data is there to analyze and report.

Google Analytics is in place and working. They continue to add features to the product. And it remains free of charge for what we need. We don't have a reason not to renew.

Make sure to put the tracking code on every page. Ideally this would be part of a template or "include" so you can update the code on all pages (or at least within pages of the same category) at once.