Google Analytics

Live activity, you can monitor your app at the very same time you are using it.

Filters, you can define filters like geographic location, client platform, time periods.

User behavior can show you how your application is used.

The session duration time is not that accurate.

The experiments feature is not that easy to use.

Reporting - clean and organized

Options - between the basic and premium packages, metric are available for almost any type of tracking you can think of

Usability - easy to integrate

Sometimes the results in GA doesn't match the results with other tracking devices our company has in place, such as email marketing results, and other analytic-measuring tools

Javascript-blocking programs render GA unreliable

Presents a ton of data without providing much of an idea on what to do or how to interpret the data

traffic to the site is very easy to see

allows for comparison of time frames to see if your sales or site upgrades are making a difference

can also show real time traffic to the site, useful to see if commercials, ads or eblasts are directly generating interest.

sometimes it is hard to find the exact data you are looking for as they frequently upgrade and move data around

the live traffic viewer is still in beta

the homepage is a little confusing to navigate as there always seems to be a subfolder to click on to get to your acutal site data

It's simple.

Easy to use.

It's free and plays well with other platforms as it exports to Excel via CSV.

This might be counter intuitive but it needs to be smarter, I have to program it to do stuff and I barely know all the details. Offer better training or courses on how to configure and tweak GA.

More color in the GUI.

Create an easier sense of flow... hell hire me to work for Google Analytics and I will create a spike in new user growth.

Learn to think 4th dimensionally.

Traffic measurement

Marketing ROI

Audience demographics

Customer behavior on site

Always want more granularity

Better and automatic spam exclusion

Tighter integration with AdWords

Easy and quick to implement.

For very little effort you get a lot of data and information on your audience.

The reporting UI is very clean and user friendly.

Using the URL as a basis for all the data can make the reporting messy in places.

Creating goals and conversion funnels can be a little tricky for novice users.

The data can seem a little superficial on the surface when compared to the more sophisticated digital analytics software.

Traffic reporting for our company's website. All channels are on one screen, and I can drill-down into each channel for a more thorough evaluation of where our traffic is coming from.

Excellent for pay-per-click advertising. We run close to 100 pay-per-click ads at various times, and each one is directed to a specific landing page with a call-to-action. I easily add the URL of these landing pages in our Google Analytics Goals for accurate reporting.

Mobile reporting. Google Analytics lets me determine our number of mobile visitors, and it provides a breakdown of mobile versus tablets, and each type of device (ex: iPhone) is also in Google Analytics reporting feature. This is extremely helpful because we are running mobile-specific ad campaigns on Google.

Google Analytics currently has just 20 Goals settings. While it is possible to create an additional set of 20 Goals, it would be great if up to 100 (or more) were available in one list. As it stands now, we have several "buckets" of 20 goals each, and it takes time to go from one to the other and manually count our Goal conversions, and their percentages or total conversions.

Email or chat support. Google Analytics is an enormous and often intimidating platform, and sometimes there are questions that need to be answered right away. Email or chat support for Google Analytics users who are spending money on pay-per-click campaigns would be a tremendous benefit.

Add all Google platform links within one another. Google Analytics is fantastic, but as an SEO specialist, I also need quick access to Google AdWords. I need to log into both, and if they were integrated with the same login and password, it would be far more convenient.

Allows you to deep-dive into each page on your site to see how long a visitor stayed, how they exited, and what they may have clicked on. This is important to better develop content for those pages to keep visitors longer.

A real-time view allows you to see where visitors go on your site from start to finish and how long they stay. You'll want to tweak your site based on these visits, even while they're visiting.

Campaigns allow you to try different setups on your site in order to attract new visitors or keep recurring visitors.

Better explanations of mobile browsing would help to gather information on what needs to be tweaked regarding mobile use.

Better views of the real-time use. It gets difficult to view and browse this at times.

Lowering our bounce rate.

Increasing our click-through rates.

Increasing our average session duration.

I would love to see an integration with platforms like HubSpot.. it is hard when the two numbers are so completely different.

Adding a capability to further back track clicks and see how they were brought to our page would be helpful.

Further parsing the demographics would be ideal in developing company personas.

It provides a depth of information and insight. There is more information than anyone could realistically harness themselves.

It's easy to install and start using.

It integrates into other reporting tools fairly easily.

Spam traffic is a big nuisance and they've yet to really do anything about it.

The reporting is clunky and hard to setup.

Sometimes it more complicated then it seems it ought to be.

Ability to track web traffic, attribute to sources & mediums.

Ability to segment to view visitors by desktop, mobile, and tablet.

Exporting reports in various formats for different use. Management likes easy to read PDFs, while marketing analysts prefer Excel data.

So many features that it's hard to keep up.

Sometimes difficult to dig into particular segments or criteria.

Limits in automation of reports, such as time length (no way to set one start date & get automated reports on regular frequency, e.g. Year to Date report weekly, always starting on 1/1 and extending time each week.

It could be better at showing flow/path through site.

The tool is very user intuitive. If you're not familiar with the tool, it's still fairly easy to navigate and understand.

The data provided simplifies things and makes it easy to understand.

When there are uncertainties, the documentation and self-service help provided by the Google team is great.

I've run into a few instances (more so with Google DFP) in which there have been updates to the platform itself, but documentation that sent me in a loop and didn't provide more thorough documentation on the changes.

The User Interface is very easy to navigate and find what you are looking for. With some much data this is crucial.

I like the quick access to all historical data. e are continually changing the date range to compare data from a month ago, a year ago, or when the company started until now - it's very useful for us and how we like to monitor things.

I really like how you can view your data in so many different way. Basic tables/spreadsheets of data, line charts, motion charts, and pie charts. There are also advanced options to let you manipulate the data even further such as adding a secondary dimension.

I would like to see more "canned" options in the date range drop down. It was be nice to have options already there such as This Year (YTD).

It would be nice to have weekly or monthly emails sent to me with key data from that time range. I don't always have time to login into Google Analytics but I'm always glued to my Inbox. This feature may exist, but I'm not aware of it.

Track Website Visitors - this is helpful to see where people are coming from

Reports - gives you a lot of information that helps with reporting to clients

Breaking down data - helps break down all types of demographics which is helpful for advertising

It is hard to use at first when you aren't familiar with the product

It can be hard to get certified with the program

Which marketing initiatives are most effective

Accurate website traffic patterns/trends

Which keywords resonate with prospects and lead to conversions

Google has done an excellent job with Analytics over the years

It's free. Can't beat the price.

It's permissions, reporting, and dashboards allow for great flexibility for users to get what they need

It has advanced features many don't know of such as eCommerce reporting tools, goals and trending tools, and a plug-in API.

GA still misses a few of the features some of the commercial tools do in regards to in depth data mining and trending.

It would be nice to see more Social sentiment in the GA system. This is an up and coming area that many are now adding to their tools, but most of the algorithms are so-so. Given the data Google captures they could build a good picture for social sentiment, but today are doing very little other than some social connectivity.

Great for tagging links

Good for monitoring traffic flow through website

Good for tracking goals, events and conversions

Ecommerce tracking presents some challenges

Not easy to track to our Pinterest and Facebook sites

"Not provided" is a horrible change!

Event Tracking

Measure AdWords ROI (on all levels)

Easy to implement

Cross Domain Tracking

Google Analytics allows us to easily view site visits, conversions, and conversion rate by source, medium, campaign, keyword, and/or content. This is extremely important when considering how to spend our time and money.

Google Analytics is able to provide data in real-time. This is vital when launching new initiatives and wanting to find learnings as soon as possible.

Google Analytics allows us to compare conversion attribution models very easily. This is important because it allows us to better understand our users' conversion path and our website conversion funnel.

Google Analytics could allow more rows to be exported at one time. If a report is more than 2000 rows, it must be exported in chunks and combined into one spreadsheet.

Google Analytics could link with other popular advertising channels (ex. Microsoft BingAds). This would provide greater insight and help improve business ROI.

Google Analytics could make recommendations for our website based on data (ex. focus on a specific webpage due to high bounce rate).

Detailed breakdown of web traffic by any specified length of time (could for correlating with campaigns)

Time on site, % New Visits and Bounce Rate help qualify potential customers

Ease of Use! Very intuitive and well laid out

It would be nice if the free version had more tracking tools, but that is understandable.

I am unsure of the turnaround of analytics data for free users. Even premium accounts will not see immediate turnaround.

Multiple variations of a keyword may often be reported but you must manually group them together in reporting which could become tedious. Ex. Organic keywords searched that include: Startec, Startech, Starteck will all be compounded separately even though all searches were variations of the company name.

Provides quantitative insight into your web presence. Much of our online marketing would be guesswork without the hard data provided by Google Analytics - and decisions made based on data are generally better decisions.

Integrates different online marketing activities. Through integrating with our enewsletter client and providing data on referral sources like social media, search, and advertising, Google Analytics gives us a broad picture of how our various online activities work together to support our marketing goals.

Shows you where you're weak. The "Behavior Flow" display is a valuable window into how our visitors reach our site, which pages lead them where, and which pages result in exiting our website. This information helps us improve content and readjust our strategy as necessary to make sure the right visitors reach the right content and the right time.

It's so robust it's scary - I know there are tons more features we could be using to our advantage within the program, but they're too complicated or detailed to access easily.

Permissions are a little wonky. It's hard to authorize multiple users on our team to access the necessary levels within the program, and it's not clear what permissions different users need to make specific changes - until you get an error message saying you're not authorized.

Free Product - A great benefit of Google Analytics is that it is a free product that has many capabilities. It performs the functions we need it to without additional fees.

Event Tracking - this is a wonderful feature of Google Analytics that allows us to track many different kinds of user interactions on our sites.

Sources - Google Analytics provides the sources from which users came to our sites, which allows us to use Google Analytics as a kind of lead generation platform for two of our sites, from which we can build relationships with others sites that link to us.

Session Duration - Google Analytics' Session Duration calculation is not very accurate, since it only measures the duration of time between interactions on the site. The first interaction is page load, but then if the user spends 5 minutes on that one page and reads it thoroughly, receives the information they need, and leaves the site, since they are counted as a "bounce", their session duration is 0, even though they were engaged. They only triggered one event (page load) before leaving the site, so their session duration didn't calculate as it should. There are methods to implement timers, etc. however, the standard Session Duration numbers could be inaccurate without implementing other methods in place.

One Page Sites - we have one Single Page Site, and installing Google Analytics to give us accurate numbers was more difficult than we anticipated. One challenge was creating a way to record bounces correctly, since a users could visit the site, be fully engaged, and leave the site without ever triggering an event. We used Google Tags to create scrolling and menu event tracking to solve this problem, but out-of-the-box, Google Analytics is not the most accurate reporting tool for a One Page Site.

Charts and graphs are good in GA. You can load your presentation or report with hard numbers and nice charts. BUT, this is also the problem with GA, there are so many charts and graphics, and they look so good, you sometimes forget you have to actually analyse them and make actionable suggestions for improvement.

The basic numbers from 50,000 down to granular analysis are all available in GA.

You can build very sophisticated dashboards, lead funnels, and eCommerce reports inside GA. The learning curve for these types of uses are high, but free and extremely valuable.

Connecting AdWords, AdSence and your eCommerce wins to GA, gives you a massive overview of your digital business.

Don't rely too much on the top-level dashboards. They are nice and broad, but often don't give you much to go on for building recommendations.

The eCommerce connection between GA and your shopping process is not always accurate and may take several tries to get it working. Just reporting the presentation of a Receipt page does not really equal a definitive sale.

The depth of the rabbit hole in GA is amazing. You can spend hours, days, weeks, building tools and maps and strategies, and still miss the actionable goals. Don't be mesmerized by the charts and graphs either. Dig into the WIN for your client, and focus all your efforts there.

Describes overall page visits

Describes how many placed orders

Specific events can be added depending on the merchant need

Maybe it can be extended by providing more ways of capture and more ways of reporting

Monitors website traffic patterns. If you don't have a handle on where or how your website is getting traffic, I can't think of a better tool to use to get that information.

Tracks goal conversions. If you have a specified path you want visitors to take to complete an action on your website, GA does a great job of reporting to you how many times that path has been completed.

Integrates with other Google tools. If you aren't using Analytics, but are running AdWords campaigns or monitor site health in webmaster tools, Google allows you to sync them all together.

Google used to tell us keyword referrals. Kind of annoying that they don't anymore, but life goes on.

They change the names of important metrics from time to time, generally into more ambiguous names. Again, kind of annoying, but a couple Google searches will bring up 100s of SEO blogs that tell you what means what - so not the end of the world here, either.

It doesn't tie-in (yet) with other Google tools like YouTube Analytics and Google+, or Google My Business. So in some cases you still need to monitor information from multiple areas of your Google-verse.