Google Analytics

Google Analytics Dashboard gives you a quick overview of how your site has fared with time horizon of hourly, daily, weekly & monthly.

Very easy to install and implement. It gets you going as soon as its bots crawls through your web page contents.

Gives you instant real time analysis of how many active users are currently accessing your site, their demographics, their location, the page they are accessing, source of traffic etc.

Amount of reports that can be fired out of Google analytics is humongous, thus enabling detail study and implementing new ideas.

In Audience GEO location reporting, the level of source is restricted to the city. We need further drill down if possible with the exact places from where the hits have come for the site, thus helping narrowing down on the user base to be targeted.

Keywords formed the backbone of the analytical tool, but its demeaning from analytical tool as its adwords revenue taking a hit, may be good for the company but not beneficial for end user.

There is constant upgrades and changes to the tool happening, it makes difficult for us to adjust to new changes frequently.

GA is easy to navigate and they make it easy to understand how to interpret reports

This is not a great app if you are looking to track personal data on your websites.

Ease of use

Actionable insights

Who is the actually the audience- siteographic information

Google Analytics is the best free online analytics tool on the market.

If you'd like to learn more about how much traffic your site/pages receive and attributes about those users - Google Analytics is a perfect fit.

Enhance your site traffic by using complimentary pay services from Google such as AdWords. You may utilize pay per click advertising to help drive users to your site.

Google Analytics is easy-to-use. Simply place a small amount of provided JavaScript on your site - and the statistics start flowing into GA.

Typically, to integrate some of the pay services into your website, it requires sophisticated JavaScript skills. I've often found that it is helpful to know JQuery and have a solid understanding of the DOM (Document Object Model) in order to get full use out of some of the products (such as AdWords).

Great for start-ups to understand what is happening on their site, their traffic sources, conversions, etc.

Hard to learn with lack of support. You have to really spend a lot of time with it and reading material to learn all the details.

Free web analytics service

Provides click and event tracking

Tracks user demographics

Generates reports

Customizable

Fairly easy to set up

Native integration with Google AdWords, Webmaster Tools, and other Google services

Heatmaps are still in beta

While instructional support is far better than others, and the interface is cleaner than the rest, could still benefit from more instructional tooltips and basic how-to's for the newly initiated

Gives us all the data we need surrounding our website (visits, pageviews, sources, conversions).

Helps us to review our social media goals. We use GA to measure referral traffic from social media channels, along with the associated conversion rates. For example, originally much of social traffic was coming from LinkedIn, but recently we started to run Twitter ads and we have seen a huge spike in referral traffic to our website from that channel. We are thinking about running an ad campaign in LinkedIn and we will also track that carefully in GA.

GA allows us to put a Dollar amount on conversions. For example, a request for a demo has a higher associated Dollar value than a white paper download. This is based on historical analysis of conversion data. This is a great feature.

Google is very proactive. We have an AdWords account with them and they frequently check-in with us to see how things are going and make suggestions. We sometimes use these calls to discuss GA-related topics too.

We use the product to measure conversions and content engagement along with Marketo- The data does not always correspond. We tend to trust the Marketo metrics a little more, since they are measuring very concrete things like forms completed, etc. while GA is measuring the paths that people on our website.

You can't complain about what it does well and what it is not effective in supporting because it's essentially a free product. When compared to the astronomically high cost and convoluted Adobe Site Catalyst/Omniture software, Google's UI and intuitive menu labels is best in class for slicing/dicing web analytics data to find just about anything a client may be interested in... quickly and efficiently.

Some data visualization options for viewing/interpreting rows of data could use improvement. It's not exactly plug and play for presentation ready decks that make sense to a layman client. It's easier to export a .csv file and crunch the data set yourself to create a customized chart that's more client centric.