Google Analytics

Free tool.

Track visitors in real-time.

Custom report designer.

Difficult first set-up.

Not simple for new users.

Manual setting of all goals.

It provides great insights into your website analytics.

It has a mass amount of data it provides you that can truly change how you look at your marketing efforts.

It has a large number of views and reports you can use to look at the data in different ways.

While it has a lot to offer, it can be overwhelming sometimes. I'd love to get weekly or monthly emails with tips or stories of how other similar businesses use it.

I wish you there some type of limited access to the organic search so you could at least see some of it versus needing to have the premium version.

I wish there was an easier way to build reports. I've tested it out, but have found more success in just using other reports that have already been created.

It shows the data in an easy to use fashion.

It is quick and easy to install.

It really tracks everything that is done on a website.

I wish I could see more on mobile.

I think it is hard to learn how to use at first.

I think some of the "search" traffic isn't properly separated.

Robust data.

Easy to use, yet powerful.

Continually evolving and improving.

Data overload - It can be easy to spend hours in Google Analytics without walking away with insights that lead to action.

Aggregates web data

Highly performant data capture

High availability and uptime

Getting more targeted in segmenting users

Integrating other data sources to web activity

Seeing actual search terms for organic traffic

User-friendly

Easy to use

Beautiful charts

Sometimes it is hard to find the info on the dashboard.

The software tracks exactly where every user is sent from whether it is a Google search or social media.

The data that Google Analytics gathers from each user is detrimental to the success of our business. It offers unique incite from each user in regard to demographics.

It makes it super simple to find out what demographic we need to spend our resources on retargeting.

There was a bit of a learning curve to implement the software on our website.

Some of the reporting functions can be difficult for a novice employee.

There can be a small lag when trying to run larger reports.

Comprehensive reporting

Easy implementation

Clean and easy-to-use reports

Ability to integrate with other platforms for enhanced use like Google Cloud Platform

Sampled data (unlike Premium)

Free

Easy to read reports

Detailed web analytics

Integrated with Google AdWords

Social media traffic analytics

Data overload

Conversions and goals are tricky to setup

Integrate it with Google Search Consoles into one interface

Tracking what content performs best.

Monitoring the performance of our content across different distribution platforms.

Tracking the performance of our campaigns, especially paid ones.

Comparing the effectiveness of two similar distribution platforms, so we can get the most out of our budget.

Specific dashboards, for media companies, for registered users and paid subscribers.

Sometimes an article has different UTMs, and since it's shared on different platforms, and GA treats different UTSs to mean different pages, this results in separate pageviews counts, which can be misleading.

It will help a lot if GA provides a guidebook, or best-practice, for media companies and publishers so we can maximize efforts.

Visualizing traffic patterns.

Showing website data in an organized way.

Very easy installation.

It is missing drag-and-drop-type data analysis functionality.

Its tagging structure is not very sophisticated.

It does not provide in-depth technical support from Google.

Easy to use and doesn't require a lot of training

Provide useful data

Data is easily accessible and provides great insights

Page specific data

Nice reporting system

Might not be suitable for people without a good amount of technical knowledge

Not flexible for integration with other apps

Wealth of data. There is too much data, honestly.

It's very customizable. It's very easy to drill in and out and modify parameters to meet a specific need.

It's easy to get set up. Right out of the box, it requires no customization.

It doesn't think for the user much. It basically overwhelms them with information, which can be hard to digest and can lead to some false assumptions.

Oftentimes, nuanced questions are really hard to find good answers for. Something that should be simple like: "how many users logged in?" is often really difficult depending on how your web application is built.

Data visualization isn't very useful. The graphs seem useful at first, but honestly end up using the tables most of the time. Occasionally I'll spot some trends in the data vizualization, but it's pretty uncommon.

It's relatively easy to use even for beginners -- basic reports are simple to run.

The user interface is pretty intuitive.

Real-time stats and usage are very beneficial.

Demographics information is easy to access.

Not all measurements are easy to understand intuitively (i.e., page value).

Being able to easily add additional dimensions for filtering results would be nice.

It does not report on file downloads from your site, at least from what I have seen.

Web tracking and conversions across multiple channels.

Out-of-the-box attribution reporting.

Individual and device tracking.

Integrates well with Data Studio for extended reporting.

Limited or costly integration with other Marketing Technology platforms (MAPs, CRMs, etc).

Resources to learn, train others can be modernized or organized.

GA is obviously the price-conscious choice of the group. Bottom barrel product for a bottom-barrel price (especially the free version). But to its credit, it can be cheap (or free).

GA can be routed through Google's Data Studio platform, which I believe is a far superior and significantly more intuitive tool.

The integration between Google Optimize and GA is pretty seamless and does provide a basic/cheap method of starting a testing program.

There were times where data was literally incorrect (not even close to being correct at times).

There is little to no tech support (obviously if you are using the free version especially). Adobe's tech support, in contrast, isn't amazing, but it at least exists.

GA's data sampling can lead to confusing or unhelpful results.

It may be the single least-intuitive tool I've ever used.

It's not built for A/B testing and personalization campaigns if that's what you're considering leveraging it for (in other words, it will be a bit duct-taped together to get it to do what you need it to do).

2 segment maximum is extremely limiting.

No ability to gather HIT-level insights.

Segment builder is cumbersome.

Site analytics.

User behaviors.

Conversion analytics.

Recommended dashboards.

Recommendations for traffic.

More detailed analysis of traffic.

Reliable data on live views and users by time of day, day of the week. For e-commerce retail, it’s important to see which are the quiet or crowded hours.

Reliable data on audience behaviour & checkout drop rates.

Reliable data on traffic sources and which contributes the most revenue - you can determine where you can better allocate your money to.

Great AI insights - you can receive data you wouldn’t know you had within seconds of opening Google Analytics.

Google Analytics on the mobile app is not as complete or as easily accessible as on desktop.

Setting e-commerce goals is not easy and to this day I still don’t know what’s the actual use.

Could be better connected with Facebook Ads so we can see integrated, more insightful data.

Ability to manipulate the time frame to see historical data vs present data

Percentage increase or decrease at a glance for important metrics

List of pages and how they are performing from a UX perspective

It can be hard to navigate at first.

The settings are cluttered and setting it up on your website isn’t intuitive - the script is often hidden

Sharing the dashboard with others should be easier and more clear

We like the snapshot of how many customers called us.

We like and look at how many asked for directions to get to us.

The analytics tell us exactly how many visited our website. We use this information to make enhancements on the web materials.

The insights are probably what we use most to understand exactly what our customers are searching for when looking for us.

The reviews are nice to see, but when a client posts an inappropriate review it is very difficult to have it removed if you can even remove it at all. This area could use some improvement.

We would like to see what search engine or browser they are using. If this were possible, we could enhance our web capabilities.

If we could have more information like where they are searching for us, this would be beneficial to understand our reach.

Understanding customers' behavior and interaction with the website is essential to study carefully to understand their likes and dislikes before making any changes.

Google Analytics provides important data on whether your web traffic is coming from desktop or mobile devices.

Looking at aggregated data gives us a much better read about which channels influence performance.

While Google Analytics offers amounts of information on your website performance, it is still somewhat limited.

Google Analytics can be confusing and overwhelming for new users.

Implementation: Adding a snippet of code to the site is easy.

Metrics: It's pretty easy to tell one of 100 stories in the first 10 minutes with the platform.

Automation: Setting up dashboards and automatic email of information makes it even more powerful.

Depth: There is depth here but takes some work to get accustomed to the platform to find it.

Agility: Sites change but GA doesn't always take that into consideration.

E-Commerce: I would typically recommend another tool if the real money is needing to be tracked.

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.

User activity

Time on page

Location of user

Source of website visitors

Hard to install

Can be challenging to find the information you are looking for

Cannot look at specific users - data is aggregated

Advertising my blog pages and post

Selling my ebooks

Increasing my blog audience

The site should be made simpler to use

The site should all forms of ATM cards

The site be able to send monthly reports to users