Item: Google Analytics
Rating: 9
Author: Curt Craighead

Overall Satisfaction with Google Analytics

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We're a B2B/B2C hybrid, and we use Google Analytics as a way to understand traffic source, conversion, order value and all ecommerce metrics. This also helps us understand the greatest marketing effort in brick and mortar. I also use it to understand +/- by key dates, periods and sales events. I oversee all marketing and ecommerce, and these are the only departments using Google Analytics.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Great way to comp dates and events without pulling internal reports.
My internal reporting is less than stellar, so I use GA to reference AOV and conversion rates.
I use GA to identify traffic sources, which helps me understand where to spend my marketing budget as well as the effectiveness of campaigns, social media posts, etc.

Cons

I've had a handful of occasions where I get an error, a la "data unavailable" or temporary outage. It generally remedies itself, but when I'm asking for date I'm not in a waiting mood.
When comping dates, I'd like more than one range available. For example, if I want to comp this week vs last week, I also want to see this week vs last week vs same period last year vs another week last year (in order to account for shifts in holidays etc)

Return on Investment

I understand where my traffic is coming from, which tells me whether what I'm doing is effective. For example, if I post and push a major social media event and GA confirms its effectiveness, I funnel more dollars into social.
GA provides internal data points. In any corporate environment, opinions and intuition can get in the way of the facts. I use GA to call out the differences and to do the right thing for the business.
Using GA is much faster than pulling and aggregating a half dozen internal reports.

Likelihood to Renew

It is efficient, and I'd rather spend my time growing the business than shopping for software.

Likelihood to Recommend

Let's face it. Marketers and business analysts will never say "that's too much information" and will always ask for more. In my experience, the folks asking for more generally don't know what to do with the info they have, and asking for more is just a smokescreen to put off making a decision. GA provides a fantastic overview with all the key points necessary to make a decision, independent of on-site software for click stream tracking and customer behavior. That includes traffic sources, conversion rates, AOV, comp comparisons, total traffic by date and time range, and all major decision enablers.

Comments

Please log in to join the conversation

Use Google Analytics and Get to Work

Software Version