Item: Google Analytics
Rating: 9
Author: Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Google Analytics

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Currently I would say GA is being underutilized by my current organization. At my last organization GA and Site Cat were heavily relied upon for both reporting and informing our marketing decisions. We used GA to set up goals and track conversions. We also looked at high level metrics for our clients' sites like unique visits, time on page, pages per visit, etc. For our e-commerce clients we also used GA to track Revenue and ROI. GA was used by every department of our company.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Conversion Tracking- GA is able to accurately track conversions by placing a conversion pixel on a 'Thank You' or successful transaction page.
Real Time Analytics- If you are implementing code and need to see how things are tracking in real-time, GA allows you to have this view
Evaluating Traffic Sourced - If URLs are properly tagged and you are familiar with marketing budgets allocated to different channels (paid search, SEO, display, etc.) you can clearly see where you are getting your bang for your buck

Cons

Pathing - GA doesn't give the most robust information when it comes to tying in the path of the customer to final conversion. Longer conversion paths are much harder to track with GA than with a more robust solution like Site Catalust
Training - The training and education materials provided by Google are great for remedial users, however I always felt they could provide more real-world type scenarios and exercises for more advanced users
Accuracy/Discrepancies with other Google products- I had a few bad experiences where data from DFA never seemed to quite match up with what we were seeing in GA. As these are both Google products, you'd think there would be more consistency.

Return on Investment

GA helped us improve our clients on site conversion rate by pointing out drop-off in our conversion funnel
GA helped us identify which channels brought better quality traffic to our clients' sites
GA helped us identify which areas of the site got the most attention, therefore better inform other content creation

Alternatives Considered

Adobe Marketing Cloud

I mentioned this before, but I believe Adobe Site Catalyst (now Adobe Marketing Cloud) is a more robust solution. This makes sense as one is free and the other is extremely expensive. When it comes to pathing, there are not many tools I've seen that measured up to Site Cat (if implemented properly).

Likelihood to Renew

I see myself digging into GA everyday at my current job, even if it's not required. I use it to give clients a few key metrics that they can share with their teams to show the success of their campaigns. I also use real-time analytics to see how people are interacting with new content on The Onion immediately after it has been posted.

Likelihood to Recommend

If you have a very robust website and several different offline and online channels you'd like to track, I would suggest using Site Catalyst over Google Analytics. Also, if you don't have a trained staff member it would be very difficult to get full use out of this product. In most cases I would still recommend GA.

Comments

Please log in to join the conversation

Matthew's Review of Google Analytics

Software Version