A Free Resource with In-Depth Reporting Power
December 17, 2014
A Free Resource with In-Depth Reporting Power
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Software Version
Google Analytics
Modules Used
- Audience
- Acquisition
- Behavior
Overall Satisfaction with Google Analytics
Google Analytics is being used by the Digital team who reports on website traffic for our business' 5 websites, and then those reports are distributed throughout the business to the respective "owning" departments.
- 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.
- We use Google Analytics to track the "health" of our websites and the success of email campaigns. It is a very useful tool, with a few challenges. However, the fact that it is a free tool has been very helpful since we are only sacrificing our time to collect these reports and no additional resources.