Item: Google Analytics
Rating: 10
Author: Patrick Buffum

Overall Satisfaction with Google Analytics

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Google Analytics was used within my organization to track our website's traffic. The metrics that we gathered and reviewed included CTR, unique visitors, pages viewed and time spent on the site. It was used primarily by the marketing department with relevant information relayed to sales. We didn't use it to address business problems per se, but rather to calculate the effectiveness of our marketing campaigns through web traffic.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Detailed breakdown of web traffic by any specified length of time (could for correlating with campaigns)
Time on site, % New Visits and Bounce Rate help qualify potential customers
Ease of Use! Very intuitive and well laid out

Cons

It would be nice if the free version had more tracking tools, but that is understandable.
I am unsure of the turnaround of analytics data for free users. Even premium accounts will not see immediate turnaround.
Multiple variations of a keyword may often be reported but you must manually group them together in reporting which could become tedious. Ex. Organic keywords searched that include: Startec, Startech, Starteck will all be compounded separately even though all searches were variations of the company name.

Return on Investment

More efficient lead conversion
Accurate pulse of inbound strategy effectiveness
A go-to tool to determine next actions or where to begin

Likelihood to Renew

The strongest thing Google Analytics has going is that it's a free, yet powerful tool for inbound marketers. It is a great initial step to take when determining campaign effectiveness and provides a pulse of your audience in the form of many easy to digest metrics. With features touching SEO, email CTR and visitor profiling it is an ideal tool for small to medium sized businesses or start-ups.

Likelihood to Recommend

One scenario for which I found this service particularly well suited was for tracking and calculating ROI on trade show spending. For example a company may purchase banner ad space for a trade show and have site links included at the end of an attendee email. Using Google Analytics you can measure the traffic from the trade show homepage (referral) and the CTR/time spent from the email links.
While this service is very impressive for one that is free it is far from all encompassing. While the platform reports data it is not an all in one tool that allows you to monitor how your actions directly influence inbound web participation.

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A powerful, FREE tool to take the pulse of your inbound audience

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