GA Is the best!
June 30, 2017
GA Is the best!
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Software Version
Google Analytics
Overall Satisfaction with Google Analytics
We use Google Analytics for numerous amounts of data gathering, both for our own marketing site, our customers "product" sites that they actively use as part of their service, and we use it for "in-app" tracking to determine how users are using our product. Basically, we use Google Analytics for tracking everything!
- Google Analytics does the obvious thing really well: tracks user behavior around our website. But more specifically, it allows us to do some very complicated attribution to behavior, traffic sources and even specific campaigns or devices. Depending on the volume of traffic we are trying to analyze and the purpose, we can narrow things down EXTREMELY well and get a great story to use for data mining.
- The eCommerce tracking with GA (Google Analytics) is hands down the best. Specifically, its attribution to traffic sources and matching with user behavior that is the best. I have yet to find another tool that can let me track traffic sources, split campaigns down to devices and track which inventory was purchased specifically from that campaign--especially if I am looking back at inventory purchased from a campaign (or in our case, people who signed up for Classes) I can tell all of that from GA.
- You can use GA to track specific user accounts within a product, and differentiate user behavior within the product based on account roles. A lot of people don't know about this, but with the help of a developer you can leverage a TON of data including creating lookalike audiences that you can sync into AdWords and make your display campaigns highly targeted. Most people think this kind of feature is only available on Facebook ads--nope! :)
- GA can be very confusing if you aren't extremely tech savvy. The interface is intimidating to most people, and without some training the reports are hard to understand.
- The jargon really trips a lot of people up. Like what's the difference between a session and a user? What are "hits"? Stuff like this is frustrating if you haven't been through any kind of training for GA.
- The most positive impact is that we use GA to augment other systems like Hubspot that don't let us customize tracking parameters are thoroughly as we would like. For example, Facebook has the ability to dynamically change parameters based on where the ad placement is, and you can use that parameter in utm_content to segment traffic based on the ad placement. It's much easier to analyze behavior on your site with GA than with the Facebook pixel, and you can create much more detailed custom reports which has been critical in our conversion rate optimization.
- Mixpanel and Kissmetrics
Mixpanel and Kissmetrics are good systems, and for the most part they can do the same thing that GA does, but they are more basic. If an average person, if you don't have a desire for deep data, I think these two platforms are better choices.