Item: Google Analytics
Rating: 7
Author: Verified User

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Google Analytics is being used to track and analyze any web traffic. It addresses questions like: "How many people are filling out our trial form?", "How many use this web page?", "Who's coming to our site and from where?" and more. It's mostly being used by the Marketing department, but is being used by some product teams to track key KPI's and determine the performance of prototypes or production products.

Pros and Cons

Wealth of data. There is too much data, honestly.
It's very customizable. It's very easy to drill in and out and modify parameters to meet a specific need.
It's easy to get set up. Right out of the box, it requires no customization.

It doesn't think for the user much. It basically overwhelms them with information, which can be hard to digest and can lead to some false assumptions.
Oftentimes, nuanced questions are really hard to find good answers for. Something that should be simple like: "how many users logged in?" is often really difficult depending on how your web application is built.
Data visualization isn't very useful. The graphs seem useful at first, but honestly end up using the tables most of the time. Occasionally I'll spot some trends in the data vizualization, but it's pretty uncommon.

Return on Investment

It's highlighted areas of improvement that can be made. It's hard to quantify it though.
There's been no negative impact as far as I can see. It cost nothing.

Alternatives Considered

Google Analytics is the path of least resistance. It doesn't cost anything at all, and is easy to get set up quickly. It's integrated into almost every CMS platform out there. If you just need to see who's coming to your site, where they are going it's a great tool. Otherwise, there are other tools for more nuanced analyzation. Things like screen recording software, heatmaps, surveys, etc.

Support Rating

I've never used it. I have had meetings with Google engineers to troubleshoot tracking issues, and they have been very helpful.

Key Insights

Do you think Google Analytics delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Google Analytics's feature set?

Yes

Did Google Analytics live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of Google Analytics go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Google Analytics again?

Yes

Likelihood to Recommend

Need some free quick and dirty data on your web-based project? Plug it in and get some idea. If you have a lot of e-comm requirements for analytics, I would not recommend it. It requires a lot of setup for that to work well. If you are using Tag manager it's probably a good fit as well, but most other analytics platforms have integrations there also.

Quick down and dirty analytics software

Software Version

Overall Satisfaction with Google Analytics