Item: Google Analytics
Rating: 10
Author: Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Google Analytics

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

As a media company, we rely on Google Analytics to monitor the performance of our contents -- mostly news stories. We track what type of articles performs best and at which platform, to know what we should focus on and where we can improve. Google Analytics is used by the Editorial, Sales, and Marketing departments.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Tracking what content performs best.
Monitoring the performance of our content across different distribution platforms.
Tracking the performance of our campaigns, especially paid ones.
Comparing the effectiveness of two similar distribution platforms, so we can get the most out of our budget.

Cons

Specific dashboards, for media companies, for registered users and paid subscribers.
Sometimes an article has different UTMs, and since it's shared on different platforms, and GA treats different UTSs to mean different pages, this results in separate pageviews counts, which can be misleading.
It will help a lot if GA provides a guidebook, or best-practice, for media companies and publishers so we can maximize efforts.

Return on Investment

We know what articles and content that we should focus on. The Editorial team can focus on producing more quality stories.
Experiments can be measured more objectively.
The Sales department can sell our products confidently, as they are backed with numbers and our performance metrics.
The Social Media team can analyze which distribution platform is best for our company. Each distribution platform has its own dashboard, but we still measure their performances through GA, to be more thorough and objective.

Support Rating

I choose a rating of 5 as it reflects a somewhat neutral position. I have never been in contact with the Support team. GA has always run smoothly, hence the absence of a need for contact. The information regarding the platform can be easily found across the web, without the need for the Support team.

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?

I wasn't involved with the selection/purchase process

Did implementation of Google Analytics go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Google Analytics again?

Yes

Other Software Used

Echobox, Taboola

Likelihood to Recommend

Google Analytics is a must-have if you have a website, let alone if your performance depends on traffic, user, and other related metrics. As a media company, we must know what type of contents perform best so we can produce more or focus on boosting the content to satisfy our readers and reach more readers. However, focusing on pageviews alone can be misleading as sometimes pageviews do not translate to conversion (registered users and paid subscribers), hence the need to see other metrics such as user counts, pages per session, and time spent. In the three years of working in national media, I've witnessed multiple times when important reports are not being read, as shown by analytics, but this does not mean that we should not do a follow up, it just means that the social media team has to work harder in pushing the news to more audience.

Comments

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Google Analytics -- A must have for anyone on the web

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