Item: Google Analytics
Rating: 9
Author: Víctor Garnica

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

My team and I try to guide and implement the end customers to answer business questions regularly to the Marketing team and sometimes IT. The typical problems between organizations are related to bringing more clients and increasing the LTV of current clients.
The business problems that Google Analytics helps us regularly are demographic and technographic knowledge of users. Also, the behavior with interactions on different products on the sites, increasing revenue up to 400% compared to previous periods. In some cases, we have managed to reduce expenses by around 25% during the campaign with optimizations on sites that allow navigators to have a better experience around them.

Pros and Cons

Simple to use. The clarity of its reports allows rapid adoption of users without knowledge of Marketing as with experts.
A large percentage of the metrics and dimensions appear only with the snippet. It is simple, either with direct code or with Google Tag Manager (recommended). If you have access to the code of your site, it is a process that you can carry out in less than an hour to know a large number of insights for the first steps, including the measurement Advanced in Universal Analytics is not that complex (possibly with GA4 this changes slightly at the event level)
Connect with your infrastructure. As well as universal analytics, google analytics 360, and now with GA4. Every version looks for a way for their tools to connecting with their ecosystem: Ads, Google BigQuery, and other services.

Connection with offline sources. Apart from making adaptations in the data sources, they also need to be handled with care because it is easy to make mistakes, and the result is not always what is expect. They need to work more like a CDP.
With GA4, many things will change, but in the Universal Analytics version, the event fields were limited. If you need detail, you had to make some adjustments around that. With the standard version, sometimes you cannot reach the next level in non-eCommerce topics with the limitations of custom dimensions.

Most Important Features

Acquisition reports, this feature is essential to know how your campaigns impact and give you ideas to improve.
eCommerce reports, it is always important to know the transactions you generate. Even better, taking actions that feedback other teams with targeted audiences, improvements in the UX, system errors, lack of catalog or AB experiments will always be a plus point to having no idea what you are doing.
What should I optimize on the site? Or what is the type of user that converts on my site? These details can even rethink corporate business objectives to compare what is useless and what works.

Return on Investment

The standard version of Google Analytics can usually bring customers a significant ROI because the investment is minimal. In some cases, they can recoup the cost of the implementation consulting in 1 to 6 months.
For our business, the volume of implementation of Google Analytics is low compared to other services since there are many competitors in the market now. In real terms, it can bring a minimum of 10% of the income for the year to a consultant.
With the change to GA4, many companies in the market will have to redo their implementation with universal analytics and previous versions. For current users, it will be a challenge to adapt. Still, suppose they do it in the right way. In that case, it could bring even more significant benefits due to the specifications that they will be able to make in the attributes of the events and to be able to measure their applications in a better way.
In terms of applications, with GA4, they are attacking a market that they could not achieve in the best way with Firebase. They could potentially be a higher ROI for having the information of websites and apps centralized.

Alternatives Considered

Adobe Analytics

Adobe Analytics has been in the market for a long time; some people still know it as Omniture or SiteCatalyst. It seems that some great ideas from Google Analytics, such as Enhanced Ecommerce and the new way of measuring events with GA4, are adapted from the traditional Adobe Analytics measurement.

As I mentioned before, a great advantage of Google is the ease with which you can implement and find the information. For its part, Adobe Analytics can have much more power than standard Google Analytics, so its real case to compare should be with the 360 version. On that side, the partnership between Adobe and Microsoft can benefit you a lot in consolidating it into corporations. Unlike Google, many are distrustful because they consider using their data a fact that has not been proven.

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

Other Software Used

Adobe Analytics, Adobe Audience Manager, Google Optimize, Salesforce Marketing Cloud Interaction Studio (formerly Evergage + MyBuys), Salesforce Audience Studio (formerly salesforce dmp)

Likelihood to Recommend

I would recommend it in the following cases:

1. If you are a small or medium company with a site used to generate a business objective, you must use it. If not, you should also use it to improve your site and achieve business objectives.

2. If you are a company adopting the digital culture, it is an excellent way to understand the concepts necessary to give a better customer experience.

Google Analytics

Software Version

Overall Satisfaction with Google Analytics