Item: Google Analytics
Rating: 10
Author: Francois Salvert

Overall Satisfaction with Google Analytics

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

As a Web Analytics Consultant, I use Google Analytics 4 for my client and for my own
website. For my client, Google Analytics 4 is the tool most of them used since it's
quite simple to implement, it's highly integrated with other Google
tools such as Google Ads and BigQuery. Google Analytics 4, is well know now even if
the upgrade from Google Analytics was a pretty big learning curve to overcome.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Integration with GTM to ease implementation
Integration with BigQuery to enable advanced analytics and reporting
Custom events are easy to configure

Cons

Rollback. Most of the Google Analytics 4 features are not applicable on past collected data.
Clarity around sampling used in reports and the effect on data precision.
Custom reports (Explore) and still a bit buggy and the sharing function seems incomplete.

Return on Investment

Since the basic implementation of Google Analytics 4 is free and only require a couple of hours, it's quickly providing value.
When running Google Ads, Google Analytics 4 provides great ad measurements and conversion reports to understand ROI on ad spent.
With GDPR and other privacy laws, Google is not enforcing data privacy information into Google Analytics 4 and all Google marketing tools making it simple for smaller businesses to comply with such laws.

Usability

The UI still need some polishing since some visualization cut on text length for example or are hard to read even on large screens. Custom reports are better than a year ago but still need more refinement to appeal to more serious needs. For example, when selecting some dimensions or metrics breaks your reports. This is mostly due to incompatibilities between the dimensions and metrics selected but such incompatibilities should be grayed out, for example, beforehand to make the selection impossible.

Alternatives Considered

Adobe Analytics, Coremetrics / IBM Digital Analytics (discontinued) and Mixpanel

Google Analytics is for me the default one to implement especially for business starting in analytics. The time (aka cost) of implementation is very low and it provides results in a matter of hours. The integration with the Google ecosystem is also a plus especially when exporting to BigQuery to enable integration with other data in dashboard.

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

Google BigQuery, Databricks Data Intelligence Platform, Google Ads

Likelihood to Recommend

Small to medium size businesses that are keen on using the full suite of Google tools such as Google Ads, Google sheet and BigQuery. Google Analytics 4 is very well integrated with these tools and available at almost zero cost of businesses.
For larger, multinational organization, other solutions may be best suited especially to comply with local laws and data privacy.

Google Analytics Feature Ratings

Comments

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Google Analytics 4 - the default solution for quick results

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