GA Premium Improving, But Not Quite There Yet
December 20, 2013
GA Premium Improving, But Not Quite There Yet
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Google Analytics Premium
- The dashboards feature is quite useful. It's easy to create a dashboard for commonly-used metrics, and they're a good way to keep track of different segments. Dashboards can be private or shared with specific people, so it's very simple to get different people the information they need without overloading them with information they don't use.
- Google Analytics allows broad access to data in a way that most analytics programs do not. You can give any member of your organization access to a GA account, instead of dealing with a limited number of licenses. This is a convenient and effective way to get people looking at relevant data.
- GA now buckets data into acquisition, behavior, or conversion data; this is a very useful way of grouping information, and was a great update. The ABC model reflects real customer flow through a website, and is the way most companies actually want to look at data. With this update, Google also introduced new acquisition-related features that allow you to track in much more detail how users came to your site (not just source and medium, but down to source of first vs. second exposure to your brand, how many visits before conversion, etc.).
- Google has recently added features that allow for greater data customization in GA, which is great. For example, GA now integrates with BigQuery, which means you can combine your internal data with GA data.
- GA Premium is not yet customizable enough, which is frustrating given how much Premium customers pay for the product. There are many cases in which you can't use the metric you actually want to look at (visits vs. visitors, for example). Custom reports are supposed to solve this problem, but typically require complicated RegEx and often don't work the way you expect them to. In most other analytics programs, you have much more flexibility to look at basic metrics, so this is a frustrating limitation in GA.
- We didn't find Google's support for its Premium customers to be very good. We adopted Premium fairly early on and were assured that we'd have a lot of help from the Google team in implementing a custom version of Premium that would meet our needs. In fact, we found that most of the documentation we received was simply copied from the public website (not helpful in solving particular business needs). The Google team didn't seem to do much to understand our business needs and help us find the right GA solutions to meet them -- much of the time, we had to go looking for answers on our own. Even when we had very specific technical/implementation questions, our reps typically did not have the answer on hand, and when they followed up it was a very generic answer.
- Training on GA Premium could be better. Since the point of using GA instead of a limited licenses-based analytics program is to allow broader access to data, GA could provide better training materials. Empowering people to look at data isn't much good if they don't know how to use the program, and we didn't find Google's training materials very helpful. When we implemented GA Premium, for example, the videos on the GA website featured an out-of-date version of GA.
- More efficient cost management. Since Google Analytics integrates with AdWords, we were able to more clearly see the effect of our marketing spend and adjust CPAs accordingly.