GA Premium: A Force To Be Reckoned With
Overall Satisfaction with Google Analytics Premium
Vertical Nerve is a digital marketing agency. We are a certified Google Analytics Premium partner and reseller, as well as provide GA Premium implementation and analytics services to our clients. We work with several clients on the Google Analytics Premium platform who use the tools within the product to analyze their site usage data, conversion funnel flow, digital marketing campaign performance, visitor and customer segmentation analysis, and more. We find that the data and analysis gleaned from GA Premium reports are used throughout the organization, from marketing teams or IT, to C level executives.
Pros
- Marketing Attribution Modeling -- Google Analytics offers several rules-based marketing attribution models such as first interaction, last interaction, time decay and position based, but the Premium platform also offers a data driven attribution model. The data driven model is a huge advancement that uses a statistically driven methodology to best estimate the value of each marketing interaction. As someone who is very familiar with the other big players in the digital analytics space, I can say that the data driven model is something only Google offers in their enterprise product. IBM, Adobe and Webtrends do not include a data driven model in their standard product offerings (although I suspect they must be in their product road maps now that Google is showing them up in this area).
- On the Fly Filters and Segments -- Building customized reports is very easy in Google Analytics; much easier than any of the other major tools I've used. I can apply filters and segments on the fly with very few limitations. Other tools either limit the number of segments I can create, or remove the functionality altogether from many of their reports.
- Fast Report Processing -- Most of my Google Analytics Premium reports, even with segments applied, load in mere seconds. I rarely get that impatient feeling waiting for a report to appear on my screen. It's definitely faster than the other major analytics tools I've used.
- Multi Site Implementations and Reporting -- For clients looking to implement a solution across multiple sites, and they are interested in getting rolled up reports or customized views of data across sites, I would hands down choose Google Analytics Premium. They excel in this area and make implementation of these scenarios much easier than other tools. Also, their flat price makes them a better bargain for multi-site customers because one Premium contract can be utilized across multiple sites.
Cons
- Ecommerce -- Unfortunately, at this time, I just wouldn't recommend Google Analytics Premium to a retail/ecommerce brand. The product is missing some key metrics and reports such as product views, add to cart, abandoned products, cross sold product basket analysis, etc. Clients in the retail sector struggle to use events to hack together these data points that are out-of-the-box with other analytics tools. Once Google overcomes this obstacle, they will truly be a force to be reckoned with.
- PII - Personally identifying information is allowed in other tools such as IBM Digital Analytics and Adobe Site Catalyst. The inability to pass something as simple as an email address into an enterprise analytics tools like Google Analytics Premium is not only an annoyance, but a barrier to integrations with other tools such as email marketing platforms.
- Add Ons -- Vendors like IBM and Adobe are building out awesome add-ons that boost the value of their product offerings. For example, IBM offers Digital Recommendations (previously known as Intelligent Offer), which uses analytics data to serve up real-time intelligent product recommendations on a site. This integrated add-on provides a ROI and further incentivizes the brand to stick with the IBM product suite.
- We help our clients use GA Premium to optimize their marketing campaign investments, especially around Affiliate and Paid Search.
- We show our clients how to use GA Premium funnel reporting to improve their conversion paths onsite, leading to improved conversions.
- We also utilize the data in our A/B testing projects to improve our clients' conversion rates through site design optimization.
I am also an advanced IBM Digital Analytics user and beginner Adobe Site Catalyst user. I definitely prefer GA Premium for non retail clients due to the ease of use, flexibility and robust marketing attribution modeling. I also prefer it for multi-site implementations due to the flexibility around roll up reporting and customized views.
Using Google Analytics Premium
Using Google Analytics Premium
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
Like to use Relatively simple Easy to use Technical support not required Well integrated Consistent Quick to learn Convenient Feel confident using Familiar | None |
- Segments and filters are quite easy to build and apply to reports.
- Creating a custom report is quite easy.
- Adding secondary dimensions to standard reports is a very nice feature that allows additional insight into the data.
- I wish that the right hand pane of the screen (where the actual reports are) would stay within the view of the screen. Instead, when I scroll down the menu on the left-hand pane, my right-hand pane also scrolls down and I have to scroll back up to see the report I've selected from the menu.
- I wish that there was an option to download a particular number of rows from reports, rather than having to load the number of rows I want first and then downloading. I often forget to do this and waste time with a download.
Yes, but I don't use it
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