By Anthony Centeno
Google Vs. Omniture Vs. Coremetrics Vs. Unica, blah, blah, blah. We’ve all heard and read the arguments and read the Forrester Research and numerous white papers espousing the competitive advantages of each of the leading web analytics solution.
We all know who the industry leaders are, we know that Omniture owns the most market share, flexible reporting, and is great at tracking mobile devices but also forces you to dig deeper into your pocket than anyone else. We know that Coremetrics provides lifetime profiles of visitors as well as benchmarking against your competition. Google Analytics is constantly being improved upon by a company that has deeper pockets than, well, everyone.
What do you tell a client who asks you “What Web Analytics solution do you recommend?” I tell my clients it is worth the money to implement one of the industry-leading solutions that provide robust reporting, deep-dive visitor-pathing analysis, and unlimited site goal creation. But I also tell them to also implement Google Analytics.
Cue the client “Why do I need two web analytics solutions?”
Two primary reasons, number one, we all know web analytics data tends to overlap and never seems to add up, and it shouldn’t, so why not use a free web analytics solution to compare and contrast the data points you are getting from your paid solution? The numbers from both solutions will be different, you know that even before you get started, but the general trending of the numbers should be similar, if they are not, it’s time to roll up your sleeves and dig deeper than visits and top content.
The second reason I give clients, is to be able to leverage the multitude of fantastically free Google tools that provide seamless integration with Google Analytics. Of course, Google AdWords is the most obvious tool that jumps out at you. It makes sense to have access to the Keyword Tool from the most dominant search engine on the planet. This alone is reason enough to implement Google Analytics additionally. But there are many more Google tools to take advantage, there’s Google Insights for Search which is a powerful tool that allows you to research search trends by industry category, seasonality, geo-targeting, and other search variables. I could go on and on with examples like Google Docs, Google Trends for Websites, etc., etc., but I’m sure you get the point.
We used to say two is better than one, but you don’t hear that too much in the current ultra-competitive world we live in. Maybe we should.
Please leave a comment, especially if you disagree!
Tags: Google, google anlaytics, internet marketing, web analytics
You asked for it….
In most cases, I think it makes no sense to use multiple analytics packages. For one, the tracking codes can interfere with each other. For another, those calls to outside servers can unnecessarily increase the page load time.
What reasons could I see for using multiple analytics packages? One reason would be to gain additional features and functionality that the combination would give you, i.e. the sum was bigger than its parts. However, I can’t see many cases for this.
The other reason would be to diagnose tracking issues, which you may have eluded to. i.e. the tracking code was stripped from several pages and you only notice that as a result of viewing an abnormal difference in trend lines between the two apps. However, there are other ways to diagnose these kinds of issues without needing multiple apps. One way would be to setup custom alerts using the new Intelligence feature in Google Analytics to look for abnormal variances in pageviews, visitors, etc.
Your second reason talks about accessing the multitude of free tools that Google provides. The analysis tools you mentioned for keyword research, search trends, etc. don’t require an Analytics account. In fact, they don’t even require a Google account at all so I’m not sure of the benefit there.
In short, I disagree.
Happy New Year to everyone at PV!