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!

The new Google AdWords interface continues to see improvement in features and usability.  One of the new features is the tab called Opportunities.  Google reviews the current budget, keyword list and campaign performance for each campaign and automatically generates ideas for each ad group.  Googlel identifies related keywords, showing the additional estimated monthly searches that can be generated with these new keywords.

While reviewing each new set of keywords, you have the ability to select which additional keywords you would like added to your ad group.   You are able to preview your ad text while reviewing the keyword list to make sure that the new keywords fit logically into this ad group.  Please be aware, that this is an automated process and you should not select to add all of the keywords without reviewing carefully first.

I haven’t actually been presented with a budget or campaign setting idea yet, but I’m sure this will provide very helpful optimization suggestions.  As always, Google is trying to help advertisers be more successful in their marketing campaigns.  True, Google benefits as well, but it is a win-win situation.

It is not every day that Google, makes dramatic changes its algorithm, so when Google started soliciting feedback last week for “Caffeine”, our SEO team took notice.  In fact, according to Matt Cutts, principal engineer at Google, it’s been more than 3 years since the last major change.  Although it is too early to start changing our process as launch is weeks away, but the changes we are seeing are addressing a lack of timeliness in the Google results, which has been a major deficiency.  So for instance, if a plane crash happens today, the Google results won’t reflect that until the news outlets pick up on it.  With the new algorithm, if it’s being talked about in social media (i.e. Twitter) then Google will start picking up those results in real time.

Google caffeine is still in Beta, but this is what we are seeing so far:

• More weight given to authoritative domains and to tag pages like Technorati and Facebook
• Tuning down the exposure on some video and universal search results
• An emphasis on real time indexing.  We are going to see more twitter results and other social media sites, especially on news related queries
• The results are showing up faster, for now
• perhaps a bit better understanding of related words / synonyms

If you want to test Google Caffeine for yourself, try it out here: http://www2.sandbox.google.com/ or compare the results from old to new here: http://www.comparecaffeine.com/

Additional Reading:

http://www.marketingpilgrim.com/2009/08/google-caffeine-test-suggests-too-much-emphasis-on-real-time-indexing.html

http://www.seobook.com/google-caffeine