Google Analytics is a very effective tool when you consider the price. the fact that you can start getting marketing analytics, all by installing a tag on your site, with no startup cost is very powerful. Also, the way its laid out, while confusing at first, becomes sortof second nature, and there is a metric tonne of insight that you can pull from the data that you can gain from its various views.
While Google Analytics can give you a lot of insight, there is some to be desired. Most obviously, its nearly impossible to tie specific traffic/customer journey's to specific purchases or leads, there currently is no way (as far as I know) to tie a user ID from google analytics with a customer on your site. This leaves a big black hole in data as it becomes difficult to see the full value of each step in the customer journey. Also, the multi-touch data that you can gather from Google Analytics leaves much to be desired, and in most cases a separate solution is necessary.
The main way I use Google Analytics is to figure out direct value derived from various marketing channels (Facebook, LinkedIn, Google Ads, Organic Search, etc.), and for this purpose, Google Analytics is a star. As long as you have the proper UTM trackings setup on these various channels, there is much to be learned and a lot of value to be derived. Furthermore, I find that gathering value derived from specific campaigns (on a first touch basis) is very easy from Google Analytics, and most of the time I use this tool rather than the in-built analytics views on the various platforms we're advertising on. All in all, it's an essential part of my analytics stack and will continue to be for the foreseeable future.
Let's me clearly measure and understand what is happening with my business online. Provides excellent reporting tools for clients as well. Now with new data studio we can further present data without having to use basic charts and display tools.
Can be overwhelming and isn't very intuitive if you're not tech savvy. Can take a lot of getting used to, but over time you get the hang of it. Definitely can feel like you're parsing and presenting data that could or could not be relevant based on your data definitions. Data can be misconstrued to present dishonest findings, which is the nature of all data collection/analysis tools throughout the industry.
Measuring online success for campaigns, very practical. Tracking and tagging of all user activity on client websites - lets us measure activity and make recommendations for best use of websites. Ecommerce measurement - Conversion tracking as a means to present value of our operations in the advertising industry. Creating a case for further sales targets and providing client with a lot of value without significant cost to us. Measuring marketing metrics - providing proof and cases for clients to determine what source they want to pursue as a marketing tool. If they rely on social, why? Bing, why? Hard data to support our methods.
With the growth of tracking information on websites to generate more leads and gleaning more insight into what content is resonating on our website is the ultimate goal of Analytics. Google Analytics is a platform that enables SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and visitor segmentation by providing geographic locations and referral resources. Tracking the visitors behavior pattern on our pages to understand not just their visit but to really understand geographic diversity and what extent of visitors bring value to our website and so on. Customization of reports and data collections are dulcet features of analytics. Everything comes with a cost, but google has provided the tool for free and this is a boon to grow perpetually for the users and marketing portfolio's.
Even though it is free, upgrading to a premium costs a bomb. Limited number of goals can be set as a user of the tool and requires constant training to peers if analysis tasks have to be delegated. Google analytics uses dimensions and metrics quite rigidly and drill-down is a redundant process for analysis of data. GA is less reliable when there is less traffic. One major drawback is the data displayed on sites is not owned by users but google Sometimes the voluminous amount of data collected is confusing and makes the user go hither thither.
Most of the companies try to solve the problem of less customers by showcasing their presence by creating a website be it a portfolio for individuals or e commerce for online sales by enabling analytics for their websites.Focus is always on the vanity metrics like increase in visitors for pages and page views. Because in web analytics, it’s not just about knowing your valuable traffic sources ,number of visitors and conversion rates, what's important is the how interpretation of the data. Benefits realized are: Planning is the key for analysis. Checking the USP for company/self and then analyzing the data Set the goal and then drill-down for analysis, track the bounce off rate and reduce the clogging of information
I think the best part about Google Analytics is the price. It is, for the most part, completely free to use. This is somewhat surprising given the breadth of features it offers. The development team is constantly improving the software through the user interface as well as new features. Set up is extremely easy, and the default dashboards provide data to satisfy most user requirements.
While Google Analytics has plenty of features, the developers tend to reorganize the software's user interface far too often. As soon as you get comfortable pulling the data you are looking for, it seems as though the whole application has been redesigned so things are in a different spot. There is a paid version of the software, but I imagine it is too costly for most businesses. That being said, the free version has essentially no support from Google. One must rely on outside consultants or their own research if they have implementation issues or questions about a particular feature.
Google Analytics is our go-to solution for website analytics for our own websites as well as our clients. There is no issue with the cost, and the amount of data it provides satisfies almost everyone.
It’s free of charge so everyone can use it. You can use it on different digital environments such as websites, mobile applications, kiosks, or anything that has an internet connection There’s a Google Analytics Academy, where you can get in-depth information and get educated about how to use it. You can connect your Google Analytics account with your AdWords account. You can also collect data from different platforms and sources. You can create custom goals and you can also track your ecommerce platform. You can create custom reports based on your needs. This way you can track specific information depending on your industry.
In order to understand all the intricacies, you need to learn. The issue with that is that the information is sometimes hard to find, may be confusing, and overwhelming. The academy is also quite time-consuming so if you’re on a time frame, it my not be feasible. The overall feel of the platform might also be a little bit overwhelming. There are too many dashboards and too many things to look at. The free version of Google Analytics suit almost anyone, but if your traffic is high and you’d like to upgrade to Premium, the price is $150,000.
I've used it to track measurements that helps you in understanding which people you reach with your website and how your website performs.
Live Feedback of each website page, live tracking of every page, live visitor count, live location, traffic sources, audience overview, country or city, language
after getting so much from one tool I don't think anyone will dislike anything about the tool and that too free of cost as google doesn't charge a single penny for analytics
Easy to integrate and you can understand where you are making mistakes, what you can improve, your strength and weakness, from where you can get more results work there
If you have both a website and a mobile app, you have the ability to combine your data from different analytics tools by simply installing Google Analytics 4 and creating multiple streams within a single resource.
Google Analytics, at a first glance, can seem daunting to a complete beginner to the tool. I wish the user interface was less cluttered and more approachable to regular users.
It is a completely innovative, holistic approach to collecting, tracking user behavior and predicting data not only for websites but also for mobile apps. Google Analytics offers cross-platform tracking, machine learning and predictive metrics, the ability to work with raw data, and so on. Google Analytics can automatically predict user behavior using machine learning technology. For example, estimate the probability of conversions that users will make in the next 7 days based on their activity on your site or mobile app over the past 28 days. Once you install Google Analytics on your site or mobile app, the counter will start tracking visitor activity and gathering data. Over time, there will be more and more statistics. To quickly report on page views, events, transactions, and other interactions, the system can apply filters (if you have them set up) and aggregation (summation, grouping). Direct import of data from Google Analytics into Google BigQuery used to be available only to users of the paid version, and now you can access the raw data, merge it with other sources, and work with it without sampling by directly linking your Google Analytics account to Google BigQuery. And you don't have to pay a single dime! Google Analytics information in Google BigQuery is stored in tables with numerous columns and rows, and the work and analysis itself happen by entering certain SQL commands that allow analysts to find interesting insights, build reports, different funnels and visualizations. There are four types of events that can be tracked in Google Analytics: 1. Automatically logged events - events that Google collects automatically after an account is created and set up (first_visit, session_start, page_view, user_engagement). 2. Recommended events - events that are already built into Google Analytics for various activities, with standard names and parameters, and which are described in the official documentation, but which you need to fine-tune for your own tasks. 3. Special events - events that you can create on your own, according to your needs. 4. Advanced statistics - additional events that Google starts tracking after you turn on this feature. These include page scroll depth, clicks on outgoing links, site search, interactions with YouTube videos, and file downloads. That is, those settings, which we previously adjusted ourselves by implementing special code on the website or using Google Tag Manager, are now available "out of the box". It is only necessary to activate the corresponding function in the webstream settings. Overall, Google Analytics comes with a staggering number of benefits packed into an intuitive, fairly straightforward user interface. It is a tool that is undoubtedly priceless for entrepreneurs, business owners and startups all over the world. Anyone can learn to use it and continue to do so for free. Completely cost-effective!
The ease of set up and how easy it is to build custom reports. The clarity in data. GA gives us and overall picture of what's going on in our product. It also allows us to collect data in any way we feel is right and then allows us to go really deep within that data.
Sometimes if the number of data points is too high it ends up taking a sample and generating a report with only 50-60% of the actual data leading to differences with reality if you're trying to find very accurate reporting.
We want to improve the product to solve our users needs. At the same time we want them to feel like for the information and experience they are looking for, we are the best place. One way to do that is figure out what they already use and improve the features so they find more value and can trust and depend on it more. Another way we use it is to find why a certain feature may not be working and then keep improving it till we hit a sweet spot.