Product Review for Google Analytics

Google Analytics doesn’t just provide you with website insights for digital marketers, it’s incredibly valuable to the commercial success of your business. Google Analytic is becoming one of the main tools to support business decisions.

Basing my business decisions on sufficient data is crucial to ensure that I have enough evidence to build an effective digital marketing strategy and marketing campaigns. Google Analytics is split into four key reporting areas;

1. Real-time (live analytics for your website)
2. Audience (Vistors and client persona)
3. Acquisition (Traffic sources, Organic and Paid campaigns analysis)
4. Behaviour (Website and content analysis)
5. Conversions (Tracking ROI, E-commerce goals, and Funnel Attribution),

What do you like best?

Google GA has so many benefits:

1. It is free to use; you don’t have to pay any (monthly) fees for using this product.
2. Relatively easy setup; a basic implementation is easy compared to tools from many other vendors.
3. Documentation available; you will find helpful documentation on both the implementation as well as the configuration part.
4. Powerful reports; create your own reports and add many different dimensions and metrics in one report.
5. Intuitive tool; set aside some time and you will soon understand the interface, the different report sets and how to work with the tool.
6. Great Analytics API; for more advanced users, you will love the Google Analytics API.
7. Integration of Google Console; it’s easy to connect your Webmaster Tool data to Google Analytics to track your organic SEO results.
8. Tracking campaigns; you can literally track any campaign that is driving traffic to your website using utm parameters.
9. Great add-ons available; add-ons can make your Google Analytics implementation, configuration, and monitoring life a lot easier.
10. Easy to connect to other tools; I am a huge fan of exporting data and automatically building reports & dashboards via Google sheets and reports garden. And there are many ways to automate data reporting and uncover insights more easily.
11. Send reports via email; it may be useful for you to send out powerful custom reports to clients or internal stakeholders.
12. Export reports; the data export function helps to extract data in many formats such as PDF and CSV.
13. Easy use of annotations; you can add private or shared annotations. In this way, the data gets more meaning and causalities can be shared on the surface.
14. Setup custom alerts to save you time; uncover insights more easily.
15. Measure internal site search; know what people on your website are searching for. Make effective changes to your navigation and product offers.
16. Setup profiles for long-term segmentation analysis; you can choose to exclude ‘own’ traffic or certain IPs, focus on certain traffic channels, include only traffic from a specific region etc.
17. Advanced segments for ad-hoc analysis; powerful on the fly analysis on a group of visitors.
18. Powerful real-time reporting; great way to get direct feedback on campaigns you are running. Very effective when testing implementations.
19. Attribution Model and Multi-Channel Funnels; Although it is not really advanced like Premium but it can help your team to study your funnel and go beyond looking at Last Click Conversions.
20. Powerful integration with AdWords; it takes a few steps, but it’s worth it. Many insights on your AdWords campaigns are waiting for you in Google Analytics.
21. Monitor your mobile and tablet traffic; it is easy to see how your mobile and tablet traffic is growing and whether this visitors segment is converting or not.
22. A large group of specialized consultants; Google Analytics has an enormous network of qualified consultants around the globe. So in case you need help, it is easy to find someone who can assist you.
23. New features added periodically; the Web Analytics package has evolved to become a high-end solution for small, medium and large (multinational) companies.
24. Easy testing via experiments; if you want to try out testing, start with experiments in Google Analytics. Later on, you can choose to invest in a paid solution.

What do you dislike?

1) Complicated interface: It is not flexible or customizable, especially for the average site owner. It doesn't help much when you need to build a customized report. You need to understand all the variables and data.

2) Report Export: The only options to export reports right now are CSV, TSV, and CSV for Excel. The CSV for Excel exports aren’t functioning properly, so users get CSVs instead.

3) Data Samples: If you have a huge traffic then the free GA wouldn't be so accurate since it is based on data samples and not full data.

4) Date-Over-Date Comparison: Although you can view data from two date ranges, GA no longer shows the percent increase or decrease. Although the graph can be helpful for a quick view, the date comparison is close to pointless without the percent change.

5) Poor charts and data visualization: It is not easy to get customizable data visualization in GA unlike Google Data Studio.

6 ) Export 50K Rows: Google Analytics still only shows a maximum of 500 rows. Previously, users could use &limit= to export 50K rows. This is now capped at 20K. This would be a higher priority item if we didn’t use the GA API.

7) Settings & Navigation: There are too many steps to get to something simple when you want to change the settings. The same can be said for the navigation. There are too many clicks needed to get to reports that were previously easy to access.

For which purposes do you use the product?

• Analyzing consumer journey, attribution model and behavior on the website
• Tracking traffic sources, traffic quality, organic search results,
• Monitoring conversion funnel, KPIs, and Goals
• Creating segmentation for Google Adwords

What is your primary role when using this product?

There are several overarching business benefits of Google Analytics, these are; marketing campaign optimisation, website usability and organic improvement, target audience analysis, AdWords and Google Tag Managers integration, KPIs and conversion tracking, and finally budget allocation.

Overview:

I started working with Google Analytics in the early days and I believe that the tool is getting more advanced. I always check the reports on a daily basis to build effective insights for my clients. If you are new to the field of digital marketing or professional, I highly recommend investing more time with Google Analytic.

Yasser Ahmad

Digital Marketing Consultant