TrustRadius Insights for Google Analytics are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, third party data sources.
Pros
Customer Behavior Understanding: Users have praised the ability to understand customer behavior and preferences through web analytics, helping them optimize marketing campaigns.
Issue Identification and Fixing: Reviewers find the feature of identifying and fixing issues on websites to be highly valuable.
Integration with Google Services: Customers appreciate the seamless integration with other Google services like BigQuery and Google Ads, which provides a comprehensive analytics solution.
Custom Reports Creation: Users value the ability to create custom reports based on specific use case requirements for tailored insights.
Export Functionality: The option to export reports for custom analyses is highly valued by users for further data exploration.
Google Analytics is an essential tool at the company I work for, allowing us to analyse the website performance and understand the contribution of different media channels on traffic acquisition and on-site engagement. As a media manager, I particularly appreciate the possibility of audience segmentation for retargeting purposes in Search and DV360 Programmatic.
Pros
Reporting visualisation
Audience management
Compatibility with other Google products
Cons
More intuitive reports creation
Introducing AI-based assistant helping to find needed data (instead of building a report, users could just brief the assistant)
AI-based insights
Likelihood to Recommend
Best tool for website analytics
VU
Verified User
Manager in Corporate (Retail company, 5001-10,000 employees)
In my organization, which is a grocery e-commerce company, we use Google Analytics to gain insights into our website traffic and customer behavior. The product addresses several business problems such as measuring website traffic and conversion rates, identifying where our customers are coming from, and which pages on our website are most popular. Our use case for Google Analytics is comprehensive and covers all aspects of our online presence. We use it to track key metrics such as page views, unique visitors, time on site, and the sources of our traffic such as search engines, direct visits, and referral sites. This information helps us to optimize our website for better user experience and conversions. We also use Google Analytics to set up and track goals, such as tracking sign-ups or purchases, to measure the success of our marketing and sales efforts. Additionally, we use the product's segmentation and reporting features to gain insights into the behavior of specific groups of customers such as mobile users or those who came from a specific referral source. Overall, Google Analytics has proven to be a valuable tool for us in understanding the success of our website and e-commerce efforts and helps us to make data-driven decisions to improve our business.
Pros
Traffic analysis: Google Analytics provides a comprehensive analysis of your website traffic. You can see how many visitors come to your site, where they come from, how long they stay, and which pages they visit. This information is essential for understanding your audience and making informed decisions about how to engage with them.
Conversion tracking: Google Analytics makes it easy to track conversions, such as purchases or sign-ups, on your site. You can set up conversion goals and track how well your site is performing in terms of meeting those goals. This information can be used to improve your site's user experience and increase conversions.
Custom reports and dashboards: Google Analytics offers a wide range of customization options, including the ability to create custom reports and dashboards. You can create reports that are tailored to your specific needs and objectives, providing you with the information that is most important to your business. Whether you want to see which pages are most popular, which sources of traffic are most effective, or what types of products are selling best, you can create reports that give you that information in an easy-to-understand format.
Customization of reports and data visualization: Google Analytics offers a wide range of customization options to create custom reports and dashboards based on specific KPIs and metrics that are most relevant to your business goals. This helps you to gain a more in-depth understanding of your website's performance, allowing you to make data-driven decisions. The tool also provides a variety of visualization options such as line charts, bar graphs, and pie charts, enabling you to clearly communicate insights to stakeholders.
Cons
Integration with Other Tools: One area where Google Analytics has room for improvement is its integration with other tools. While it is possible to integrate Google Analytics with other tools such as Google AdWords or Google Tag Manager, it can be difficult for users to do so without technical expertise. Improving the integration with other tools would help organizations get a more complete picture of their data.
Customization: Another area where Google Analytics has room for improvement is in its customization. While Google Analytics provides many pre-built reports and metrics, it can be challenging for users to customize these reports to fit their specific needs. Improving customization options, such as the ability to create custom reports, would help organizations get the most out of Google Analytics.
Real-time Data: Finally, Google Analytics could improve its real-time data capabilities. Currently, Google Analytics only provides real-time data for a limited set of metrics, such as active users and pageviews. Improving real-time data capabilities, such as providing real-time data for all metrics, would help organizations make more informed decisions in real-time.
Likelihood to Recommend
Google Analytics is particularly well suited for tracking and analyzing customer behavior on a grocery e-commerce platform. It provides a wealth of information about customer behavior, including what products are most popular, what pages are visited the most, and where customers are coming from. This information can help the platform optimize its website for better customer engagement and conversion rates. However, Google Analytics may not be the best tool for more advanced, granular analysis of customer behavior, such as tracking individual customer journeys or understanding customer motivations. In these cases, it may be more appropriate to use additional tools or solutions that provide deeper insights into customer behavior.
Our company used the free version of Google Analytics to monitor and report on website visitors and e-commerce conversions. We would regularly generate reports based on the data contained within the platform, and use it to inform website development, issues and tracking of various KPIs. For this reason, it was crucial to our commercial performance measurement and a major contributor to future planning for different business functions. We also made some of the data available to third parties for the purposes of retargeting and advertising.
Pros
Clearly segmented dashboard for visits, commerce, performance metrics etc.
Relatively simple user and property management.
Useful exporting options for external integrations and analysis.
A variety of viewing options for different data, so that it can be understood better or drilled down into.
Intuitive UI for navigating historical data.
Cons
Data sampling is somewhat inaccurate on the free tier - this is addressed in premium but is expensive.
Some of the UI is very similar in naming when presenting different data, some in-situ information might be useful.
Gotchas around filtering and data validation.
Implementation can be tricky, it can take a lot of time and expertise to get a full, accurate picture of your metrics.
Likelihood to Recommend
For a free product, [Google Analytics] is an excellent offering that is difficult to compete with out of the box. Simple integration is very quick and easy with gtag as a website snippet, or even via Google's tag manager. A more complex, detailed integration can be more costly and time-consuming, but it is always possible to opt in to various bits of data over time, so it is quite extensible in that sense. This makes it suitable for small sites and businesses starting out, and when you get to a scale where GA may no longer be fit for purpose in this state you can then evaluate versus other platforms and possibly upgrade to premium if desired.
VU
Verified User
Professional in Engineering (Retail company, 201-500 employees)
Used by e-commerce department within our whole group as the obvious and worldwide accepted solution to measure traffic, sessions, sources of traffic, product/sales performance, sales versus actual sales, flow & journey of customers, user experience, cities performance, and site speed.
Pros
Reliable data on live views and users by time of day, day of the week. For e-commerce retail, it’s important to see which are the quiet or crowded hours.
Reliable data on audience behaviour & checkout drop rates.
Reliable data on traffic sources and which contributes the most revenue - you can determine where you can better allocate your money to.
Great AI insights - you can receive data you wouldn’t know you had within seconds of opening Google Analytics.
Cons
Google Analytics on the mobile app is not as complete or as easily accessible as on desktop.
Setting e-commerce goals is not easy and to this day I still don’t know what’s the actual use.
Could be better connected with Facebook Ads so we can see integrated, more insightful data.
Likelihood to Recommend
Well suited for a medium to large scale retail brand creating an e-commerce site for the first time who has large enough database to launch and some knowledge of how to handle big data (beginner/intermediate level on digital performance).
Not well suited for a small company/store who does not have enough data. If you have no expertise in setting up APIs or integrations, you will not be able to unlock the full potential of Google Analytics or will only be able to see the surface.
We use Google Analytics on our eCommerce website to spot not only what current pages on our site are trending, but also to see the visitors origins so we can increase advertising on those social media platforms. Additionally, we use google analytics to monitor the success of different advertising campaigns to determine which are most viable for further investment without stretching our advertising budget too thin. This allows us to better focus our limited advertising budget while still conducting some basic A/B testing on our audience.
Pros
Monitoring website referrals.
Extensive data analysis capabilities.
Improved eCommerce integration for more detailed data reporting.
Useful Demographic information on your website's audience.
Helpful AI system to spot data-reporting problems, and trends.
Well designed mobile application.
Cons
Overly complex report lists (way too many reports for most users. A "basic" or simplified model would be more useful to new users).
Incomplete social media referral data (Youtube and Facebook for example only list top domain, no additional information provided).
Referral spam and fake traffic have become a major issue (fake referrals injected into analytics data, requiring users to filter out this junk data).
Less accurate recently with more people blocking tracking software like Analytics.
Likelihood to Recommend
For a small business owner or blogger looking to get a better understanding of visitors to their website. It will give you a sense of where visitors are coming from, what they do on your site, and how long they spend doing it before leaving. This information can be extremely useful in planning the next moves for your business or brand.
In reality, it's a great product for almost every website owner, although I admit the system has gotten more verbose and complicated over the years. Less technologically inclined people might need to take a few courses or watch some tutorials before digging into the system.
VU
Verified User
Executive in Sales (Retail company, 1-10 employees)
Google Analytics is used to review our website performance as well as evaluate website design effectiveness. It is also used to evaluate marketing efforts (for example: measuring traffic to a landing page created specifically for a digital marketing campaign). This is used mainly by our marketing department as the purpose of Google Analytics to measure the effectiveness of the website.
Pros
Website Insight: It provides detailed data to measure the effectiveness of your website (for example, which page your customers visit the most, which page they spend time on reading the most).
Customer Data: it also provides some insight on your potential target market since it records the age/gender/location of the website visitors. These data are useful, especially when being used together with digital marketing campaigns to make sure your ads go to the right target market.
Multiple Website Data Management: one account can measure different websites so it is convenient, especially when you are running multiple websites for your business.
Cons
Website Integration: In order for Google Analytics to measure the most accurate data, it requires you to put a code into your website. This could be hard sometimes especially if the user is not a person who is familiar with coding.
Accessing Data sometimes takes longer than expected.
Mobile Apps are too hard to be used. There are a lot of features that are more effectively shown on the version on browsers.
Likelihood to Recommend
Google Analytics is best used together with digital marketing tools like AdWords so you can measure the traffic that the ads draw to your website. Also, it is effective in collecting customers' insight to promote your products and services. For example, if Google Analytics shows that most of the visitors of my website are aged from 25 to 35 and most of them are males, I will create content that leans towards males at that age more.
Used mainly by marketing, but some aspects used by our web tech team. We evaluate our email sends, our CPC programs, our social media, and our display campaigns...along with website performance in general.
Pros
Great for tagging links
Good for monitoring traffic flow through website
Good for tracking goals, events and conversions
Cons
Ecommerce tracking presents some challenges
Not easy to track to our Pinterest and Facebook sites
"Not provided" is a horrible change!
Likelihood to Recommend
For most SMB's I would definitely recommend Google Analytics. If a business sells a lot of 'complex' products with many attributes, then Omniture may be a better solution.
