Google Analytics

I'm generally a believer that you get what you pay for. But with Google Analytics (GA) being free, you certainly get a lot more than you pay for.

I've been using GA on a variety of sites for over a year now. While I'm certainly no expert on it, I have gotten my hands dirty enough with it to appreciate all it has to offer. We recently launched a new pro selection service for Washington state at http://search.porch.com. In the ramp up of launching that site, I did an evaluation of the different web analytics offerings out there. I won't go into the details of what I found. But here's the summary of my findings.

You should just use Google Analytics until the time that you hit GA's traffic volume limits.  If you have a need for capabilities beyond GA, then get a second package to cover that need.

Now Google Analytics isn't free for everyone. You do need to pay for it once your site exceeds 5 million PVs per month (a metric that I am looking forward to exceeding).

Here are some of the reasons that I think you should just use GA:

• It's the standard out there.  It's the most used web analytics package today.  Now I'm not saying that you should use it just so you can be a lemming.  But because it is so pervasive, you get a lot of integration for free.  For example, WordPress has modules that make using GA with your WordPress site brain-dead easy.  Additionally, we implemented call tracking with March Ex recently.  And they have GA integration built into their service.
• Tons of depth.  It has the standard PV and UU type stuff.  Some of the more interesting features include:
  • Events.  You can define events throughout the experience and track them as desired.
  • Goals.  You can define the business goals you want to track.  We have the concept of Valuable User Actions (VUA).  This is when a user actively inputs data into our system.  We want users to do 5 or more VUAs.  So we set a goal for 5 VUA and can now easily track it.
  • Site search reporting with some pretty cool search specific reporting attached.
  • Realtime.  Who doesn't love watching their web stats in real time.  At our office, we're kind of addicted to the stats and have a TV on the wall showing it at all times.
  • Page flow analysis.
  • Campaign tracking.  Just add some simple code to each link in your social efforts and see what efforts are bearing what results.
• there are more features to GA than I've used so far.  So it goes beyond the things I've described here.  For example, I haven't used any of the ecommerce features.
• Integration with Adwords and Google Webmaster tools.
• Customizable reporting.

Now, not all is perfect.  My biggest complaint about GA is about usability and learning curve.  There's a lot of functionality here.  But discovering it and mastering it can be a challenge.  And there are some settings that I still have trouble remembering where they are in the UI.

Additionally, we had some problems implementing GA in our non-native iOS app.  And I'm still not happy with our implementation there.

But the net of the conversation is that Google Analytics is a great tool for anyone that wants to understand how users engage with their site.