Why Google Analytics?

Web analytics play an important role in measuring customer digital activity. Not only does web analytics help the company gather, and integrate the data, but it also helps the company with reporting and analysis. From that, companies get full the picture of their customers, so they can plan effective marketing strategies to win the market and new customers. As a digital marketing beginner, The Forrester WaveTM: Web Analytics, Q2 2014 report by James McCormick really opens my eyes. In my limited knowledge, I thought Google is a leader of everything, from web analytics, to search engine optimization, and to Google Adwords. I do not even aware of the presence of At Internet, Adobe, IBM and Webtrends in web analytics field. However, The Forrester Wave indicates that Google is just a strong performer. The leaders in enterprise web analytics are Adobe, AT Internet, IBM, and Webtrends. In addition, Yahoo,  Moz, KISSmetrics, Salesforce’s Marketing Cloud and Livechat Software also offer web analytics service. These information are a big surprise to me. Considering among web analytics vendors, the question given here is why Google Analytics.
Among web analytics services, Google Analytics is the only one vendor which has free standard fee and gain a big market share, in comparison to Logentries, Mapmyuser, Quantcast and Yahoo.  According to Wikipedia, Google Analytics is used at around 49.9 of the top 1,000,000 websites (as currently ranked by Alexa) and is used by 66.2% of the 10,000 most popular websites ordered by popularity, as reported by BuiltWith in August, 2013. Google offers free web analytics service to the user, no consultants needed and free training. Google Analytics can be use in various types or forms of business, especially for start-up business or small business which has limited budget. Although Google Analytics is free, it is not a cheap tool. Instead, besides letting users measure sales and conversions,  Google Analytics is a powerful tool which gives users fresh insights into customer digital activity through Google analytics functions, such as ads and videos, websites and social tools, tablets and smartphones. According to some of my researches, Google Analytics provides many great aspects to maximize the efficiency, effectiveness, and convenience to the user like Analytics API Access, Add Ons, Custom Reports, WMT and AdWords, and Multi-Channel Funnels. According to “9 Awesome Things You Can Do With Google Analytics” article, the latest version of Google Analytics adds some great features, so it makes new organization and visualization features are easier to use. With Google Analytics 5, users are able to see the most important analytics data, find out which online campaigns bring the most traffic and conversions, determine where the best visitors are located, learn what people are searching for on the site, visualize what people click on the most, uncover the top content, identify the worst performing pages, determine where people abandon the shopping cart and discover if their business need a mobile site.

Nowadays, many companies use Google Analytics and gain a lot of successes. A lively example is Novartis company.  The company used the Google Tag Manager API to generate the containers, tags, and marcros. Novartis also adopted the Google Analytics API to create Google Analytics accounts, properties, and views. After that, they tapped the APIs to modify several groups of websites that needed customizations, such as IP address anonymization. They got awesome results thanks to Google Analytics. Their developers and marketers save a lot of time, so they can work on other high- priority tasks. The company can pulled and shared more consistent and pertinent data across sites. Finally, company increases its management efficiency by created dashboards that report across multiple properties.

After watching Google Analytic Academy videos, I am overwhelmed with new skills and the power of digital platforms. I feel like that there always have eyes watching each of my click on the websites. Recently, I realize that the advertisings that I saw on Facebook are the items that I was searching. Now, I understand that it is not a random coincidence, but it is the great work due to the powerful web analytics tool. Lastly, the important lesson that I learnt from Google Analytic Academy videos is the changes of customer’ journey and engagement with the business online made it important for digital analytics practitioner to think about how the business infrastructure, the tools, processes, and people support the continual improvement process of measuring, reporting, analyzing, testing and improvement. Depending on type of business, choosing the right people, processes and technology which fit with that business are very crucial. The reason is not only does it helps to maximize the benefits of digital platform to business,such as reducing costs, increase company perfomance and enhancing marketing effectiveness, but it also helps business leaders to have right actions and strategies to improve the business results based on collecting data.

In conclusion, the advantages of Google Analytics are enormous. Nonetheless, in order to take full benefits from Google Analytics, users require to have deep knowledge about it, and go through Google Analytics training process. It takes a lot of time effort, but the payback will be great.

Citation:

PAUL KOKS. “25 Reasons to Use Google Analytics | OnlineMetrics.” OnlineMetrics. OnlineMetrics, 18 Mar. 2013. Web. 06 Apr. 2015.

http://online-metrics.com/25-reasons-to-use-google-analytics/

“9 Awesome Things You Can Do With Google Analytics 5.” 9 Awesome Things You Can Do With Google Analytics 5. KISSMetric, 09 Aug. 2011. Web. 06 Apr. 2015.

https://blog.kissmetrics.com/awesome-google-analytics/

“Novartis Case Study.” (n.d.): n. pag. Google Analytics. Google Analytics. Web.

http://static.googleusercontent.com/media/www.google.com/en/us/analytics/customers/pdfs/novartis.pdf

Kate Morris. “Why You Should Use Google Analytics.” Distill. Distill, 23 Aug. 2011. Web. 5 Apr. 2015.

https://www.distilled.net/blog/web-analytics/why-google-analytics/