e-interactive/blog

Today I had a lunch meeting with Yannick Laclau of Properazzi. I would describe Yannick as a “start-up business guru”, and he asked me a question which seems to be all the rage at the moment. I’m paraphrasing, but the gist was, “What do I get with a fully paid-up web analytics solution that I don’t get with Google Analytics?”.

A great question this one. Why should I pay when I can get it for free? Well, there are bunch of answers to this, but for me there are three main answers; segmentation, reporting, support.

Before I dive into these areas in a little more depth it is worth mentioning that I, like many others in this industry, believe Google Analytics to be the most important tool out there today. It certainly isn’t the most powerful, but the adoption rate has been so high that there is now a general appreciation of web analysis that simply wasn’t there before. This is incredibly important in the context of all analytics discussions. In addition, GA provides a lot of information in an easy-to-use way and integrates perfectly with Google Adwords; absolutely perfect for the small website owner.

So, back to our three main points of differentiation.

Segmentation: this is my favourite subject at the moment, and one covered very well by Matt Belkin in a recent article on Omniture’s blog. Segmentation in the web analytics sense means the ability to look at data according to a specific set of user types. For instance, whilst it might be very interesting to see the bounce rate of a specific page (the % of users who leave on their first page visited), it is infanitly more interesting to understand how this metric might change depending on the marketing channel the user found your site from, be that Google or your weekly email. In fact tools with the power of Omniture and Indextools allow this type of functionality as standard on their applications. This is an essential for me.

Reporting: this isn’t about a battle regarding the number of reports that that each tool has. This is more about the ease of which the user of the analytics tool can automatically send pre-defined reports to interested parties, at an appropriate level of frequency of course. GA fails completely in this instance.

The fact is that most business owners are not interested in using web analytics tools, indeed it would frighten most online marketing managers to let their boss loose on the tools in the first place. What is useful then is to allow administrators of the analytics tool to send automated and pre-configured reports to different parts of the business. All the best tools have this functionality; Omniture even provide a way to allow you to push reports to the desktop of anyone in your org.

Lastly, support: The fact is the GA does not have a great support service in place. Of course not, the user is paying anything. However, when analytics becomes a driving force behind an enterprise, a certain level of support is not only important, it is critical. The Spanish market is the one most important to us, and although support for most tools is available (in English) from all of the most advanced tools, it is Xiti and Websidestory (through a partner Alt64) that really stick out in this aspect. Xiti, a French web analytics company, has an office and support team based in Madrid.

These three aspects are only a summary of the advantages in taking a “paid-for” tool to help with the analysis of your online business, and marketing investment management. There are also many more specific instances where the pure flexibility, functionality and power of the main tools makes GA look a little “beginner-like”. However, we would always recommend having both, using GA to back up your paid solution, both to better integrate with Google Adwords and provide a failsafe in the event that your paid solution decides to take a day off!