Using Google Analytics or a paid for web analytics tool (part 2 ish…)

A couple of weeks ago I wrote a post here that gave some basic, but real-world, reasons why companies might want to invest in a paid web analytics solution rather than stick with Google Analytics exclusively. It was nice to see that Anil Batra, author of a great blog himself, made a comment shortly after this went live. He had the following to say:

Not all tools are created equal. Not all paid tools provide the same reports or functionality. What tool you should choose depends on your business goals and what extra features (report emailing etc.) you require. There are several businesses for which Free Google Analytics works perfectly and paying for a tool like Omniture is overkill.

Ummm, yes……

I was a little confused about this comment to be honest. Anil is absolutely right, of course, tools need to match requirements, and we are certainly not at the point where we could call the main WA tools available “commodities”. In addition I had written that .. “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.” I guess then that Anil found the article a little on the unsophisticated side, and you know what, I think he’s right.

The fact is that in Spain, were I am based, Web Analytics is a largely unknown area of internet business; the need for a basic and “unsophisticated” approach is critical. The adoption of GA in Spain has been huge, which is great, but now we need to convince the medium sized and larger business community of the need for sophistication in the analysis arena. I think Anil would agree that large traffic sites such as Vueling.com (a fantastic, medium sized, “low cost” airline operating out of Barcelona and selling 95% of its flight tickets online) might be better off implementing a more sophisticated solution than GA. (Google are so thrilled with this exclusivity that they are using Vueling as a case study here), and so they should.

So, back to the differences between paying and not paying, and why companies (in Spain and elsewhere) should only use GA as a part of their analytics solutions, not the only one. In my last post on this I looked at the areas of reporting (automated send of reports), segmentation (an interesting paper on this subject, compiled by Omniture, can be found here), and support. Today, briefly, I wanted to comment on one aspect of GA that I find poor to say the least – clickstream analysis.

Google is generally a very usable tool, however in this area it falls down completely. GA does provide some clickstream analysis, both navigational page to page and a pre-defined page funnel sequence. But the way the results are presented, and the usability of this whole area makes it almost impossible to cope with in a real world business situation. Any person seriously interested in understanding user clickstream behaviour onsite would be wise to go elsewhere I think.