Google Analytics

Well, first the obvious. Google Analytics is free. Yes, there is a premium version but the free version is quite good too. Hence, it is almost a no-brainer to integrate it. It’s also easy to use on your website. All you have to do is integrate some Google Analytics JavaScript to your site. And voila it starts working. Add some custom events and that is it. Despite being free, Google Analytics is quite a feature rich tool which essentially means most folks can get quite a lot out of it. Google Analytics also plugs nicely into Google Adwords and Google Adsense. Hence, if you are running a campaign on Google Adwords or you are tracking which ads convert to clicks on your website, it is really useful. You can drill down the source of traffic on your site into various categories. Keywords, Geography, Referral, Social Media, Age demographic, Device etc. are all the things available to you and you can make business decisions based on that. You can also set up Goals and measure what works and what does not work in achieving that goal. Like you can track all the steps involved in making a purchase of a product and at which step the customer drop off most and work on that page. Real-time analytics let you see what is happening at real time on your site. A true Marketer who can harness the full potential of Google Analytics will always be successful.

Google Analytics is quite feature rich and one of the first things we did when we implemented it was pick a book on it. There is a significant learning curve on the same. Despite being feature rich, there is a ridiculously low amount of customization available. You can track only 5 custom variables, which means you more or less have to track the data that comes standard with Analytics. Another major drawback is that data is only available after a 24 hour time lag (and in some cases even later), so if it absolutely. For most businesses this can be quite a lot of delay especially if you have same day sales and marketing happening. You need to be ready for spam in your reports as well. You will need to create special filters in order to fight off spam which can elevate your traffic significantly.

The very first step for any site (haven’t experienced the Google Analytics kit for the apps as yet) to get into data collection is to implement Google Analytics first and become well-versed in everything it can do. If Google Analytics turns out to be inadequate and you need much more out of your analytics tool or need tighter integration with custom advertising tools, then you may want to look at some other solutions. You may want to also take a look at Google Premium as well.