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Google Analytics. Should you use it?
By Shalom Issenberg | April 21, 2009
Let me start off by saying that I personally use Google Analytics and don’t have any major complaints. I have been using it for years – since it first came out and I have grown used to it. I have also gone through the hassle of creating custom analytics applications connected to CRMs, playing with open source analytics like Piwik, and have researched other advanced analytics solutions for commercial sites like Omniture. I’m not the type of guy that like most of my analysis or optimization automated so I found some of the advanced features offered by commercial web analytics packages to be useless. Overall I think Google Analytics is a great product. There have been three issue in the past that really bothered me:
1) You can’t change the time zone / location setting.
2) In depth click data older than 100 days is erased.
3) Tracking non Adwords campaigns in Analytics using tagged urls have resulted in having those tags indexed by search engines leading to incorrect statistics.
Here is a quick list or the pros and cons:
Pros |
Cons |
| Free. | Does not offer API |
| Easy to use and setup | Does not store click details long term |
| Scalable – for large traffic sites | Poor keyword/visitor details tracking for multiple sites in one analytics account. |
| Google safeguards the privacy of your data | Google safeguards the privacy of your data |
| Integrates with Adwords easily | No cost data for non Adwords Campaigns |
| Google offers online help | Try calling Google regarding a problem with Analytics! |
For more information check out the following sites:
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