Comments on: Google Analytics can be More Expensive Than WebTrends

By: Michael

Michael — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 18:48:03 +0000

Rebecca,

Thanks for commenting. I agree that ODBC access to the report database was one of the best innovations that WebTrends has had in the past few years.

By: Rebecca

Rebecca — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 18:34:15 +0000

Great post Michael. I couldn’t agree more. Google is a great solution for sites needing something simple and not very deep. Once you start needing to make serious decisions, at least I think my clients are trying to be serious:), than you need WebTrends or the like.
I was happy to seem someone validate, with real numbers, that FREE doesn’t always mean FREE which is something I tell my clients all the time.
ODBC access from WebTrends is SUPER AWESOME and a huge time saver!

By: Michael

Michael — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 15:41:16 +0000

Robbin,

Thanks for your comment. What I have noticed in the writing by your company and others is that there are some really brilliant work-arounds available in Google Analytics that do extend the functionality and increase the power of the tool. My personal feeling is that these capabilities are going to continue to be out of reach to the mass of marketers because of the heavy reliance on regular expressions. Usually when I mention regular expressions to marketers what I get back is a blank one.

One thing I didn’t want this post to imply was that people can’t accomplish their reporting goals in Google Analytics. Because in my case at least I would have been able to, it just would have taken longer.

By: Robbin Steif

Robbin Steif — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 15:29:55 +0000

Ah, you want to segment in the second dimension. You need to read my article on cascading advanced filters and then use them so that you can get:source/medium/city/region/country/ in one report, etc. But then, as you point out, I am just an enterprising GAAC with workarounds. BTW, I was really delighted that you recognized what a kind soul John Henson is (he really is!), and you might be interested in using his Copy Goal plugin for Firefox. But I probably only get one link without moderation, so here is the article on cascading advanced filters

Editor: Here is the link to the Copy Goal plugin. Very useful for people with lots of profiles in Google Analytics.

By: Michael

Michael — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 15:29:37 +0000

Chris,

Regarding 2d report views, I might have said that wrong. What I mean is if I want to view the values for my User Defined (custom segment) in Google Analytics as it pertains to countries that visitors are coming from I can only view one country at a time. So as I think about it I think I mean I can only view one value in the 1d aspect of the report. Anyway, it was really frustrating. Instead of looking at all the countries with 1d and their custom segments as 2d I only see one country with the 2d custom segment.

I did not talk about the inability to re-analyze as part of this because it was not officially part of the report gathering process. I do see it as a risk in using Google Analytics but there are a couple of potential ways to mitigate it. You can write all the Google Analytics hits to your log and then use Urchin to track it.

By: Chris Grant

Chris Grant — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 13:52:04 +0000

This is great. Can you explain or give examples of “I need to see multiple values in the reports 2nd dimension and GA will only show me one at a time” please.

My experience is exactly the same. If we had kept one a certain one of our clients on GA, we’d have to have hired another FTE by now, or cut back on their analytics to the point of being half as useful as it should be.

You didn’t mention the fact that you can’t re-analyze in GA, which is huge. Talk about making a grown man cry. Of course, GA isn’t alone in this, but other other ASP solutions like WebTrends On Demand offer the possibility on a per-incident basis. And then there’s WebTrends software … without which some of us would probably just not bother being in this field.