Mymotech

Well, this is a blog about web analytics, so I guess a web analytics type post is in order.

Since Google Analytics came out last year, there has always been a question:

Isn’t Google Analytics just as good as other web analytics tools that cost more?

And while there are many different answers to that question, I ran across something today which inspired a closer analysis.

When looking at keyword reports in Google Analytics you can view the search phrases

Or You can view the Search Engines

But you can’t view both at the same time. In other words, You can’t see a report that displays all the search engines and their underlying search phrases simultaneously and vice versa. In addition the export function only grabs what is on the screen, so there is no correlation of those two data points in any exported report.

Briefly, I want to describe why it might be useful to see search engines by search phrases or vice versa. Let’s say that I am trying to optimize my site for the phrases, “wowza”, “yowza”, and “gyoza”. Wouldn’t it be useful to be able to track the number of referrals I got from Google and Yahoo over time without having to expand and collapse multiple boxes within the report? But it doesn’t appear that that is the case with Google Analytics.

The lack of this feature makes Google Analytics inferior to the likes of WebTrends, Omniture, Coremetrics, and WebSideStory. Although there is still no beating the price.
BTW, I would be happy to be wrong, so if you know some way to accomplish this in Google Analytics then please let me know, and I will obviously post an update.