Choosing an analytics tool that serves your unique business needs
It was in mid-March 2022 that Google urged everyone to prepare for the future of website data analytics. How did they propose to do this? By scrapping Universal Analytics! Wait. What? Rightly, there was much consternation amongst the analytics fraternity about the impact of this on measuring website traffic. However, the news of the impending retirement of Universal Analytics was quickly followed up by the tech giant extolling the virtues of its replacement product. Known as Google Analytics 4, this analytics tool is earmarked as being a more flexible, powerful, and adaptive platform than its predecessor. However, the question remains: do businesses necessarily need to follow suit and hop onto the Google Analytics 4 platform simply because Google is sunsetting Universal Analytics? Or is now the perfect opportunity to rethink choosing an analytics tool that serves your unique business needs?
Table of Content:
Google vs the rest of the marketplace
Choosing an analytics tool other than Google
Final thoughts
Linkedin Remix
Google vs the rest of the marketplace
Google has long held a monopoly over many aspects of user experience on the internet. From its search engine to its advertising reach, Google holds sway over less established competitors. And in the website data measurement field too, it is certainly the biggest (but not the only), player in the market. Indeed, according to a recent survey, it is the preferred analytics tool for over 55% of all websites on the net. And if you like Google Analytics, it serves your purposes well enough, and you don’t want to change tack, then you can probably stop reading this article. However, a word of warning: since all the historical data you’ve accumulated about how users interact with your website will not be transferred over to the new Google Analytics 4 platform, it is vital that you begin to send new data the way of Google Analytics 4 asap.
Choosing an analytics tool other than Google
Ok, since you’ve chosen to keep reading, it tells me that you are someone that is interested in seeing what else is out there in the way of website data tracking.
Congratulations.
It’s obvious that you are seeing the sunset of Universal Analytics as a chance to think about choosing an analytics tool that is going to deliver more powerful insights to help your business grow.
When choosing an analytics tool for your business, the first thing you need to consider is what features you need. Do you need something simple that just tracks basic data, or do you need something more complex that can help you with things like marketing and sales? Once you know what features you need, it’ll be easier to narrow down your options.
Let’s look at one of Google Analytics’ main competitors Adobe Analytics for a moment.
Adobe Analytics promises to deliver its users deep insights into how their websites are performing. Also a cloud-based platform, Adobe Analytics unlocks the power of predictive analytics. Powered by AI and ML, this analytics tool allows users to gain actionable data based on input received from your various marketing channels. It also empowers you to select and connect different data from key points across the customer journey. Not only that, Adobe Analytics’ marketing attribution also allows businesses to gauge the value of a variety of customer interactions and assess how these impact levels of conversion and ROI.
Sounds pretty good, right?
That’s why I am a big fan of seeing what else is out there in the way of choosing an analytics tool that uniquely serves your business needs.
Don’t get me wrong, Google Analytics 4 is a perfectly fine website data tracking tool. And so is the offering from Adobe. But, if you are looking for something more powerful and adaptive, you need to choose an analytics tool that is uniquely suited to your business purposes. A tool that will provide the actionable data you need to scale your company. That’s why it makes good business sense to explore the different options out there.
If you want to know more about the topic, check out this youtube video, where I explain everything in detail:
Final thoughts
What I advise businesses to do is to test out the free trials of the different analytics platforms they are interested in. I usually suggest sending four or five of your major events into these different systems to test out what each tool delivers in the way of insights and actionable data. This will give you a good idea of the value of each analytics tracking tool and whether you can work well with them on a daily basis.
As always, I am interested in hearing your thoughts. What do you think are the best analytics tools besides the two I’ve already discussed. Let me know in the comments. At Deepskydata, we are passionately curious about how businesses can fast-track their success with data. We offer more than tracking and data analytics packages, we offer a proven solution for transforming your business into a data-driven company that scales!
Linkedin-Remix
Dear Data-Traveller, please note that the following text is a Linkedin-Remix.
I posted this content already on Linkedin in March 2022, but I want to make sure it doesn´t get lost in the social network abyss.
For your accessibility-experience and also for our own content backup, we repost the original text here.
Have a look, leave a like if you like it, and join the conversation in the comments if this sparks a thought!
Original Post:
Plain Text:
Just go back 5 years – choosing an analytics tool was quite easy:
marketing, e-commerce & all-purpose: Google Analytics
product analytics: Amplitude
raw data: Segment
Today it has become a science of its own to find the right tracking & analytics setup. What made it so complicated?
– GDPR & Browser protection added more measures what you can basically track and where to store the data
– Google will sunset the old Google Analytics version, so you can only use GA4 in the future
– Plenty of more competition in each analytics category (which is really a good thing)
– New categories like privacy-aware and simple analytics solutions
Deciding for a tracking and analytics stack should take a bit. It’s an essential part of your setup, so it should meet your current requirements to some degree (no one can look into the future).
For me, this can be defined around two questions:
1 – What are your current data use cases? Where do you use data at the moment to make decisions? Which teams are using the data? And how often does this happen?
2 – Where do you want to use data for decisions but can’t because things are missing or it is not working?
(ok, a bit more than two questions, but I think you get the idea)
Spent some time with all the different stakeholders around these questions and created a data questions/decisions document, where you collect for what kind of questions you want to use data to add more insights.
This can be things like:
– Where do we lose people in our onboarding sequence?
– Which campaign generates the most leads for us?
– Which campaign generates the best leads for us?
– How does this new feature improve our subscription rate?
Once you have these questions ready, break them down into ingredients. What parts do you need to get data insights for these questions?
>Where do we lose people in our onboarding sequence?
Funnel analysis, Funnel events
>Which campaign generates the most leads for us?
Leads created event, campaign parameters, campaign attribution (simple)
The final list of ingredients is a part of your requirements for a tracking and analytics system.
You can now extend this list with your requirements around:
– server location
– data ownership
– ease of use & speed
– available learning resources (something often underestimated)
And you have your requirements catalog.
Miro Board Template: https://miro.com/app/board/uXjVOCK3hAE=/?invite_link_id=383325485218
Video – How to find the right analytics stack: https://youtu.be/m8vorqXMBp4