4 reasons to choose Google Analytics for your business

Google Analytics is one of the web’s most popular tools for reporting on activity and trends for just about any website. Your online and offline marketing activities need meaningful analytics data to create actionable insights. In summary, website analytics has benefits for sales, marketing and product development - in fact most areas of your business.

Why Choose Google Analytics?

It’s easy to see why Google Analytics is so popular, because it’s free, but here are my top 4

1. It’s free so there is no hardware costs or ongoing fees. Keeping operational costs down is a good reason in tough economic times
2. A majority of your website visitors will have a GA cookie & the javascript on their computer. This means your website loads a fraction faster and you get better reporting like referral source.
3. You can implement extra tracking for your own campaigns and other events. In fact you can create tracking on almost any clickable link on the internet and event tracking is great for e-commerce and sales pipeline tracking.
4. You’ll also benefit from GA if you’re using Google’s products like Adsense, Adwords & Webmaster tools.

Why Google Analytics might not be for you?

GA aggregates data and reports total of unique visits or unique pageviews. GA is not suitable when you have to track (anonymously) visitors to your website. But why would you need to track each visitor?

Tracking individual visitors requires analytics software to be installed and running on your web server (like Piwik which aims to be an open-source competitor to Google Analytics). Some Internet Service Providers already offer other ‘free’ server based analytics tools, but you’d find you have to pay more to install and run another tracking tool.

Just remember implementing your own solution costs time and money and more importantly, it’s likely that you won’t be able to report where visitors came from as other websites won’t use the same tracking script and cookie.

Google Analytics gives you everything you need

GA may not be your cup of tea - but if it’s free and provides all the features you need with meaningful data. So why go looking for something else?

Are you implementing Google Analytics? Or maybe you’re in need of assistance with improving your reports and insights, then I can help.

Meet the author

Damien Saunders
An experienced management consultant and business leader interested in digital transformation, product centred design and scaled agile. If I'm not writing about living with UCTD (an autoimmune disease), I'm probably listening to music, reading a book or learning more about wine.
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