Looking beyond Google Analytics

While Google Analytics is an excellent tool for businesses looking to measure and track their website and marketing performance, it also has limitations. In this piece, we’ll explore why Google Analytics might be suitable for you or why it might not be.

Benefits of using Google Analytics

Google Analytics is one of the most popular analytics tools on the market, and the fact that it’s free is one of the biggest reasons for this. Google Analytics is a great tool for businesses who want to monitor and track their website visits and user interactions without additional spending. Plus, it provides insights into the sales funnel through goal tracking and insight into campaign performance through Urchin Tracking Module (UTM) tagging and conversion tracking.

However, it’s not the only analytics tool. While it can provide fantastic insights (for those that take the time to understand the interface), you should use it in conjunction with other tools for richer, more accurate reporting.

Looking beyond Google Analytics

As we mentioned above, Google Analytics isn’t the only analytics tool, and it does come with drawbacks, including sampling and incomplete data because of privacy issues and cookie tracking. You can learn more about why GDPR might be killing your analytics here.

That said, there are other reasons you might be looking beyond Google Analytics for performance data, including:

• You’re an eCommerce business
• You want to do advanced segmentation of users to understand behaviour
• You need to understand the impact of broader marketing campaigns
• You need a more robust way to measure attribution
• GDPR and cookie tracking has impacted your traffic reports in Google Analytics
• You want to understand the ‘why’ behind user behaviour

Alternative analytics tools:

Here are a couple of analytics tools we would recommend using alongside Google Analytics to provide richer insights into your data and website performance:

• SEMrush – a popular SEO tool that provides data around website performance, search rankings, competitor performance, brand monitoring, backlinks, traffic and keyword performance, website audits and more.
• SE Ranking – provides detailed analytics data about a website’s performance in search to help you optimise content and compare data with competitor performance, as well as offering audits of your website.
• HubSpot – provides deeper insights into leads and conversions data to understand funnel performance and the impact on pipeline and revenue.
• HotJar – provides qualitative data about user behaviour, how users navigate your website, where their pain points are and how your website makes them feel.

Overall, which tools you use will depend on which metrics are important to your business and marketing strategy, and you should not feel limited to, or by, the data you see in your Google Analytics interface.

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