Panji Bali

Google Analytics (“GA” from now on) is a free tool provided by Google to help track your website traffic. It has become the industry standard analytics software and it’s used by companies of all sizes.

The Good
GA is a complete analytics tool. It does everything you’d expect. It’s very solid (very few bugs), and it’s the most popular analytics tool out there so it’s easy to find useful tips and advice online. Basically, GA is a very safe and standard choice.

The reporting features in GA become even more useful the more traffic you get. It’s easy to pick out trends, view which pages are generating your traffic, and see all the different ways people are reaching your site. There are also some pretty cool extra features such as “Site Overlay” which shows you where on your pages people are clicking.

The Bad
I said that GA is the industry standard, but that unfortunately means there’s not much to make it stand out. It works well for both small and large businesses, but that means it’s not awesome for either.

There are two main things that GA can’t do that small businesses really need. The first is real-time updates. GA seems to take about an hour or so to update so you can’t see the traffic your website gets as it happens. To highlight how oblivious GA is to the importance of up-to-date information, the default date range doesn’t include the current day. They assume you’re only interested in historic data which is a pretty crazy assumption if you ask me.

The other major problem I have with GA is that you basically can’t see information about a specific visitor. High-level reporting is great and all, but small businesses need to be able to focus on specific visitors because you probably don’t get enough traffic for the “big picture” reporting to be very helpful.

Conclusion
The most important thing you need to know about Google Analytics is that it’s free. This means that if you’re not currently using any analytics software, you should sign up for GA immediately. There’s absolutely no reason not to. GA isn’t the best analytics tool out there, but unless you find something you like better and you’re willing to pay for it, you should be using Google Analytics.