There are so many tools that give users insights about their website. It is good to choose a tool that offers a broad range of information to the user. One of these resources is Google Analytics. However, we cannot run away from the fact that everything on earth has its strengths and weaknesses.
In this article, we will be analyzing the pros and cons of google analytics in 2022. You can use this information to tell whether this tool is the best for your SEO audit. However, it is also important to go through google analytics reviews to gather more facts on this topic.
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What Is Google Analytics?
Google Analytics is the primary means by which websites receive information concerning their visitors. The application is widespread and is installed on so many websites globally. Google Analytics has an overabundance of available data.
The reason is that Google records all details about all things that take place on your website. However, it is important to understand the pros and cons of google analytics before you begin to use the software.
How Google Analytics Created?
In 2005, Google acquired a unique software called Urchin, which formed the start of google analytics. At that time, websites were simple things that represented a collection of static pages created in HTML 4. AdWords was a newfangled thing that had only been created a few years ago.
Right now, google analytics reviews represent a very different scenario on the ground. Initially, Google Analytics only measured the number of people visiting and arriving at your website. As we speak, it has now turned out to be a great tool for reporting vs analytics.
Online marketing continues to be complex and hence you need more info to make decisions that will enhance your performance.
Tracking web pages is not enough especially if your touchpoints are spread across several devices. You can apply Google analytic to several marketing tasks but it has its own strengths and weaknesses. You need to have all this information at your fingertips because there are times when alternatives work best.
First, let us understand why to use Google analytics before you can look at its strengths and weaknesses.
Why Should You Use Google Analytics?
Google Analytics has so many features that will motivate you to use it and not the other web analytics tools. Currently, most people are accessing the internet through their mobile devices. It is crucial to understand how your website performs on these small screens. It is one of the inbuilt abilities of Google Analytics.
The tool will also help you with traffic acquisition. In most cases, it is the first step when creating reports. It is important to know whether a PPC campaign or SEO strategy is working. Traffic acquisition provides a breakdown of the source of your traffic and the referring sources.
You also need google analytics because of content efficiency. To set up this report, you need some skills on how the tool works. Google analytics tracks goal completions, bounces, page views, and entrances. The tool will also help you with keyword analysis.
Google has been in the process of encrypting search info since 2012 and this accounts for approximately 80 percent of the organic keyword data. However, there is so much that you can gain when you track unencrypted keywords.
The other thing is returning vs. new clients. Nowadays, it is not enough to just track traffic. New visitors are crucial but you should also know the proportion of visitors that come back to your website.
Google Analytics will also show you the pages that your visitors land on when they visit your website for the first time. If certain pages have a higher bounce rate, the information that you get will help you to make your web pages more engaging.
Google analytic will also allow you to compare the bounce rate against the exit rate. It is important to know the proportion of customers who exit your website without taking any action. Therefore, you now have perfect answers on why use google analytics.
We can narrow down our discussion to the advantages of google analytics.
Google Analytics Pros
Google Analytics is like the giant or father of all web analytics. There is so much that you can do using this reporting vs analytics tool. Examples are exporting to excel, tracking campaigns, and ranking your web pages by popularity. You will also understand the origin of your web traffic and it shows traffic data on a real-time basis.
Google Analytics also integrates with other tools like Lucky Orange and you can use it to create custom reports. It is a powerful tool that those working in the digital marketing tool should know how it works. Those who work in the digital marketing company know that web analytics is the work of everyone.
You need these analytics for your own insights and also to help your customers to understand their data. These people should know how web analytics apply to their businesses. Let us now examine the google analytics pros and cons.
1. Tracking Basic Goal Attribution And Traffic
As you pour more resources into inbound marketing and adverts, it becomes increasingly important to measure your performance. Google Analytics will help you to know the source of your engaged customers. It tracks the medium and source all the way to the social campaign.
The tool collects landing page info and measures whether it met an objective like subscribing or making a purchase. It is one of the top advantages of google analytics.
2. Optimizing Website And Top Of Funnel Behavior
Google analytics measure the people who land on your website and how they navigate through it. You will see if they stayed around after reading your blog or they drop off later on or go all the way to the desired goal. It will help you to win the attention of people and keep the relationship moving.
After the visitor meets the objective, he will be of no interest to google analytics.
3. Website Performance Dashboard
The google analytics dashboard is good at monitoring the performance of your website. Some of the aspects that it shows are user locations and active users. If you wish to confirm whether your site loads smoothly for all the visitors, the google analytics dashboard will show you all this information.
It is a great way to quickly monitor the amount of your traffic and detect whether there are any bugs.
Google Analytics Cons
Like any other tool in the market, there are some things that Google analytics cannot do for you. You can tell the number of people who visited your website and the most successful campaigns.
It will also help you to know where the individuals who visited your website left. However, it will not tell you why visitors do certain things. That is why it is important to understand what can google analytics do and what it can’t.
Let’s now take a brief overview of the weaknesses of Google analytics.
1. Attributing Long Term Performance And Lifetime Value
Google analytics typically tracks page views and events during each session. However, if you wish to measure something that is more complex like blogs that attract long-term subscribers or if the leads transformed into customers, you will have to look for another tool. It is one of the majors google analytics problems that you will not want to encounter along the way.
Events may be pinged to google analytics for a completed purchase or form submission. However, it will be associated with the vulnerable cookie. Even though event tracking is helpful, it isn’t a robust way of recording the behavior of someone over several months or years.
You need to know how they progress vial your touchpoints into the retention and revenue stages of your funnel. You will know how to go about this challenge if you understand the pros and cons of google analytics.
2. Behavior Analyzing Through The Whole Funnel
Most marketing tools tend to display a detailed view of their data silo without considering the other marketing funnel. For instance, email sequences rarely consider UTM data that is essential to google analytics. You may not see that visitors who come from the same source may perform differently.
Ad platforms may also give you their own mysterious interpretations about their ad performance. Google analytics has certain multi-touch attribution but it is only used on considering multiple visits to the website. It does not look at how the other sections of the marketing process affect sales.
3. Big Picture Marketing Reports
The dashboards of google analytics are not so ideal for marketing reports. It is not user-friendly in showing inexperienced colleges or customers. It raises so many questions than what novice individuals can answer. The tool is also unable to handle the display of touchpoints outside the website.
Examples include the performance of email campaigns and spend across ad platforms. Now that you know the pros and cons of google analytics, we can now move forward to compare google analytics with the Google search console.
Google Analytics vs Google Search Console
Google is an ever-present element of both web use and modern marketing. It provides the best analytics tool and searches abilities for individuals who look ahead. However, all these opportunities are not created equal. That is why you need to understand the pros and cons of Google analytics before using the tool.
Both Google Search Console and Google analytics can enhance the SEO success of your website. However, these two tools do not resemble each other. Let us get an overview of what each of them has to offer to the users;
Google Analytics:
Google Analytics is a popular tool that will give you a vivid snapshot of your traffic statistics. It primarily highlights how your web users interact with your website. It gives you statistics like the average time on the website, bounce rate, total site visits, and demographic info for your audience.
Google analytics has several benefits like the seamless integration with AdWords, Google Plus, and Adsense.
Google Analytics primarily focuses on interpreting and processing web usage data. It also identifies opportunities and trends that you can leverage in order to boost your web presence and increase traffic. You can get more info by reading the pros and cons of Google Analytics.
Despite the correlation between the success between search engines and site visitors, this tool does not make a solid connection to help marketers increase their SEO strategies. It is the main undoing of google analytics simplified.
Google Search Console:
This is a webmaster’s tool that enhances the success of search results. It focuses on impressions and helps you to study things like HTML errors, outside links, crawl errors, search quarries, and click-through rates.
The metrics have very little to do with those people who visit your website. They are more concerned with how your website appears to the searching phrases and keywords. It makes it a valuable option for web developers and SEO marketers.
That is why we need to include the two in our study of the pros and cons of google.
Google analytics is largely objective and it presents customizable and flexible data in a form that is easy to manage. Google Search Console, on the other hand, provides more suggestions and highlights opportunities and problematic areas for improvement.
It will benefit you greatly if you target SEO development because there is a clearer relationship between optimization and ranking.
FAQ:
1.Is Using Google Analytics Safe?
To perform correctly the google analytics is gathering lots of information from all the websites. Do you think the result is only showing the result of your competitor? Not only your competitors’ page. Google Analytics is also collecting your website data. This is the biggest drawback of using analytics.
When you register there, the analytics starts to collect the potential liability and the personal data from the site. But you can analyze the performance of other websites and run the data research.
2.Do You Need Google Analytics?
Google Analytics is the ultimate destination for digital marketing. When you want to create the best SEO for your website, you have to use analytics. Google analytics is not only providing the data.
Along with the correct data research, the metrics are also shown in the research result. When you are using a separate tool instead of Analytics, you have to use various types of tools for your work. But Google Analytics is the solution for all of your queries.
Conclusion
By now, you should be having a clear understanding of the pros and cons of google analytics. We have also compared Google Analytics and Google Search Console to help you make an informed decision. It is good to have all this information at your fingertips before choosing an SEO analysis tool.
Google Analytics is a fantastic source of data but it is normally stretched over its comfort zone. You also need to understand the pros and cons of google search engines and how they relate to Google analytics. The most important thing is to choose a tool that will give you valuable insights into your website.
