- Posted by acxede on August 4, 2008
Google Analytics is, without a question, the better web analytics tool. Feature-wise, it leaves Office Live's Reports behind in the dust. It produces slick interactive reports that illuminate every imaginable statistic about traffic to your web site. Besides, it has an unbeatable price tag: free.
One of the greatest strengths of Google Analytics is its integration with AdWords, Google’s advertisement-placement service. If you advertise with AdWords, you can easily track the effectiveness of each ad campaign with Google Analytics. For anyone who spends advertising dollars on AdWords, Google Analytics is an indispensable tool. AdWords is the most popular advertisement-placement service, so naturally Google Analytics is the most popular web analytics tool.
Google Analytics has a lot to offer even if you don’t use AdWords. The traffic and user-statistics reports it produces go way beyond the basics. They’re useful in tailoring your site’s content to the visitor’s requirements. If you monitor web statistics faithfully, for example, it makes sense to filter out visits from you and your employees. That's something you can do with Google Analytics but not with Reports. The Reports package doesn't have a to filter out internal traffic. If you expect your web site to have a significant amount of internally generated traffic, you Google Analytics is certainly the better option.
However, keep in mind that Reports is quite a comprehensive package for the needs of a small web site - the kind you're likely to build with Office Live Small Business. Like Google Analytics, Reports is a free package too. And if you use adManager, Microsoft’s AdWords-like service, you’re better off with Site Reports, which have built-in support for tracking adManager campaigns.
So what should you do? My advice is to use start with Reports if you have a spanking new Office Live Small Business web site and you’re just starting out with web analytics; Google Analytics can be somewhat overwhelming in the beginning. It's easy to get sidetracked by the slick graphics and lose sight of the real purpose of web analytics. Try reports for a few months and try to understand how the data helps you improve your web site. You may find that that's all you need.
When, and if, you feel that you're getting the full benefit of Reports and you're ready to move on to something bigger and better, Google Analytics is the next logical progression. But if you're thinking about Google Analytics simply because you think the traffic to your web site is going to triple overnight simply by pasting a snippet of Google Analytics code, you're likely to be disappointed.
And if you happen to be a seasoned Google Analytics pro, by all means use Google Analytics.