Here is a post at ClickZ which explains some facts about Google Analytics. They are indeed facts, but if you look carefully you’ll see the post was sponsored by Adobe. Pretty ironic, huh? That might be like vegetarians sponsoring an ad for meat or something, since Adobe owns SiteCatalyst, a major player in the paid web analytics arena. I think the point of the post is to make potential or existing users of Google Analytics think about the features they really need in a web analytics tool. Who knows how long Analytics will remain free of charge, but if I were a web analytics vendor, I’d be watching Google Analytics rather closely on an hourly basis because new features we only dreamed of are now available to virtually any web site owner.

I’ve been fortunate to have access to SiteCatalyst and Webtrends (but not Yahoo Analytics) and those paid tools still offer many features not yet available in Analytics such as reliable report scheduling, data export capability and customization. However, who can beat Google Analytics’ price and feature set for what it is? Have a look at the article and think it over.

Point number 5 in the article, “GA is no better than its implementation” really bugs me since the article was sponsored by Adobe. No one more than SiteCatalyst users know how true this is, and SiteCatalyst implementation is quite a handful. Just because you pay for the tool doesn’t make the implementation any better in many cases. Implementation is a complex task for any web analytics tool and so many organizations struggle with it. The good news is that it can be fixed even when it has been done incorrectly – given enough time and resources.