Actionable Analytics

With recent and continued advances to Google’s excellent and free analytics tool, one of the key questions that I seem to get asked these days is whether there is any real value in paying companies like Omniture and Webtrends for the commercial (and expensive!) services they provide. 

It’s probably already obvious that I’m a fan of Google Analytics (be prepared for gratuitous bias); for lots of clients I really don’t see how spending the money on something like Omniture would benefit them. However, this isn’t always the case, and I think a more systematic way of making this decision is often called for. 

This post is therefore an attempt to help make decisions about whether or not you should put your hand in your pocket, and I have chosen Omniture Site Catalyst as an example. 

Monetizing the Incremental Value of Site Catalyst

Now, it is undeniable that a tool like Site Catalyst does some more stuff than Google Analytics, and certainly that it has more dedicated and human support. However, it is very easy for clients to get blinded by the way sales people position these extra features; they don’t stop to think what they might actually use them for. Conversely, GA extremists will flatly deny that there is any use in these additional features (or sometimes that they even exist), likewise failing to provide adequate reasoning. 

It seems to me that there is a more simple way of stating the true question: 

Site Catalyst does various things that Google Analytics doesn’t. What benefit do these things provide on their own (i.e. in isolation from any of the things that both GA and SC can do)? And – can the entire cost of Site Catalyst therefore be justified based on these incremental benefits?

So what does Site Catalyst do that Google Analytics doesn’t?

Following is a list of the key things that I believe SC does that GA doesn’t. It isn’t meant to be completely definitive, but [in my honest opinion] everything else is pretty much cosmetic:

Weighing up the cost benefits

Real-time data – this basically means your stats update more-or-less straight away rather than after about 24 hours or at mid-night. Personally I find it hard to think of companies that could truly benefit from this, but if you think you might then you need to work out exactly what financial benefit it gives you over and above waiting half a day. Also check out Avinash Kaushik’s blog on real-time data.

Importing external data – at first glance, this is a fairly major thing that GA doesn’t do. In Omniture you could import a lookup table of postal codes and then use this to carve up sessions into sales territories. This can be pretty valuable, but what you really need to ask yourself is: ‘how much benefit does this give us over and above exporting the data to excel and making the table ourselves?’ How much extra work is it really to just do this outside the tool? This also applies to a lot of other stuff, such as the functionality that lets you add targets to KPIs – and also to most of the Genesis integrations.

Custom variables – you actually get 2 of these in GA, but then you get loads in Omniture. Yes, for some companies this is valuable, but are you one of them? Again, I’m not denying that these things are important; I’m saying that you need to make an actual financial calculation about the benefit you get from using them over not using them. ‘Nice to have’, ‘convenient’ and ‘handy’ are not good enough reasons! Another function with similar ramifications is the ability to link metrics with dimensions that are not available in the out-of-the-box package.

Creating paths and funnels on the fly – very nice, and I wish GA did this, but I would have a hard time selling it to a client and I also couldn’t say that it is critical. I’ve certainly never seen it as a barrier in GA. Monetize it if you need it!

And, seriously, that’s pretty much it! Like I said, everything else is cosmetic or falls into a similar category. The main point is that you don’t get swayed by the sales spiel, and you calculate the return on your investment not by asking what analytics per-se can do for you, but asking instead exactly what can commercial analytics do for you that the free stuff can’t?

But wait…

Having said all that, a big word of caution  – GA can do a lot of stuff that Site Catalyst can, but a lot of the time it isn’t necessarily easy or straight forward to do, so much so that you might not even know or believe that it is possible in GA. What I’m getting at here is, you may need specialist expertise (a decent analyst) to be able to match GA with Site Catalyst on some levels of functionality. Again though, monetize this properly – you would have to pay someone to use Site Catalyst, so how much more would you have to pay someone to get the most from GA and how does this weigh up against the cost of SC?

Finally, it is worth also noting that I haven’t even touched on what GA can do that SC (on its own, i.e. without Discover etc) can’t, and believe me there is plenty of stuff!

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