In my investigation of Google Analytics (and I’m new to it), I wanted to understand what you get for table stakes reports. Logging into to GA gives you a really nice overview:
Hard to see such a rich report in a blog article, but some of the things I’d expect from an analytics are there—visits, unique visitors, page/visit, etc. In addition, a very intuitive interface let’s me see more specific table-based reports that filter my viewpoint by browser, visitor location, operating system, and more.
Sitecore’s Engagement Intelligence Analyzer (and the full business intelligence suite it enjoys) employs a robust interface strategy, where dozens of prebuilt dashboards are available, each additionally customizable with filter criteria. The example report below allowed me to easily define date ranges and looks at visitor locale (by country), to see a nice bar/line graph plotting both average visit duration and pages per visit, see a quick list of referring sites comparing the last 30 days against the previous 30 days and more:
There are plenty of additional dashboards that reflect all of the data shown on GA’s opening dashboard (stats covering visit duration, bounce rate, operating systems, browsers, etc.).
In addition, each of the individual graphs above gives me the option to expand / contract levels, add additional criteria, toggle between a chart and the data table behind it and more.
Here’s the same dashboard with the table data toggle on the top right graph:
The available dashboards make readily available all the same information on the Google default dashboard. Of course, with a full-featured BI environment, the possibilities for customization are much greater here. The Operating System report, for instance, gives me “live” graphs showing visit, conversion, duration and page per visit information. As I click on a particular operating system, those graphs are refreshed and updated with the relevant data to that operating system only. A full “drillpad” gives me even more power to fine tune and specify my criteria:
OK, so that’s just the surface, but I’m now confident that Sitecore Analytics provide me easy access to all the “default” analytics data in Google. Since I know a lot about Sitecore Analytics, now I’m off to learn about segmented targeting, goal and campaign identification in GA so that I can fully understand the level effort to model these (I already have these marketing assets modeled in Sitecore and our Launch Sitecore site).
Off to consider both systems as I try to leverage analytics to answer the important questions for our Launch Sitecore site—why does our site exist, what do we want our visitors to accomplish, how are they getting to the site and which full path leads to optimal results?
