MKTG 345 Pros and Cons of Google Analytics week 9

Google Analytics is a popular and powerful analytics tool. There are a lot of benefits of using this tool opposed to other tools. Google is good at a lot of things they do, so it's not surprising their analytics tool is good as well.



 Some of the benefits include it's free, so anyone can use it. Because it is free even small businesses who are just trying to figure things out can see how their efforts are going. You can connect Google Analytics to a lot of different types of websites, which is helpful since not everyone uses the same few domains. Along with being able to link it to many different types of websites you can also link it to your AdWords account.



Once you link your Google Analytics and Google AdWords accounts you can create some custom goals and these tools will work together to help you meet them. You can also create reports using Google Analytics and it will show you whatever selected information you are interested in knowing. You can also set up these reports to regularly be sent to your email, so you don't have to remember to check or generate these things, it will be sent to you.

So all of these aspects of Google Analytics are awesome, however there are some cons. If something seems too good to be true, it probably is.



One thing that can be a con to Google Analytics is you can only set up to 20 goals for a website. 20 is plenty of goals and in most scenarios just fine, but once you set a goal it cannot be deleted. It requires planning to get the perfect goals to set, so you don't run out but still get the results you want.



Another con is that Google Analytics is free. You can do a lot with Google Analytics for free, but if you ever feel like you may benefit from the upgrade, it is $150,000 annually which is not something just anyone can afford.



An additional thing that can be a con is the Google Academy that goes along with analytics. Yes getting a free Google Analytics certification is great, but it is not an easy tool to use without spending time learning it. So if you were in a time-crunch it may not be the best analytics tool for you. From personal experience, I have found that some of the more confusing topics within the Academy are not easily explained by other sources either. So there are a lot of things you will just get, but some things will be more challenging to grasp.

Overall I would recommend Google Analytics as a tracking tool, however you need to be aware of what the tool can and cannot do and be familiar with what you are doing before you dive right in.

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