Google Analytics and Sitecore Analytics

How are they different?

Google Analytics and Sitecore Analytics are both tools used to track engagement with your website. What are they used for, and how are they different? Both analyze your website engagement—but at very different levels. Google Analytics gives detailed behavior and conversion tracking and integrates easily with a wide variety of tools. Sitecore Analytics is best suited for tracking individual customers, profile and experiences, and powering personalization.

GOOGLE ANALYTICS

Google Analytics is a great place to start analyzing your website’s data. It is free and flexible – allowing you to compare multiple data sets and ranges and filter them by a wide range of dimensions. Google also gives you real-time information, meaning you don’t have to wait for a certain time of the week, month, or year to test and view the traffic on your website.  

Google is best used to give you very detailed snapshots of your visitors. It allows you to see the number of visitors coming to your site, the most popular pages, where they are coming from (social media, google, email, etc.), and general information about them-- including their demographics, location if they are new or returning and the devices they used to access the website.  

Beyond viewer snapshots, Google Analytics also allows you to track conversion and events on your website, the average time spent on a page, bounce rates, exit pages, and popular content.  

Google Analytics is best used to get an idea of who is engaging with your website and how they are getting there.

SITECORE EXPERIENCE ANALYTICS

Where it can be said that Google Analytics tracks the quantity of engagements, Sitecore Analytics focuses on the quality.

Sitecore Experience Analytics comes with your purchase of the Sitecore solution. It utilizes Engagement Values and goals to track what you really care about. With Sitecore Experience Analytics, you can assign engagement value scores to the important engagement opportunities that lead to conversion or your desired business goals. This allows you to see if your visitors performed an action that you care about rather than just overall traffic. It enables you to see what items have been downloaded, what blogs have been viewed, and what forms have been completed. With Sitecore, you can investigate the full journeys your visitors took on your site so that you can determine what content is most engaging for your audience and what may need to be revamped or optimized.

Because Sitecore Experience Analytics is your content and personalization hub, can track down to the individual user, store online and offline data, and store marketing campaign information, it gives marketers a unique view into how customers are interacting with their digital properties.

Sitecore Experience Analytics is best used to get an idea of what content and campaigns are most successful based on your company’s goals and deliver personalized experiences based on that insight.

CONCLUSION 

Google Analytics and Sitecore Experience Analytics are not interchangeable.

Both Google and Sitecore Analytics can give you information to show how the website is performing, what pages are popular, and insights to improve the customer experience. When utilized properly, both tools become complementary to each other.  Google Analytics will give you a broad range of data while Sitecore allows you to drill down to the individual customer and gives you the data you need to deliver a personalized experience.

If you have any questions about Google Analytics or Sitecore Analytics and their implementation, please don’t hesitate to reach out for a no-cost, no-commitment consultation, and a member of our team will contact you shortly.