This is the question Michael Helbling ask over at his excellent Web Analytics Blog – and not a bad question at all. But before voicing my opinion, let’s try to have a look at the fairly straight forward reports Michael ask for:

• Keywords Report
• Search Engine Report

(the pictures are the ones from Michaels post)

At first sight, two standard reports! But when he try to do a bit of analysis:

“Let’s say that I am trying to optimize my site for the phrases, “wowza”, “yowza”, and “gyoza”. Wouldn’t it be useful to be able to track the number of referrals I got from Google and Yahoo over time without having to expand and collapse multiple boxes within the report?”

He’s stumbles into the following problems:

• “You can’t see a report that displays all the search engines and their underlying search phrases simultaneously and vice versa”
• “In addition the export function only grabs what is on the screen, so there is no correlation of those two data points in any exported report”

And this is where the power of more flexible tools appear, the ability to change report layout and metrics on the fly. So given the upper business requirement, my first step would be to open a “custom report wizard” – and drag & drop the groups and metrics needed to answer this. (to spice up the report example, I replaced Michaels conversion metrics (called Goals in Google) with a Revenue metric, but any metrics could of course be presented here.

The report result is as follows. (N.B. I have replaced the keywords, as the revenue is from one of our hospitality industry clients)

Where I have the sought after oppertunity to expand the tree and compare engines - “side by side”. Like this:

And one could re-arrange the metrics and put Keywords on top as well, for a different view. Giving the Web Analyst the freedom to investigate, turning metrics upside down anyway they want.

And this is of course something that is doable in any of the “Big Four” analytics packages that Michael mentions; this including a few contenders… as us :-)

So: “Is Google Analytics really as good as other tools?” - The answer is No. Not because of the above of course, but the tool has technical limits in regards to customization that most enterprise clients not want, but need to carry out their analysis. However; my question would not so much be, whether it is as good, but whether the tool of choice solved the problem at hand – and for a lot of people, Google Analytics does and for that reason I think it is a splendid tool that I can only highly recommend. And with Avinash beginning to advocate Google Analytics as a consultant, I might as well just surrender now.. :-)

.. I am as we speak on my way from Arlanda Airport to Stockholm – where I tomorrow will meet up with Brian (Head of Google Analytics EU) at the Web Analytics Wednesday event. So plenty of time to debate the above on the Vendor Panel. More about that event later.