Google Analytics Reviews: 4.5/5 — Highly Rated

It is great to see bounce rates for pages and user engagement yet these metrics are minimally useful given the overhead of managing the analytics code that seems to require a lot of training to comprehend.

Weighs down site performance and perhaps helps google track your users much more than you'll ever want or need to. Have found other tools much easier and cost effective to manage such as Plausible and other open source tools that are non invasive to you and your customer data.

Bounce rate and regional metrics help us to gauge site performance as well as user flow across the site and helps us to revise content to improve engagement and see where users are lost.

I don't understand all these great reviews. There is really nothing I like best about Google Analytics, I had to purchase another solution.

First of all, it's really hard to use and by the time you get used to your workflow, they change the user interface. Second, the most important data to me (where are visitors coming from) is obscured. It used to be available, but now it says it's not. What happened? Finally, the conversion data doesn't match data coming in from Google Adwords or my own servers.. so I can only deduce that the data is incorrect. Oh... and there's zero customer support.

I'm not. I'm using a paid solution instead.

As with many Google features, Google Analytics is something that you can use for free, which is always appreciated for startups, but aside from its low price (free), it doesn't have much to recommend itself.

Google Analytics is not user friendly. It's difficult to navigate and it's difficult to make sense of it. I have wasted a lot of time setting up an account and setting up my information, only to have one IT issue after another, rendering it almost useless.

I initially used Google Analytics to analyze a start-up blog once it had begun to really take off, but I found it difficult to use and it wasn't helpful.

I guess if there was a best part, it would obviously be the cost. The fact that there is a free version (that sometimes works), is more than most large vendors can offer.

The tool rarely works, the interface is extremely confusing and outdated, it runs slow, errors out frequently, etc.

Running test reports for A/B Tests & pulling general sitewide traffic & conversion reports.

GA is a great tool if you use the paid version and you are only using it as one frame of reference for site traffic statistics.

The free version is not reliable - Google even says though themselves in their privacy policy. "Sessions" are a vague statistic that do not help define the quality/quantity of your web traffic. Far too often, people rely on the free version as a main hub for their website traffic reporting - it's a mistake.

None - I would not recommend it.

Google Analytics is like a mandatory now on pretty much every digital property you build/maintain/host. The problem is, they continue to change the platform so you HAVE to keep up with the new updates and re-learn how to use the tool.

It's cumbersome, difficult to use, and constantly changing. For an agency that does not focus/specialize in digital or website building, it's not easy to work with and we constantly have to relearn how to navigate and interpret the new UX. It's also cloodgy in that you have to have Gmail to access but most businesses operate with their own (usually Microsoft Exchange-based email) so it forces people to use their own personal email addresses to manage client properties. I have been in marketing for over 10 years and struggle to use this. I do not buy that entrepreneurs with small businesses that have NOTHING to do with marketing can easily use this tool. Unless I am missing something or am a total dolt, this is not a user-friendly analytics tool for your average bear.

We have visibility into traffic driven by marketing campaigns.

I like the ability to really see where you’re getting marketing hits

It’s very time consuming to setup Google AdWords and is almost a full time job managing keywords and staying on top of your organic searches

The ability to track our marketing dollars to see where it is best spent

Its a great measure of where your online success is & the breakdown is extremely detailed.

At times it can seem overwhelming, just so much information to process.

Keeping better track of website traffic so we can set our goals more accurately.

I love the concept of being able to monitor which pages on my website are receiving the most views and how much time they spend on the site.

I had a really difficult time getting the app to work with my website.

Not sure I have solved any problems. Google analytics seemed to verify what I predicted about people visiting my site.

If you are a small business, this will provide you enough information that you will be able to directionally understand traffic on your site. It will give you some idea of what content is driving your conversions, and it will mostly accurately record your conversions, provided they are based on simple rules, preferable page load.

Sampling, sampling, sampling. For a data and algorithm based company, Google does a terrible, terrible job of estimating reality out of the sampling they do. When we switched to an enterprise web analytics solution that does no sampling, we found that Google Analytics was telling us we had twice as much traffic as we actually do. The sampling also means that you will not receive the same answer twice. This is especially true of activity that happens in small amounts. If the visits sampled by Google do not contain that particular event, they will grossly underestimate. If they happen to pull a sample that contains quite a few, they will grossly overestimate. Either way, you won't have an idea of the true rate of activity on your site. The content analysis is stunningly bad, especially if you have a large site. The level of customization allowed is very, very limited. Cross domain tracking is terrible. But most of all, the data just cannot be trusted.

It's mostly fine for determining what marketing channels are driving conversions. Otherwise, once we hit a certain size, relying on Google Analytics became a liability rather than a benefit.