Should You Use Other Analytics Tools besides Google Analytics?

You may be wondering if alternatives to Google Analytics are worth considering. Here are our thoughts about that.

Video Transcript

Dave: How many of you guys do stuff with AppSumo? Any of you?

David: I’ve kind of purged myself of it, but I have in the past been seduced by the joy that is AppSumo.

Dave: I try to be very careful now, but I’ve gotten some really good tools.

David: Explain what AppSumo is for everybody here.

Dave: So AppSumo, in a nutshell, brings some awareness to various software tools, maybe software as a service type tools. And what they do is these guys are sometimes starting up, normally starting up, but they want to get some cash into their business. So, they offer lifetime deals on certain things that a lot of times would normally cost once they develop the tool: $50 a month, $100 a month, or whatever. But in order to get some cash to get some clients and maybe to upsell us later, they give lifetime deals on some of this early developing software. Other times, it’s not as early; they’ll bring people back, but most of the time, it’s to bring a big base of people to help these guys get some cash.

David: And to get users, and so they can test and stuff like that.

Dave: Yeah, yeah. So, they have an area on the site where you can ask questions, and then they have people review it, and it’s pretty good overall. However, when you buy stuff, it’s kind of hit-and-miss on what you get. Our task management solution, Nifty, we got on there. We’d be paying about $100 a month or something, but we don’t pay anything right now, which is cool. So, I think it saves us overall.

David: Except we don’t talk about all the AppSumo tools we’ve purchased and never done anything with.

Dave: Yeah, I would…

David: That’s the problem. When you’re introduced to this, you’re like, oh, $50? I’d spend $50 for that. And you do it and you never ever use the tool ever again.

Dave: That’s right. Or you try it out and think, I believe in these people. I think they’re going to develop it, and then they never do. So, it depends. It’s not for everybody.

David: Right.

Dave: So, related to that, there are always new tools out there, and every now and then, they will have an analytics solution that you can purchase.

David: Yeah.

Dave: The idea is that you can do it in addition to, or you can replace, Google Analytics. So, my question is, what does everybody think the criteria are that you’d want to use when choosing a different analytics solution for a client site?

David: Is there a problem that you’re trying to solve that you feel that analytics doesn’t do that would make you want to use a different solution?

Dave: We’re having a lot of problems with it tracking e-commerce sales and stuff. It’s just that GA4 is just not accurate at all. We used to be pretty accurate with UA, but with GA4, the sales that it shows are like $50,000 when the real sales are $10,000. I mean, that’s one aspect of it. The other thing, I guess, would be that maybe the tool offers a little bit more simplicity. You could say it’s a check against Google Analytics. Given how important it is, would it be wise to have a backup on the site? I don’t know. I don’t know.

David: Yeah. Well, with the first issue that you’ve mentioned about the inaccuracy of conclusions, I think that if that’s the case, then that is a serious problem because that’s the real value of any analytics is knowing the outcome, whether that’s the number of leads or number of sales. So, the first thing I would check unless you’re using a pre-prepared cart that supports Google Analytics, is just to make sure you’re actually sending the data to Google Analytics correctly because it does take some effort.

Dave: Oh, yeah. And that’s easier said than done, right? I spent hours on it, and Brian has spent hours on it, but it’s just not right.

David: Well, remember, if this is the same issue we’ve talked about in the past, at one point, Brian had to custom do some stuff, and that’s before WooCommerce supported GA4. And it might be worth looking at the default GA4 system for WooCommerce because that might be more accurate. But I will say that GA4 is built on sample. And so, in the reports, they’re always sampled because they’re designed to get you most of the way there. And what they’re doing is accounting for missing data. So, if this also has something like some sort of cookie policy or cookie opt-in on it…

Dave: Yeah, we don’t right now.

David: Okay. My feeling about the fact that there’s a big economy of people selling those cookies is that they don’t really need to sell those cookie platforms for many people, for many websites. But that could affect it, too. However, as people become more privacy conscious, they can enable it themselves, and the data is simply not being sent to any analytics product, let alone Google Analytics. So, then Google Analytics has the advantage over any other analytics product in that they’re able to use machine learning to make some projections. A smaller analytics project would not be able to provide any insight into conclusions.

Dave: That’s a really good point. I think that’s a good point.

David: So, the other thing on the same topic: the whole point of analytics is, did it make any money for you? Whether that’s a sale or a lead, we have to track that. And most analytics products I’ve seen, including the one that you sent me earlier, have no means to track that.

Dave: Yeah.

So, it’s only about, hey, how many visitors and what pages they might have visited, but it’s not about did we actually get a lead or did we actually get a sale. So, it’s really more about monitoring users on the site, not the conclusion of that user actually accomplishing what we want them to do, which is to give our clients business. And without that feature, I’d suggest most analytics is just noise.

Dave: Yeah.

David: This is kind of the same thing (and I’ve waxed eloquent about this so many times), as number of pages on site as a metric to judge the success. Stupid metric. What if that means someone’s angrily looking for something, but you have a large number of pages on the site? People aren’t finding what they’re looking for, and they’re really mad. It doesn’t mean it’s a good thing. Bounce rate is another thing. That’s a terrible metric because maybe it was a successful visit, but based on your lack of analytics, you don’t know. So, what people do is resort to these pages on site, amount of time on site, bounce rate metrics, when they don’t have something like, did we get a customer? Did we get a sale? And most of these third-party upstart analytics programs can’t tell anything, so they just give data. It’s like, yeah, you got a bunch of visitors. Okay. Did any of them become customers? I don’t know, but you got a lot of them. We know where they came from. Okay, that’s getting there. Did any of them become customers? But they came. Okay, it’s still not helpful. Right? And so, without that conversion data, with any analytics tool that can’t tell you that something was accomplished, it isn’t useful.