Google Analytics vs WebTrends

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Google Analytics vs. Google Analytics vs. WebTrends WebTrends Sample Range December 2-8 th Performed January 13 th 2008 Author Thomas Bosilevac

Transcript of Google Analytics vs WebTrends

Page 1: Google Analytics vs WebTrends

Google Analytics vs.Google Analytics vs.WebTrendsWebTrends

Sample RangeDecember 2-8th

Performed January 13th 2008

AuthorThomas Bosilevac

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This report is being presented due to a reported discrepancy found and reported between Google Analytics and WebTrends. The conclusion of this report states that discrepancies are well within the 1-15% range.

This document provides a high-level explanation to differences in the two reporting engines and offers suggestions toward decreasing the gaps even more.

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Dashboard MetricsDashboard Metricsvisits, page views, etcvisits, page views, etc

Although the presentation of the data between Google Analytics and WebTrends is quite different there are metrics that can be directly compared. This first section

highlights such metrics as Visits, Page Views, and Visitors.

In summary, both tools report extremely similar results.

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Google Analytics is known for its simplicity. Their dashboard provides an extremely easy means to look at the KPI’s of the site. Unfortunately this simplicity does not provide the granularity needed to make deep changes to your website.

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When breaking apart the key metrics where applicable, you can see how the difference is really quite bearable.

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Content OverviewContent Overview

GA provides a new Row for every variation of the URL along with the Query String. That said, there are 102,090 pages listed in the all inclusive profile to WT’s 465.

Both tools can be configured to display URLS with or without Query Parameters

WebTrends provides a new Row for each domain the user was utilizing, whereas Google always assumes www.yourdomain.com.

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Acquisition Source Acquisition Source SegmentationSegmentation

Campaign Analysis is measured very similarly between Google Analytics and WebTrends. GA relies upon a series of utm parameters, and WT relies upon WT.srch and\or WT.mc_id.

Currently WebTrends is configured to measure visits, page views, unique visitors, clickthroughs, revenue and a host of many more metrics for many appropriately tagged campaigns.

Google Analytics is configured only for Google Adwords. That said, the GA reports provided for this Acquisition source are far superior to those found in WT.

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Paid campaigns such as zwoops that have appended a campaign identifier have a very similar count of Page Views. Note WebTrends does not Total Visits due to the overcounting of Visits that would occur..

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Google AdWords CampaignsGoogle AdWords Campaigns

The highlighted (and disputed) metric displayed above may be more closely aligned with WebTrends campaign tagging that is more in line with the various Google Campaign buckets.

Visits will only count once per session

and are grouped together.

Increase of visits may be due to varied

campaign distribution.

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Traffic SourcesTraffic Sources

The acquisition pie chart is wonderful and must be admired. Out of the Box Google has managed to display the 4 key acquisition points to most sites.

Unfortunately the granularity does not extend far past this point. WebTrends provides varied levels of granularity in listing different referral sources as well as the list and filtration methods used to group domain traffic.

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Traffic SourcesTraffic Sources

As seen, WebTrends for better or worse provides a much more detailed viewed into the actual referral domain. This makes comparison with Google Analytics difficult against sources with many known domains such as Yahoo, Google, and maybe even searchingbooth.com.

Direct Traffic is something that likely is defined and categorized differently by both providers.

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Organic TrafficOrganic Traffic

When trying to view Organic Search traffic it becomes even harder to truly compare.

In WebTrends, Referrals are

counting each and every time a user comes in through

Search Engine, and for each key phrase

used.

Google may only be counting one

instance per Visitor.

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Organic TrafficOrganic Traffic

Yahoo was much closer when also excluding for yahoo mail users.

You will also notice WebTrends shows all

domain variances including country and

product line. This makes in near

impossible to try and compare.

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In Summary◦ Google Analytics and WebTrends are essentially based

upon the same data collection methods. Therefore, the collection metrics (Pages, Visitors, Visits) should remain roughly the same.

◦ Content and Campaign Segmentation results start to separate due to varied methods in the way each tool needs to be configured.

Google Analytics provides visually rich, quick, contextual data WebTrends provides flexible and robust segmentation in a definable manner