Omniture vs Google Analytics

[akim26]

What's your opinion on analytics tools? Specifically Omniture vs Google Analytics. Is Omniture really that much more powerful than GA? Have you used GA Premium, the enterprise package?

My main question - Can GA (free or premium) do everything that Omniture can? If GA Premium and Omniture were the same price, which would you choose?

Is one harder to implement, pull reports, tweak, ect?

Thanks in advance.

[jrjames83]

Google Analytics Premium still samples your data, in some cases quite heavily to the point of the report being unusable.

[BlueprintMarketing]

Hi guys,

I wanted to mention that even though web trends has not been brought up if you are a large corporation looking to save money on analytics and you know you will be getting a large amount of traffic.  This is my case another company I am on the board of a manufacturing company. In addition to having an extremely large amount of traffic we had purchased too many servers for all sorts of things that cost us money anyway. if you own a server it has to be four core and have 10 gigs of RAM. To run a web trends in house or you will be paying more for Omniture because of your traffic I feel Web Trends offers a outstanding deal. For only $5000 a year I have all the hits the server can take and the addition of web trends only cost me that $5000 every time I upgrade like when they go from version 9 to to version 10. It may not be as quick to up date as far as software goes but saving around 100 thousands of dollars and getting a fantastic analytics system with the downside of not being updated as often as the others on the cloud I still do receive updates. I am surprised honestly at the cost of Google premier  annually I'm not saying it's not worth it I just think if you put the effort in you can possibly save some monthly as all the other enterprise grade analytic companies are cloud-based. I want to say something else and I realize this might not apply to everyone however there are sensitive things being discussed in the company I have spoken about and I know for fact the rumors about Google put the rest of the board far off using something that could possibly exposed privacy weaknesses for others take advantage of. My opinion of web trends is very high in comparison to Google analytics standard I must be honest I've never used the premium version. I have used core metrics and Omniture if I had to is only cloud-based software I most likely would be stuck between Omniture an core metrics I do want you to know though I would not be unhappy at all to stay with Web trends. I know I am not as versed as some of you guys but I hope this was of value to someone. In my opinion even if you had to buy the server a 4 core 10 gig server is not much compared to the cost of cloud-based enterprise grade analytics ( please excuse me if I am wrong on the RAM I know I'm right on the course and close on the RAM) if anyone is wondering what I am talking about here is some info

Webtrends Analytics 9 On Premises. In this webcast, Derek Fine, Analytics Product Manager, will highlight how you can uncover real-time and historical trends and business opportunities with:

• Powerful, customizable analytics engine for data collection, analysis and rendering.
• Self-service APIs to Connect data across all digital channels.
• Intuitive user interface to quickly uncover customer trends and business opportunities.
• Real-time analytics anytime for up-to-the-minute data and context.

Regarding on premises

Your choice: on Premises Webtrends is the only analytics provider who offers enterprise-scale data capture, analysis and reporting with software that runs on your own servers. With Webtrends, you are not locked into a specific choice of deployment model. You can start running the solution in-house and move to on-demand at a later date. The choice is yours.Webtrends Analytics On Premises is ideal for financial institutions, health care providers or government agencies — or any field mandated by law to secure and maintain their customer information at their own facility.

analytics http://understanding.webtrends.com/forms/OnPremisesWhatsNewWebinar

I will also tell you I noticed the cloud based system is up to version 10 and on premises is still at 9

Sincerely,

Thomas

[SL_SEM]

Good clarification on the privacy options.

As for the segmenting I should clarify what I have seen and heard.

GA will let you apply segments retroactively as you are basically telling GA to filter your existing data by a specific set of information.

However, in GA, goals are tracked as goal data, and GA only gathers data for that "goal" while it is turned on in the settings. Any goals achieved by users previous to turning on the goal in GA will not show up in your goal reports retroactively.

It should be noted though that this isn't much of an issue if you remember to setup your goals correctly when you start. This is more of an issue if someone comes to you and notes they want to start seeing X show up in the goal reports. If the goal they describe has been around a while they will only get to see it there moving forward, and not historically. You could mine some of the GA data to get a similar historical record that the goal report would show if it did apply retro-actively. The pageviews, or events would be there, but you would be building a special report just for that purpose, and it may not accurately line up with the way the goal reports track.

I believe Omniture let's you mark something as a goal, and allows it to appear retroactively, but I will double check when I am out at the adobe summit later this week to be sure I am not misinformed :).

VertialNerve is absolutely right about the price.

Basically Omniture is going to let you get more granular in your user profile data, and will let you combine data from other applications, but the more you pull the more it is going to cost.

As I mentioned before GA will get you 95%-99% of what you need.

I see Omniture as the proper tool to use when the expense is justified by the gains you will get by increasing your conversion optimization efforts on an individual user level, especially when combined with Test & Target.

In the end though that expense needs to line up with increases in revenue :).

[verticalnerve]

I just want to jump-in and provide a little clarity to the information Charles provided (which is mostly accurate, but not 100%).  BTW - my company is a Google Analytics Premium Authorized Reseller, so we work with this product on a daily basis.

GA (Standard & Premium) is pretty strict when it comes to privacy, so there are fewer opportunities to track individual users because of that stance. However, the GA Premium TOS does allow for more flexibility in this area, allowing you to track unique but non-identifiable information like visitor IDs or member IDs. In general though, if tracking individual user behavior is critically important to you, Omniture does offer more in this area. (Keep in mind, Google has to be more sensitive than Adobe when it comes to privacy because of their reputation and scope of business.)

Second, GA (Standard & Premium) does allow you to create on-the-fly segments and apply those retroactively. The Advanced Segmentation feature of GA is probably the most powerful feature of the entire system, and in my opinion much better than anything you can find in a competing solution.

As for the price, GA Premium is a flat $150k annual fee. Charles says that "depending on the number of server calls you have...Omniture will be cheaper".  Well, the opposite is also true, of course! In my experience, many of the Omniture customers that we have spoken with who are interested in GA Premium are actually paying more for Omniture. It does depend on your traffic volume, but GA Premium doesn't penalize you for getting more traffic to your site.

Let me know if anyone has other questions about GA Premium, I'm happy to answer.

Tyson Kirksey
Vertical Nerve, Inc.

[akim26]

Thanks to both of you - great info. I appreciate it.

[SL_SEM]

Good catch. I meant to mention that

When you go with GA premium you no longer have the sampling of data.

[KTaylor]

Omniture also does not sample data when the data sets get large, which GA goes a fair amount of these days.

[SL_SEM]

GA will provide a large portion of what you need to report on, but has limitations if your site is gathering large amounts of data.

GA is generally easier to install, but gets more complicated if you are setting up custom variables, events, tracking across 3rd party services, and tracking e-commerce (these are still relatively easy though).

GA doesn't like you to identify individual user actions for the purpose of targeting marketing efforts specifically to that individual.

GA Premium runs around $150,000 per year. I say "around" as I have heard some certified firms can provide discounts.

Omniture is more complicated to install than GA, but when you do that setup you will be able to track individual user actions, and then use that information to market directly to that user via email, highly focused content, etc... also a really nice part of Omniture, to me, is the integration with their Test & Target system.

Omniture has a system that will let you pull in data from 3rd party API's like salesforce and email systems. So it can associate information your sales person gathers, and intermingle it with your web data. This is really powerful for pinning down individual user actions, and obviously good for getting a better feel for your conversion funnel.

Omniture will let you create new goals/segments and apply those retro-actively to your data if possible, where GA will only let those apply moving forward.

Depending on the number of server calls you have, and the tools you use, Omniture will be cheaper than GA premium.

Hope that helps