Google Analytics or Adobe Analytics: What’s right for you?

Imagine this: You’ve just started a new job as a marketer at a national retail company and you’ve been tasked with overhauling the company’s marketing strategy. You note that the organization needs a web analytics tool to track the effectiveness of the new marketing strategy. After all, all good decisions are data-driven. You bring this idea to your boss, and the question is brought up, “which analytics platform should we choose? There seem to be quite a few.” You pause, you hadn’t considered anything other than Google Analytics. Not satisfied with the answer you’ve given; your boss has tasked you to research what analytics tool best fits the organization’s needs. This isn’t an uncommon scenario for all marketers, especially those working to get a company’s analytics off the ground. This post will guide you through the decision-making process by comparing two prominent analytics options: Google Analytics and Adobe Analytics through a series of relevant factors. At the end, it will be up to the marketer to decide what platform fits his or her needs best.

Adobe Analytics overview

Adobe Analytics is an analytics application that lives within the package of Adobe Marketing Cloud family of products. Adobe Analytics offers reporting with a focus on understanding your organization’s customer base and how they interact with all facets of a brand.

Adobe has been among the top players in the web analytics industry for more than five years, and in 2017 Adobe won an ANA Genius Award for a project that measured how media moves customers toward free trials, and then paid conversions.

In this post, we’ll touch on Adobe Analytics’ offering and compare it to both the free and paid version of Google Analytics.

Ease of use

One key factor that teams will need to consider before choosing an analytics product is how easy the product is to use, what support resources are out there for users, and (something about how easy it is to get new users up to speed

Google Analytics: One positive about Google Analytics is that it’s an “out-of-the-box” option for marketers. Once a tracking code is placed on your website data will start coming through and users can leverage a variety of standardized reports to analyze customer insights.

In addition, Google offers an Analytics Academy with multiple levels of training videos to serve marketers needs. Analytics Academy covers the basics, which is helpful for those with no analytics training, and covers complex topics like utilizing Google Tag Manager. Individuals can become “certified” in the Google Analytics application as a way to verify they’ve completed the training program.

Google Analytics 360 Suite is an elevated, enterprise, paid version of Google Analytics. Similar training resources are offered, and there is a similar certification program. Because 360 Suite is implemented through a service agreement, it has an added level of individualized support not provided through the free analytics offering.

Adobe Analytics: Adobe Analytics can take a little more configuration to get set up and running, and requires slightly higher-level coding knowledge to set up the initial tracking codes. The benefit with Adobe Analytics for taking this approach is that most Adobe Analytics accounts are set up with a corporate service agreement, so an elevated level of service is provided from Adobe as well. Adobe’s training resources are significant, but aren’t free offerings like Google’s academy. From experience, organizations that use Adobe Analytics may leverage various technical stakeholders to implement the tagging, set up reporting, and analyze the reports.

Reporting capabilities

On the most basic level, both Google and Adobe Analytics provide the same data, just named slightly differently. For example, the instance of a user spending time on a website is called a session on Google and a visit with Adobe. Kevin Rutter (2017) from SEER Interactive does a nice job explaining the differences in basic reporting with the two options in a recent blog. But where does each analytics platform offer advantages over the other?

Google Analytics: On a broad level, most marketers are going to be familiar with the Google analytics interface and capabilities, which on its own provides a benefit. As mentioned earlier, the learning curve for Adobe Analytics is slightly higher than Google. Usability is a theme throughout Google’s family of products, and one advantage that Google Analytics has over Adobe is the offering of the Google Data Studio, a high-quality data visualization tool that can easily turn the mountains of data into simple, digestible visual reports.

Additionally, Google 360 Suite’s attribution modeling provides a more robust view of the different marketing factors that influenced a conversion. According to Christopher (2017) Google offers “first click, linear, last click, time decay, and more,” when it comes to attribution offerings, while Adobe only provides first and last click modeling in its standard version.

Adobe Analytics: Adobe Analytics holds two big advantages over Google: path reports and ecommerce reporting. At its heart, Adobe Analytics’ prime directive is to provide customer insight based on defined success events. Through Adobe Analytics you can build customer funnels to success events and Adobe Analytics provides easy ways to accommodate custom funnels for present and historical tracking. Additionally, Adobe’s attribution tracking is a viable option for those looking to provide a big picture of various marketing efforts’ influence on success events, but comprehensive attribution modeling isn’t provided in the basic version. According to Christopher (2017), Adobe also provides robust ecommerce reporting, while Google is just looking to catch up with capabilities that have been at Adobe’s disposal for some time.

Cost

Ultimately, cost is going to be a deciding factor for many organizations. Google’s standard free offering of its analytics platform is going to work for most marketers. Google’s 360 Suite costs start at $150,000/year. Adobe Analytics costs are a little bit more difficult to track down, but the family of Adobe Marketing cloud products may cost marketers upwards of $450,000/year.

Ultimately, an organization must take technology and resourcing costs into consideration when factoring the budget implications of a web analytics tool.

Who is Adobe Analytics right for?

Adobe Analytics isn’t the right tool for everyone. When factoring the information above, Google’s free analytics offering is going to provide sufficient capabilities for most organizations. Adobe Analytics makes the most sense for larger, enterprise clients who are handling large amounts of data and require complexity and individualization with their web analytics. Large companies like Hyatt, Scottrade, Lenovo, and hhgregg use Adobe Analytics. Enterprise-level companies are those that can also afford to use third-party analytics agencies with the technical and subject-matter expertise to implement effective analytics capabilities.

How does your organization value the various components discussed above? What tool do you see as the best fit for your organization?