Why Enterprise Marketers Should be Wary of Google Analytics

September 30th, 2011

Topics: About, Optimization, Perspectives, Search Engine Marketing

You might have heard about Google’s new enterprise analytics offering (just check Google search – LOL). As always, we’re delighted to see new developments within the industry, but we also believe it’s important to understand the details that marketers must consider when choosing a measurement and optimization partner.

While Google expanding its analytics offering may, at first blush, appear intriguing, it’s important to remember that Google is a company 100% focused on driving its search advertising revenue. This is the reason Google Analytics exists at all. Much has been written about why companies should think twice about using GA and giving Google all of their corporate marketing performance data. With the announcement of a few of their new offerings, we thought it was the right time to highlight a few points we believe are of particular importance:

Data Security and Ownership – This is vastly important to any enterprise. However, when you opt-in to a free GA account you give away your data. All of it. Do note, Google makes no guarantees that your data is even safe. The new Premium SLA on the surface seems better but is curious in it’s omissions. With Webtrends, you own your data. All of it. Always. And we guarantee its security.

Unified Digital Analytics – Digital marketing channels are ever-expanding. Brands today need to capture, correlate and analyze across all of them. Because of their reach in other competitive markets, Google struggles to integrate across Facebook, Apple/iOS, Microsoft SharePoint, etc. Webtrends remains the only holistic solution for unified digital analytics across mobile, social and web, and is a preferred partner of both Facebook and Microsoft. We integrate with a giant ecosystem of other marketing services vendors as well.

Open Data and Standards Support – Webtrends is committed to web standards in our products. Open APIs and support for Representational State Transfer (REST), Open Database Connectivity (ODBC) Web Services and other industry standards let you seamlessly get data out and bring data into Webtrends products – without paying additional fees.

Multiple Deployment Options – Both Webtrends Analytics is available as a hosted service (SaaS), on-premises software, a hybrid of these two or as a “white label” service for agencies or ecosystem brands to offer to their customers. You can choose the web analytics implementation that fits your data storage and business needs — or switch formats if your needs change.

Unlimited Data Correlation + Reporting – Flexible reporting and unlimited dashboards let you correlate any number of dimensions and measures within your data to answer complex questions. Dimension limits (Google Premium now offers 50) hamstring marketers when they expand to new digital channels like Mobile and Social, for example. Also, other analytics providers charge monthly fees for a limited set of custom reports. With Webtrends, you have the widest range of custom reporting configuration options available.

Expertise, SLAs + World-Class Support Come Standard – It’s not news when our Customer Support team helps a customer solve a problem, we don’t write a blog post about it (but we love when they do!). We’ve been providing digital marketing measurement + optimization expertise, guidance and support since before Google was born!

So, is it a sexy news story that Google announced premium analytics? Perhaps. But is what they announced truly “news”? We think not.

At Webtrends we’ve been offering real-time, unified digital analytics and optimization solutions for the enterprise for a while. We’ve been perfecting everything Google offers – and far more – and we do it with award-winning, 24/7 customer support and flexible pricing. Oh – and we’re not a big, creepy giant who may use your data in ways that you may not agree with. We’re people, digital marketers to be exact, who are deeply passionate and focused, like you, on what matters most – digital marketing success.

  • http://www.blastam.com Kayden Kelly

    “Big, creepy giant”…really?

    As an analytics consulting company that supports Adobe/Omniture, Webtrends and Google Analytics, we are disappointed by this distasteful take on Google Analytics Premium. The analytics industry can only benefit from Google’s move to support the Enterprise with a more robust paid solution. Webtrends and others should embrace and support what is a clear sign of evolution in the analytics industry, which shows that the value of analytics is growing.

    Further, Google Analytics Standard (free version) has been implemented by about half of the websites on the Internet due to its ease of use and zero cost. Thus it has accelerated the adoption and value for analytics, which benefits all analytics vendors and consultants.

    Now, Google Analytics has responded to the specific requests of Enterprise organizations by providing this Premium solution that meets requirements for data ownership, data privacy/protection, data freshness (processing speeds), data access and reporting guarantees, 24/7 dedicated support, and much more.

    Plus, the annual fee includes a wealth of value added services such as hands-on custom training and implementation strategy that will ensure the organization has their tracking setup to provide a complete and reliable dataset that aligns with their specific business goals.

    Also, disconcerting, are the statements above about data ownership and privacy…which simply aren’t true.

    Google Premium follows a SAS 70 compliant data privacy program and the data is “stored in an encoded format, optimized for performance and dispersed across a number of physical and logical volumes for both redundancy and obfuscation.”

    In addition, Google is registered with the U.S. Department of Commerce’s Safe Harbor Program, that third party vendors don’t have access to the data, and that Google employees, contractors and volunteers are regularly monitored to ensure compliance with Google privacy regulations. They have a dedicated team responsible for privacy, and they perform regular privacy risk assessments.

    In closing, I hope that Webtrends and others involved with analytics will quickly realize the positive benefits that Google Analytics Premium means for us all. Enterprise customers requested that Google Analytics provide a paid solution which they would be willing to pay in the six figures for.

    How awesome is this for the analytics industry?!? This marks a new, and much needed, era of increased value for analytics. Yeah!!

    So before vendors and consultants start jockeying for position; don’t forget we are still at the beginning of a long race and it behooves us to work together to reach the finish line.

    • Marko Z Muellner

      Kayden, Thanks so much for your comment, we really appreciate it. And thanks for more details on their data ownership and security policies – we couldn’t find anything like this publicly shared by Google themselves. As you can tell, we feel VERY strongly that data ownership + security are important and we feel all analytics vendors should feel the same way and be blatantly public about it. Also, no matter how buttoned-up they get about data compliance, Google has a core business model – selling search advertising — that this effort supports and everyone should consider the implications of this.

      Your assertion that Google’s premium service is “a clear sign of evolution in the analytics industry” is interesting. We see this move more as validation of what we’ve been saying for years – that marketing measurement + optimization requires both great tools and expertise + support. We definitely support the community of measurement + optimization professionals – have for many many years – and are encouraged when practitioner maturity gets more attention. As was outlined in the post, our goal is to educate marketers considering any partner. If Google has made progress on their data ownership and security issues, great, but you can’t fault us for highlighting this and other issues we think need to be considered.

      Thanks again and keep up the good work in fighting for and working towards insight-driven marketing success!

  • http://ricosays.tumblr.com/ Eric Matisoff
  • http://ricosays.tumblr.com/ Eric Matisoff

    Good call Marko, thanks for the explanation. I’m looking forward to hearing more about the SLA as information on it becomes available. I’d hate for Google to get a bad rap for having a poor SLA without facts proving it.

    Regardless, as I’ve inferred from Hope’s article, competition in the analytics space is GREAT! I’m excited to see what Google can do to push the bigger site-side analytics platforms in the space to innovate more. How will Webtrends respond to Google Analytics Premium’s simplified contract pricing? How about the Attribution Modeling tool? I’m excited to find out!

    Although it hasn’t received much press the Attribution Modeling tool is a very exciting tool! It is well-integrated into the interface and allows for all sorts of attributions to be applied to Google Analytics Premium’s dataset. It’s clearly not for the first-timer analyst, but are any of the enterprise-only features?

    - Excited for the analytics future!

  • http://@ckeune Chris K

    Actually, those who own the servers , own the site. If you rely on a third party to host your site and do not have a confidentiality agreement or an NDA, they can sell your data to anyone they please.

    Also Google has the same information as the ISPs. And you KNOW the ISPs keep track of marketing performance data that they sell to 3rd party vendors (DSP, AdExchanges, etc).

    While Google does not claim that it owns your data, to believe you are the sole owner of your web data is comical.

  • http://ricosays.tumblr.com/ Eric Matisoff

    I’m curious about the omissions on the Google Analytics Premium SLA. Can you describe further?

    • Marko Z Muellner

      Eric, Thanks for the comment. We’ve been looking and can’t find any details beyond the fact that Premium customers will now own their data. Nothing about security or other uses, for example. They may have finally plugged this hole but we just don’t know yet.