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hi my name is Andrey Osadchuk, I am a digital analytics consultant. I started
working with Adobe Analytics when it was our Omniture SiteCatalyst. I worked with
Google Analytics when it was Urchin. I have worked with many companies from
different verticals and one of the questions I was often asked was which
solution is the best one, which tool the company should choose. And there is no
single answer on this question since the right choice would depend on variety of
factors specific for your company for your business. At the same time one of
the key factors for me personally is how convenient it is to use this or that
solution and I decided to record a few videos to demonstrate you Adobe
Analytics and Google Analytics in action. In this video episode I will start with
a business scenario and then continue with a side-by-side comparison of
Adobe Analytics and Google Analytics so that you will see how the solutions look
work and which capabilities they provide. Let's get started.
short disclaimer I do not pretend to provide a comprehensive review of Google
Analytics and Adobe analytics, this video is recorded just to show you how I am
doing data analysis in the solutions and you will obviously recognize my personal
preferences. The scenario for today is the following – my digital marketing managers
ran an on-site promo campaign last month and they asked me to provide some
high-level data about its performance. One question they asked was how much
traffic they were able to acquire. The next question was they wanted to take a
look at the daily trend of the traffic. Then they also wanted to know the
traffic channels that contributed to the overall traffic volume and they also
asked me to prepare a breakdown by mobile and desktop devices as they
had slightly different strategies to acquire those visitors. Before I dig into
data analysis just a very short review about what you can see on your screens.
In Google Analytics this is the report that is called all pages and you see
that it contains three major parts. On the top you have segments in two
variable either to add a new segment or select one of the existing segments you
can also change the date range for the report then you have a chart and a table
with the data on the right-hand side I opened one of the pre-configured
templates in workspace which is called content consumption on the top you also
can select date range and this this is called actually project and it consists
of several different visualizations and I will be working primarily with the
table that is very similar to what you can see on the left hand side in the
pages report in Google Analytics you can observe some values and this values are
originated from the site URLs basically the part that follows after the domain
name is stored in this report and depending on how the URL structure is
built you can expect friendly names or vice-versa
in this example we can see that the page names can be read very easily and they
are built the way that you can recognize where the page is located so for example
if you take a look at the fifth line we see that the page is called accessories
and this page is located under the top section which is Google redesign in this
case everything looks great but in some case
if your page URLs do not match your site taxonomy or probably I know site
taxonomy is missing for some reason and probably your page URLs do not have as a
friendly names in this case it may be a little bit problematic to work with such
a report just be ready that by default what you have after your domain will be
shown in this report in Adobe Analytics the page names are built in a slightly
different way and you can see that they are written in a more friendly manner
and this is because every single a double index implementation is done the
way that architects and developers are focused on providing the very clear and
convenient to use page names in the report and from my own personal
perspective this is a much better approach because not only analysts but
also business users can easily understand what the pages are they are
looking at and you can also recognize that for example for the shopping cart
pages there is something like again hierarchy or taxonomy so we have for
example here in the table 3 shopping cart pages and you can recognize that
card details chicken confirmation and billing information all the pages that
belong to the shopping cart site section this is the first difference between two
solutions usually when you work with a turbulent six you should expect
something like that in the page names and when you work with Google Analytics
you should be ready to work with the URLs but it doesn't mean that this is
the only way how the pages are reported now let's get back to our scenario and
let's agree that for the demonstration purposes my page is called home this
would be much easier for me to show you how the solutions work
so the homepage and the first question is how to find this page you can use the
search box on the top and you can enter some keywords and hit enter and the
values in the table will be updated so now we see all the pages that contain
home but this is not what I wanted and I can click on the advanced link and
select the criteria for filtering the values I will use exactly matching and
we'll use the home value and click apply and by doing this now I will see the
page that I wanted to find and let's do the same thing in Adobe Analytics I can
click on this funnel icon and enter again the keyword and click apply if I
want to I can also use advanced tutoring options so you can see the list also
contains a lot of different conditions so now we see the pages in both
solutions and the next question that I need to answer is how many unique
visitors came to that page in a double helix you can see that we have a number
of different metrics and basically I will need to keep only the traffic
metrics we have pageviews visits and unique visitors in Google Analytics we
also have a number of different metrics you can see there are seven metrics in
this table by default and we also have pageviews but then the metrics are
slightly different unique pageviews is something similar to visits and
simplistically you can say that if somebody came to one page twice during
the visit then you should expect one in the unique
pageviews column and two in the pageviews column and in the level in six
this metric would be called visits again this metric has slightly differently
calculated but just for simplicity let's agree that they're the same and then
inaudible antics you have unique visitors so a number of unique visitors
who came to specific page so if you came to the page today tomorrow and yesterday
you will still see one in that column in Google Analytics we do not have such a
metric in this particular table in this report in Google Analytics that metric
would be called users but the users metric is not in this table and
unfortunately it's not possible to choose that metric right away you should
be an advanced user to configure the table or the template for this report so
that you will have some other metrics and I would consider this a disadvantage
especially for new users who may not have enough experience and knowledge
working with the tool alright so but just again for simplicity let's say that
we were able to find number of unique visitors in Google Analytics as well the
next thing is that I also want to provide my dues to marketing managers
with visualization with a daily trend of traffic on that page and the good thing
that in Google Analytics the traffic is already there and there is a selector
that we can use by default we see that it's this is about pageviews I can
select another metric and the trend will be built immediately if I want you I can
select the second metric and for example or select pageviews and you will see
sorry it was page value but if I select page you see we see now two metrics
as a trendline and that's it very easy and let's see what we can do with a good
analytics the trendline is missing but just a matter of a single click if I
click this icon the trendline will appear and this is how it looks the good
thing about the double it exceeds that you can get rid of the metric that you
don't need in the report so for example I can click this close icon and make it
clearer for my digital managers because when you ask to provide for example
unique visitors to just number of visitors who came to the page you may
not need to provide at the metric just to make it clearer and you may want to
remove them also if you want to you can reorder the metrics and again this is
just as simple as that and if for some reason you are missing
the metric that you want to report it's again very easy to do you just can go to
the panels find or find the metric for example let's restored the bounce rate
and we can drag and drop it into our table so now we have this metric
available another good thing about web analytics is that you can visualize as
many metrics as you want by default all the metrics that you have at the table
will be shown in this graph if you just want to visualize only one metric for
example unique visitors you can just click in the cell and only that metric
will be shown in the graph and this is very convenient if you want to select
few metrics then you select three metrics and they will be shown for
example I will add visits and now I can compare on the same graph if you met
in comparison to Google Analytics in other abilities you have much more
flexible visualization here since you are not limited by two metrics another
good thing about the double antics is you may already recognize these big
white dots and these dots show you that there was an anomaly
there was an outlier in your data set and that's very convenient because you
immediately can see that something probably happened on your site and you
may want to investigate it you don't need to guess these dots will appear
based on the statistical algorithms and methods that are working on the
background and as you see they work immediately and the balance also
provides machine learning algorithms and if I click that link I will get a report
that will help me to find out the causes of those anomalies all right so
hopefully we were able to answer the first big question now we can see total
number of unique visitors on the page where we conducted our campaign and we
were also able to provide a graph so that our digital market managers would
be able to see a trend line the next question I also wanted to cover what if
you would need to provide a breakdown by day and that has to be provided in the
table format because when somebody is looking at the chart it's helpful to
understand the trend line but what if somebody wanted to feed that data into
our system and probably share this with some other teams like agencies because
they wanted to probably use that for their own calculation
in this case we would need to break down our total traffic by day and let's see
how it can be done in Google Analytics we have this drop down menu which is
called secondary dimension and we can look for date click date and there we
are we can see that now in the left column we see the homepage and in the
second column dates and if we click on the date header we would water our table
so that it would be the first of December the second deferred etc and
that's it now the report is ready to be exported for example into PDF or Excel
file now I will show you how to do the same in Adobe Analytics I will right
click on the page name we'll go to break down dimension and look for day 10
selected and my page will be immediately broken down by day another small but
sometimes good thing for business users the format of the day's easy to read so
now again you can if you want expertise in PDF format the next question that I
want to answer is what were the traffic sources the traffic came from to this
particular page and I will continue with Google Analytics
I will go to again secondary dimension and we'll need to look for traffic type
and I will select traffic type now you see
that in the second column instead of dates now we have traffic channels we
have organic which is search engine optimization referral third party
domains director type in paid search or search in market capitalization and some
other and that was easy let's do the same in Adobe Analytics and again this
is just I would say out-of-the-box functionality in general if you want to
have more channels probably need to configure the backend and you need to
implement something but I'm just showing you what is available out of the box and
I can go again to home and click the right button go to breakdowns and
dimensions and look for referral referral type and immediately can see
the buckets the first bucket is again other domains then what is called direct
and Google Analytics then search engines and social networks if I want to have a
split between SEO and paid search I can do that
also quickly if I right click on the value and again go to breakdown
dimensions and look for paid search I should see two buckets natural and
paid since in this particular account we do not have paid search campaigns so I
also I only see the nature which stands for organic you could already recognize
that in this particular example I was able to break down the homepage by
referral type and then by paid search and weight search in this case this is
the third level of the breakdown and this is what you can do in Adobe
Analytics you can do as many breakdowns as you want
however in Google Analytics you are limited by the secondary diamond
and imagine that now you want to not only look at how much traffic came from
for example are the websites but you also want to break this down by day and
the question is how to do that in Google Analytics again you are limited but in
other politically were not limited to define one two for ample I can go to
panels this is another way how you can work with the data and look for de
dimension and just drag and drop it to the desired value and I will get full
breakdown that's great and this is one of the biggest benefit or for Doby
because you are not limited you have lots of different flexibilities working
with the data alright so the next the last question I need to answer is how
many visitors came being on mobile devices versus those who were working on
desktops and in Google Analytics I again have to use the secondary dimension
drop-down menu and I should look for I think devices device categories and I
will select it and you will see three buckets desktop mobile that stands for
smartphones and tablet these are three out-of-the-box buckets that you can use
in other politics you can also build that report and I will need to look for
mobile devices so I will use the search box and will select mobile device type
and replace the referral type dimension they concede more buckets so we have
mobile phone again this is for smartphones tablet this is what we have
also in Google Analytics you can see some other buckets that are not popular
and other and we may can see the other being desktop traffic
so in general we have these three buckets and this is as easy as it was
shown now let's say that I want to provide my digital marketing managers
with some more information about how that campaign performed on the side and
I also want to show them not only breakdown by mobile devices versus
desktop devices but also want to show traffic sources and I want to combine
this in a single report what I can do in this case I can get rid of the metrics
that I don't need and then get back to my search box and look for traffic
referrer type again but in this case I will drag
and drop it under the metric and now you can see a good convenient table so that
you can see total traffic from each channel type bookmarked on the website
search engine social networks and then it's broken down by mobile device type
if I want to I also can add some more flexibility to this report for again my
digital managers and will show them a column with total traffic and in this
case I will be using a segment all visits and I will drag and drop it again
next to my segments so now I have total traffic on the home page and I am able
to see a breakdown by traffic sources and breakdown by mobile devices and some
interest actions this is very convenient to
prepare and you can understand that that takes just a minute and unfortunately in
Google Analytics I will not be able to do something similar and for example
another thing that I often use for analysis is what if I want to see a
trend line for a specific segment because actually now every cell is
representing its segments and analytics I can do the following I have a trend
line on top and if I click in cell I want to know traffic trend for mobile
devices that came to the page and I just can click in the cell and immediately
will see a corresponding trend line if I want to look at the same trend for turn
up all the websites I can do the same and then I can compare for example how
the traffic trend was for those who came from third-party domains versus search
engines and I can select two cells and immediately compare that that's where it
very convenient and again if I want to I can ex producing PDF and provide to my
managers so that was it about just a very short comparison about how you can
work with the one of the most frequently used reports which is called pages
report and now I hope you've got some understanding of flexibility capability
of Google Analytics and a little analytics when you need to answer quite
simple question and provide a very simplistic report and share in comments
whether you like this or not and basically since I am going to record the
number of videos about this side-by-side comparison if you have a specific
scenario that you would like me to walk you through
also share this in comments underneath that's it and thank you for watching