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The market of digital analytics solutions is going through some fundamental changes right now. Google has just announced the sunset of Universal Analytics (also known as “the ‘better’ Google Analytics”) next year, while the market is moving towards cookieless tracking, server-side implementations, all while trying to comply with GDPR and other new regulations.
Many of those trends force companies to reconsider their choices of digital analytics solutions to comply with legal requirements or future-proof their analytics practice. However, not all digital analytics tools are the same. In fact, recent years have revealed four distinct categories of tools. Instead of only choosing a tool, companies oftentimes unconsciously decide on tool categories instead.
This article intends to show and explain the different categories of solutions while also giving you some examples of the tools in each category.
At the end of the article, you will also find some important questions you should ask yourself when choosing a category or even a specific tool. You will be able to confidently choose the right category for your business and challenge the preconceived assumptions you might be confronted with. Let’s get moving.
Category #1: the market leaders
By installations: Google Analytics
Category #2: fast-moving paid solutions
Category #3: open-source DIY solutions
Bonus category: the Netflix-like DIY toolstack
Category #1: the market leaders
The first category of Digital Analytics Solutions contains only two tools:
- The market leader by tool maturity. Adobe Analytics is the most mature tool in the current market.
- The market leader by install base. Google Analytics is a leading digital analytics tool in this category.
It says a lot that there is more than one tool in this category, as it shows that the most adopted solution is not always the most feature-rich or mature tool available. Let’s take a look at both tools individually.
Google Analytics
Google Analytics is by far the most well-known solution on the market. For many people working in or with digital experiences, it is synonymous with digital analytics. Its enormous install base is largely driven by the free base tier that allows anyone to open an account and start collecting data. Some of the limitations of the free Google Analytics version, like data sampling or a limited number of events per month, can be mitigated by buying the paid version.
The paid version is especially attractive for larger websites. It can help to avoid the particularly annoying problem of sampled data and also allows for more than 10 million hits per month. On top of that, the paid version brings more advanced reporting capabilities like rollups from mixed sources or custom tables. Because the base version is free, the percentage of paying customers is comparatively low, making the paid version somewhat of a statistical anomaly.
While some people see Google Analytics as a stand-alone solution, especially the free version should be seen as an extension of Google Ads. A big portion of the product is tailored to marketing use cases with very little customizability for other applications. For example, Google Analytics provides some useful marketing features, such as:
- Acquisition Source reports
- Google Ads campaigns and metrics
- Google Search keywords and metrics
- Some high-level page performance reports
Because of those built-in reports, a lot of marketing executives see Google Analytics as the only tool they ever need. While this makes it easy to get the feeling of knowing what is going on on a page, there is not a lot of customizable information available beyond traffic acquisition.
To analyze more complex business questions or even allow for dashboarding, many companies combine Google Analytics with Big Query and Data Studio. This allows to cover more use cases but introduces a high entry threshold for any non-analytic user and can hinder agility when it comes to data democratization.
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