Google Analytics vs. WebTrends

At The Day Job, we’ve had WebTrends for several years, and recently upgraded to the latest version. It’s been indispensable in the decision making processes for both our external websites and our vast intranet. It hasn’t taken much for our internal clients to latch onto this new ability to review their content and application usage.

For KWD, I’ve never had quite the range of statistics to offer at a price that’s right for my thrifty customers. Our web host provides an open source statistics page, but it’s… eh, it’s really not that business-focused or useful.

The other day, I set up Google Analytics for several of my sites, and I’m already anxious to set it up for my other clients. Of course anyone who’s used both might say there’s no comparison, but for small businesses, Analytics is an absolute breakthrough. It has nowhere near the complexity of WebTrends, but it’s a free service that blows away most of the pay services I’ve seen. Mint seems pretty basic (which isn’t necessarily bad) and doesn’t utilize graphical representation and the CrazyEgg demo gave Firefox a stop script warning, it was so memory-intensive.

The real difference that puts Analytics in the same league as WebTrends is the breakdown of the statistics based on different interests (Marketing, Webmaster, etc.). Also, being able to set goals and track conversion from viewer to user to paying user can be incredibly valuable. Gillian Carson’s recent Vitamin article gives more detail on optimizing your website to maximize conversion.

While WebTrends is definitely a useful tool (especially for intranets), I think Google Analytics is setting a new standard for external website analysis for small to medium-sized businesses. I will be interested to see how Google refines this application in the future.