Google Analytics vs WebTrends: Tracker Smackdown!

In the Beginning

About 5 years ago (eons ago in internet time), I worked on a project where we wrote our own sophisticated website analytics tracking code. It logged browser visits and page-views via a combination of client site and server-side code.

On the back-end, we filtered out bots based on hit frequency. Then every month we loaded it all into a data warehouse for drill down reporting. This was a large project that probably took six months to implement.

Back then, the products were immature and really didn’t give you a lot of options when it came to sophisticated web analytics. If you wanted something fancy, you really had to write it yourself.

Enter the Marketers

Fast forward to today, and I would rarely recommend that a client write their own analytics. Everything that I described above is built into off-the-shelf products which probably do a better job than you could even write on your own without a very large budget.

So what changed in those five years? Advertisers came to the web in a big way.

Remember there was actually a time when Google did not believe in advertising?Nowadays, of course, that has changed and Google makes the majority of their money from advertising. 

Here’s a recent sample of the continued growth of the online advertising steamroller:

This week, DMNews revealed a very encouraging report from Forrester Research that predicts that total spending on online marketing per year in the U.S. will surpass $55 billion by 2014.  This online spending is projected to represent twenty-one (21%) of domestic marketing dollars, and is yet another indication that more and more companies are shifting more and more advertising dollars away from traditional channels and into search marketing, display advertising, and social media.

….Forester Research discovered that “marketers faced with budget cuts and the need for immediate sales in recessionary times turn towards interactive tools that are less expensive, more measurable, and better for direct response than traditional media.

The key phrase is “more measurable” and that’s where the web analytics tools come in. There is a huge market for those tools because they allow advertisers to determine the effectiveness of their campaigns and where to target their dollars.

Into this highly contested market, steps our two competitors — Google Analytics and WebTrends. I recently worked on a project for a client where I had the opportunity to look at both of these analytic solutions up close.

Web Trends

Let’s just get this out of the way first. Web Trends is the 800 lbs gorilla of the web analytics market. Pretty much any feature you could want, they have.

Here are some of the more interesting ones:

• Client AND Server-side tracking: Most other people support one or the other. WebTrends does both in an effort to capture the highest quality data.
• Large number of sophisticated built-in reports: After it processes your dataset, you have access to hundreds of reports covering all areas of your site from technical to marketing to sales.

• Full control of your data: Assuming you go with their software version (rather than their hosted version), all of your data is easily accessible and stored on your own servers.

So with all these great features….what’s the con? It really boils down to cost of ownership.

Just to get out of the gate, a software license for WebTrends will cost you upwards of 5K. Not to mention they recommend dedicated hardware for your WebTrends installation. And for good reason, in my tests, it nearly pegged the processor of a moderate server while parsing the IIS log file.

I also had much more difficulty installing and configuring WebTrends than Google Analytics. You would definitely want an expert on staff to set-up and maintain WebTrends. That said, once WebTrends was running it produced some gorgeous reports.

Google Analytics

While Google is not a small player on the web by any measure, analytics is not their core business. In fact, they give their analytics product away for free. So, it’s obvious they are targeting a different market than WebTrends.

But don’t write off Google Analytics just because it’s free. It still includes many great features like:

• Easy Set-Up: They make it incredibly simple to create a new account and then give you the exact JavaScript to insert into your pages. Depending on the complexity of your site, you can be up and running in under an hour.
• Polished Graphs for Basic Stats: Google Analytics may not have every graph that WebTrends has, but they have all of the important ones. And they are polished with tooltips and drill-downs.

• Custom Reporting and Export: If you don’t like the graphs that Google supplies, you can create custom reports using their drag-drop designer. They also recently released a Data Export API that you can use to pull the data locally and build your own UI.

Google analytics gives you a LOT for free. The real con is that you don’t have access to your data. It’s all living in the cloud and that makes a lot of people nervous. Even the data export API that Google provides does not let you export your data down to the visit level so you are pretty much at the mercy of Google. This may or may not be a bad thing.

Conclusion

It really depends on your needs and budget. I would view WebTrends as the “enterprise” solution and Google Analytics better suited for individuals and small businesses.

My recommendation is that if you are willing to commit the money and resources, WebTrends is a more fully featured product. But, if you are on a limited budget or cost sensitive, Google Analytics will give you many of the key analytic reports for (almost) free.