Analytics - Google vs Adobe Analytics

Primary purpose of analytics is to capture user behavior and display it in the reports in order to analyze user behavior. Behavior could be in term of how many users are accessing the website, their id, type, demography, device, browsers, page visited, etc. These are just some examples and lot of other variables could also be captured. In any typical eCommerce website, we can capture:

1. Items added to the cart

2. Conversion rate

3. Abandoned cart (which will help in sending targeted email to the user).

Tracking of such parameters can give good insight about user behavior. There are many tools (open source and proprietary) available in the market for tracking. Among the commonly used front end analytic tools are Google and Adobe Analytics. Both have documentation in form of tutorials and video available. Both version allow you to collect data from websites, mobile apps for iOS and Android.

Adobe and Google use very complex algorithms to calculate sessions, time spent, and many other simple and standard metrics within their platforms. They also use different methodologies when it comes to attributing these metrics to dimensions within the platform.

Each platform uses completely different code libraries for tracking.

Adobe Analytics or Site Catalyst previously known as Omniture is well integrated between different tools like Adobe Experience Management, Adobe Audience Management and Adobe Target.

The “end” of a session is always a very difficult event to capture in a web analytics platform. Since we cannot track browser window or tab closing actions nor website exits via URL address changes, it is difficult to know the exact end of the session. Both platforms generally consider the end of a session to be the timestamp of the last tag called.

Google Analytics premium has been renamed to Google Analytics 360.

In this article, we also discuss some of the feature comparison between these two tools.

Google Analytics	Adobe Analytics
Free/Paid	Paid
Google Analytics comes in two versions – One is free (with some limitation on number of variables to be tracked). Another one is premium (Google Analytics 360) version allowing more variables to be captured.	Adobe Analytics doesn’t comes with free version.
Google Tag Manager	Adobe Dynamic Tag Management
Limit on tracking variables 20 custom dimensions – Free version and 200 for Premium accounts. 20 custom metrics – Free version and 200 for Premium accounts	Limit on tracking variables 75 of your own custom traffic variables (non-persistent like page name) called property or prop variables. Examples of prop variables are Page Type ("article", "category", etc.), Site Section ("sports", "business", etc.) and Geo Country ("Spain", "Singapore", etc.). 100 custom events that are named event 1 through event 100. Examples of custom events might be login, registration, and signup. 75 custom eVar variables that keeps persistent information about whether the visitor is logged in or out of the site. The resulting Analytics report could tell you the number of purchases made when visitors are logged in or out of the site.

Conclusion –

If you have lot of users accessing your website, then you can look for paid version. In case you have less traffic (e.g. thousands user visiting your website), you should get free version. Also it depends on how much revenue you are getting from the website. If Analytics can help in conversion and cover its cost, then you may want to go for paid version.

If you are using only basic level of its capability, then Google/Universal Analytics is the right choice because it is super simple to implement and your website starts showing the basic site metrics to the reporting page of your Google Analytics account instantly.

If you want to retain your analytics data as long as you want, then Adobe Analytics is to be chosen.

Complex level of data tracking is easily done through Adobe Analytics and the reports too looks better than Google Analytics. However buying Adobe Analytics without having some skilled Analysts in-house (technically and analytically) or a good service provider is not a good idea.