Google Analytics vs. TargetBay

Google Analytics is particularly well suited for tracking and analyzing customer behavior on a grocery e-commerce platform. It provides a wealth of information about customer behavior, including what products are most popular, what pages are visited the most, and where customers are coming from. This information can help the platform optimize its website for better customer engagement and conversion rates. However, Google Analytics may not be the best tool for more advanced, granular analysis of customer behavior, such as tracking individual customer journeys or understanding customer motivations. In these cases, it may be more appropriate to use additional tools or solutions that provide deeper insights into customer behavior.

If you want to use email to market to your customer base and you don't want to handle the weekly chore of creating and sending the emails, then TargetBay and in particular, Danielle is the way to go. If you are not interested in email marketing or you can take care of that in-house, then there may be better choices to handle your reviews. It is rare today to find a company as responsive and easy to work with as TargetBay.

• Multiple reports to see website use and behavior
• Allows you to customize reports with days, weeks, months, and years
• You can build out a dashboard to easily view stats from multiple websites in one place
• You can share analytics reports via the dashboard, automatically emailed PDFs or in other formats

Incentivized

• TargetBay has amazing chat support.
• TargetBay has a great onboarding process.
• TargetBay is very affordable compared to other programs that offer similar solutions.

Incentivized

• Data sampling is somewhat inaccurate on the free tier - this is addressed in premium but is expensive.
• Some of the UI is very similar in naming when presenting different data, some in-situ information might be useful.
• Gotchas around filtering and data validation.
• Implementation can be tricky, it can take a lot of time and expertise to get a full, accurate picture of your metrics.

Incentivized

• There is always room for improvement, however, I find Target Bay to be cost effective.

We will continue to use Google Analytics for several reasons. It is free, which is a huge selling point. It houses all of our ecommerce stores' data, and though it can't account for refunds or fraud orders, gives us and our clients directional, real time information on individual and group store performance.

Incentivized

Google Analytics provides a wealth of data, down to minute levels. That is it's greatest detriment: find the right information when you need it can be a cumbersome task. You are able to create shortcuts, however, so it can mitigate some of this problem. Google is continually refining Analytics, so I do not doubt there will be improvements

TargetBay, while it is a great tool and more than pays for itself, is not the most user-friendly and/or easy to use. Even our very tech-savvy employees have struggled through figuring out some of the work flows. While TargetBay's technical support team on chat is amazing, they are not always available and documentation on "how-to" user and or do XYZ on their platform needs improvement.

Incentivized

We all know Google is at top when it comes to availability. We have never faced any such instances where I can suggest otherwise. All you need is a Google account, a device and internet connection to use this super powerful tool for reporting and visualising your site data, traffic, events, etc. that too in real time.

This has been a catalyst for improving our site's traffic handling capabilities. We were able to identify exit% from our sites through it and we used recommendations to handle and implement the same in our sites. We have been increasing the usage of Google Analytics in our sites and never had any performance related issues if we used Analytics

The Google reps respond very quickly. However, sometimes they can overly call you to set up an apportionment. I'm very proficient and sometimes when I talk to reps, they give beginner tutorials and insights that are a waste of time. I wish Google would understand my level of expertise and assign me to a rep (long-term) that doesn't have to walk me through the basics.

Incentivized

If I could rate their chat support separately than their phone support, I would rate their chat support at an 8 or 9. Their chat support team, when online, can usually answer most any questions quickly and clearly. If they can't find the answer right away, they always follow up with an email providing you the help/assistance you need. However, their phone support is another story. I would rate the phone support a 4. Most of the times, while not all of the time, that we've had to talk with someone on the phone, we typically are left with more questions and/or not the answer we were looking for. I think this may be partially due to the language barrier, but either way it has pushed us to want to only use that chat option for support which, unfortunately, is more time-consuming.

Incentivized

love the product and training they provide for businesses of all sizes. The following list of links will help you get started with Google Analytics from setup to understanding what data is being presented by Google Analytics.

1. How to Use Google Analytics for Beginners – Mahalo’s how-to guide for beginners.
2. A beginner’s guide to Google Analytics – A free eBook walking you through Google Analytics from setup to understanding what data is being presented.
3. Getting to Know Your Google Analytics Dashboard – The title says it all! This is a brief post with one goal: to introduce you to the Google Analytics dashboard.
4. Google Analytics for Beginners: How to Make the Most of Your Traffic Reports– This guide doesn’t cover setup, but it does a great job of helping you to better understand the data being presented.
5. Google Analytics Video Tutorial 1: Setup – A video presentation that walks you through Google Analytics setup.
6. Google Analytics Video Tutorial 2: Essential Stats – A video presentation that introduces you to some of the most important data being presented in Google Analytics.

I think my biggest take away from the Google Analytics implementation was that there needs to be a clear understanding of what you want to achieve and how you want to achieve it before you start. Originally the analytics were added to track visitors, but as we became more savvy with the product, we began adding more and more functionality, and defining guidelines as we went along. While not detrimental to our success, this lack of an overarching goal resulted in some minor setbacks in implementation and the collection of some messy data that is unusable.

I have not used Adobe Analytics as much, but I know they offer something called customer journey analytics, which we are evaluating now. I have used Semrush, and I find them much better than Google Analytics. I feel a fairly nontechnical person could learn Semrush in about a month. They also offer features like competitive analysis (on content, keywords, traffic, etc.), which is very useful. If you have to choose one among Semrush and Google Analytics, I would say go for Semrush.

Incentivized

We have used other customer review services in the past. I did not have the level of involvement with them like I do with Danielle and TargetBay. Email marketing is a major plus. And the PPC ads have been cost-effective. I am pleased with TargetBay and the results we have been getting since working with them.

Google Analytics is currently handling the reporting and tracking of near about 80 sites in our project. And I am not talking about the sites from different projects. They may have way more accounts than that. Never ever felt a performance issue from Google's end while generating or customising reports or tracking custom events or creating custom dimensions

• It has helped us gain understanding of what is going on on our website.
• It has helped us determine areas that need fixing (i.e. pages with extremely high bounce rates may need to be redone).
• It has helped us understand our biggest avenues for bringing traffic to the website and business in general.
• It has helped guide our website redesign.

Incentivized

• We have seen a positive ROI with TargetBay. Once we get through Covid-19, it will be even better.
• I know we are communicating with our customers on a regular basis, keeping Sign Art Etc in their minds as in-person events start happening again.
• Emails we send are professional and creative. Much better than I would do.
• PPC with TargetBay is better than what we see with Google Ads.