Thanks for the detailed comments and your comments are always welcome. I am your fan and have read your Advanced Web Metrics book twice. I totally respect your suggestions on why someone should go for free analytics. Quite honestly, I love both solutions so for me personally, I don’t mind using either one for day to day analysis. However, I still think GA has to cover a lot of ground areas before they can compete head to head with enterprise solutions. Most of the counter suggestions you provided are focused on manual work and are not available out of the box.

1. Support – I agree that GAIQ is the largest web analytics learning center. There is no question that the number of resources Google provides can be compared to anything. Having said that I think support piece is bigger and mandatory. I cannot think of operating enterprise scale analytics without having access to developer support. We can either hire a dedicated web developer or hire a company to help with coding. Analytics implementation is never complete and it scales with the organization.

2. Custom Metrics – Pulling data from API and applying to excel calculation is not feasible when it comes to handling 20 different metrics. Custom metrics is absolutely required to generate reports on the fly for each metric. Small calculations like task completion rate, ROI, and goal to visit are critical for decision making process.

3. Multi-dimensional Time line – To clarify, I was referring to comparing more than 2 time segments in the single screen. Google Advanced segment only allows comparison of 4 metrics for the same time line. GA does not allow the functionality to change the time line for any of 4 metrics. Tools like Omniture Discover and Coremetrics Explore are built for changing time lines on the fly for each metric individually.

4. Analytics Integrations – Integrating with non Google products are the most important element of multi channel analytics. We currently integrate our web analytics software with impression attribution tool, Salesforce, third party SEM software and chat tool. This allows us to look at the web performance in a holistic view and allows us to build end to end reports.

5. Campaign Attribution – I agree that campaign attribution is a big problem for the entire industry but with the help of analytics integrations, we are able to solve a lot of attribution issues. We recently published our successful integration story of media server Eyeblaster and Omniture. This integration has allowed us to double our media buy budget.
http://www.omniture.com/offer/711

Best
Sameer

Thanks for the comment. I think the link you posted will be definitely useful for my readers. thanks

As you might expect I disagree (quite strongly!) on this…

In fact, many enterprises are using GA at an enterprise level. That is, doing great things in terms of optimising their online marketing and visitor experience. Here is a list of some of them:
http://www.advanced-web-metrics.com/blog/who-uses-google-analytics/

For example, P&G have been using Urchin and GA for many years…

I am *not* suggesting GA can do everything – but then no web analytics tool can – free or paid. However, I wanted respond to your arguments for your hypothesis:

1. Support
Free Analytics refers to the data collection and reporting of web visitor data. It has never been intended to include free training, consultation, optimisation or any other form of professional support services.

As you would expect, you hire expertise for this. However, the DIY option is also available with Google Help Centre (the world’s largest resource on web analytics – and free), the GAIQ learning centre (something I have a personal interest in) and of course numerous books.

2. Custom Metrics
If you wish to create a custom metics (one number added/subtracted/multiplied/divided by another), the recommend route is to pull the data via the Export API, then do as you wish.

3. Multi-dimensional Timeline
Using Advanced Segments, GA allows you to compare up to 4 metric timelines

4. Analytics integrations
GA integrates very tightly with Adwords, Adsense and Feedburner. Being Google, no other vendor can really compete with that. Look out for future integrations with pretty much all of G’s products – as I predict here:
http://www.advanced-web-metrics.com/blog/2009/04/16/google-analytics-fours-years-on/

5. Campaign Attribution
GA can use the first click attribution method for paid campaigns. However the correct assignment of attribution is a multi-dimensional problem for the entire industry. No vendor has cracked this and to be honest, without microchips implanted into web visitors (or forcing users to log in to every website), this is unlikely to ever be solved.

Thanks for allowing my comments.

Best regards, Brian
Author, Advanced Web Metrics with Google Analytics

Your assessment of accuracy is spot on. It looks like you are already aware of my whitepaper on the subject of web analytics accuracy, though I hope you don’t mind if I post a link here to it for your readers.

Its a vendor agnostic document that details all accuracy issues when considering web analytics:
http://www.advanced-web-metrics.com/blog/2010/04/23/understanding-web-analytics-accuracy/