Generally speaking, we are comparing between Free vs. Paid enterprise web analytics solutions. The former (Google's) is a very popular solutions, intended for every type of website, whether you are a newbie web designer who just started out or whether you want an Enterprise web analytic solution for your company, Google analytics has it.
Many companies considered choosing a free solution over a paid analytic solution, only if the free version will have the right features needed for their company. As for 2009, Google introduced many features & enhancement to its Analytics platform. Introducing Advanced segmentation, many new & advanced anlytsis tools, analytsis Intelligence, Custom reports and custom variables, data export & sharing features and much more.
All this features really upgraded Google Analytics solution in many ways, and many large companies opted to use the upgraded version because many new enterprise features were implemented. The best thing is that all these "Enterprise-class" features, are now available for everyone for Free!
When you compare Google Analytics vs. Omniture Site Catalyst, you need to really place a lot of attention to the Incremental value that each product offers. You should understand the meaning, concept & usage behind any analytical tool that exists in anyone of those solutions. You should start by understanding that a paid web analytics solution is not always better than a free one, and the most important question that you should ask yourself is "What features are important for my type of website?".
Real-time Web Analytics Solutions
There first thing that you should be noticing by passing the list of features in a comparison table between GA and Omniture Site Catalyst, is the Ominture is a Real-time web analytics solution. If you had a chance to work with Google Analytics, you should probably know by now, that GA doesn't present collectible data in real-time. The data will be updated every half an hour or so, but certainly this is not a real-time web analytics solution.
The main advantage of being able to collect the tracked data and to provide the user an real-time data visualization interface, is really a huge advantage for some. In many cases on really high-traffic sites, it is all about close a sell or lose one. The leverage of being able to see the data in real0time, enables to web analytics expert to make on-demand decisions, therefore most likely elevating the website's conversion rates.
Of course it takes a lot of practice to deeply understand and implement the tools in the right way, but the result can really worth it; More leads, conversions, achieving more Goals and of course, turning visitors into cache and Increasing profit.
Being able to collect data and present it in real-time, means that you can observe trends as they happen, create special alert when a special behavioral analytic data has reached a specific spike and so on.
Take Woopra for example. In Woopra web analytics solution (paid), you have the ability to engage a conversation with a visitors on your website in real-time. The interface presents to you the list of current visitors (maybe with a delay of a few seconds the most), and you can choose to engage that visitor and chat with him live on your website. This is pretty cool feature for e-commerce websites. Some features are made automatic and some needed to adjust manually, but as a whole, you can deny the advantage of having such feature in a SaaS or Software web analytic solution.
Even though that Omniture SiteCatalyst is a real-time website analytics product, there are many other features that should be considered as well, before you decide which Analytics software suits your needs. There are many variables to consider, but for many high traffic websites, this is probably a huge advantage.
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