Quick Look: Comparing GA and Omniture numbers

There is a constant battle in the web analytics world about tools. Some are free, others are expensive. Some will argue that one particular product is very simple while alternatives are too complicated. Another point of debate is the accuracy of one tool vs. another, and understanding why the discrepancy exists. It's really no different than any other industry. I remember the exact same debate as a developer arguing over which IDE was the best for writing code.

So I thought I'd take a quick look at the meager metrics that this blog has pulled in thus far and report back.

Surprisingly, the numbers are almost identical. This might be a side effect of such a small sample size (I'm not delusional about the popularity of my little blog). When we run this test again in 6 months, would we expect a bigger difference? Are there other metrics that would be worth comparing?

Analytics Tool	Page Views	Visits	Unique Visitors	Bounce Rate
Omniture SiteCatalyst	62	30	11	50%
Google Analytics	61	30	10	53%

A few other thoughts:

• Geo Segmentation showed the exact same countries represented.
• Average Time Spent on Site was much higher in SiteCatalyst
• Both show one visit from an iPhone
• The Visitor Loyalty/Visit Number Report was pretty similar in both

So, let's try this again in a few months and see what differences start to emerge.

Web and Feedback Analytics Intro

I spend a lot of time lately meeting with project teams, administrative staff, product managers, project managers and everyone in between. We talk about the whole gamut of web and feedback analytics, the data, the reports, interpreting the data and reports, the implementation in code, configuration of our tools, and on and on. So, the natural next step was to start a blog to capture many of those great conversations and provide a repository of resources about the subject.

I'm hoping to include a variety of things in this blog:

• code snippets
• implementation best practices
• analytics theory
• using customer feedback
• actionable insights
• use cases
• links to other helpful blogs and articles
• real world stories
• statistics talk
• and who knows what else

I will focus most of my attention on Omniture with some Google Analytics. I will need to be discreet about specific websites in many cases but hope to share plenty of helpful tidbits and insights that were a benefit to me.