Confused about web analytics tools to use? Here's the solution.

Google Analytics and Adobe Analytics are two of the industry leading tools that are used most commonly by businesses in India.

Many marketers and business owners are generally confused on which web analytics platform they should use. Most also don't know whether they should be investing in a paid analytics platform or should make do with a free one. 

In reality, both these tools(GA and AA) are great and your requirements define the tool that suits your needs the most. Answers to some of the questions below will help you figure out which tool fulfills your need.

The first thing to understand is how big is your website? Are you selling hundreds of products and have a vast traffic and transactions volume? Do you publish a lot of content which generates huge traffic volume and powers advertising revenues?

Adobe Analytics suits you here

Or do you have a simple operation wherein the transaction volume is low and the website is simple? Google analytics works just fine for you.

How important is the real time data across marketing campaigns and attribution to you? Do you want to see the performance of your campaigns, products sold, articles and sections read in nearly real time? Do you want to optimize things on the website daily based on real time data? If the answer is yes, you should go for Adobe analytics.

If you are okay with looking at the audience, behavior and acquisition data at a 24 hour delay and you optimize things monthly instead of daily, go with Google analytics.

Does your business have a mobile app as well and you want to understand the mobile app analytics as well? Or do you have a video website with a lot of videos playing and you are interested in detailed video reporting? Adobe analytics in a single platform covers web, mobile, social and video which helps in understanding the holistic picture of the visitors of your online properties.

Most of the businesses in India in Ecommerce, Travel, Media and entertainment domain think their website data is very valuable and confidential to their business. These businesses do not want to share that data in lieu of a free analytics tool. With Adobe analytics, you own your data. In case of Google analytics, Google owns the data and your website data can be used to power Google's interests in advertising and other domains. If you do not have concerns with respect to Google using your data,  Google analytics is an option for you.

Cost and Support: Google analytics, base version, is free and will process upto 10 million hits per month. Google analytics premium is priced at $150,000 annually and will process upto 1 Billion hits a month. Adobe analytics does not have a free version and is priced as per the traffic volume of the site. Adobe analytics comes with 24x7 customer support and set up services. With Google analytics free version, you are on your own and support is provided only with the premium version.

So in order to find the right analytics tool for your business, you need to look at the business and answer some of these questions above.