On October 23, 2009,
Adobe completed the acquisition of Omniture Inc. for a tidy sum of around 1.8
billion dollars.[1] Chump change, right? In the world of analytics there are two major
players that dominate over 75% of the current market. At the core of their businesses they have
very similar offerings. However, Google Analytics is a free service while
Omniture can cost tens of thousands of dollars. So why are companies paying the money? Is
it worth it? Being a small business
owner I know how tight money for websites, marketing, and analytics can be
tight and where money is spent on these items it’s often at the sacrifice of
other business needs so the money needs to count.
SiteCatalyst-Omniture
The company has been kicking around since Josh James founded
it in 1996. A drop out from Brigham Young
University[2] he
had worked on several tech startups before focusing on Omniture after seeing a
need in the industry for a company that brought all the pertinent analytics
data together in one easy to use interface.
Here’s what Omniture SiteCatalyst (the
site analytics arm of the software platform) does best:
- Real time site metrics
- Optimized for big data solutions
- Tracks all mobile data and content including: carrier, location, links, etc., Google analytics does not track all data but uses sampling.
- Optimized for tracking all social media sites and traffic
- In depth reporting including several mobile apps for monitoring traffic in real time while on the go.
- Reports for practically everything you could ever imagine, including on the fly funnel reports using historical data[3]. Google Analytics will not work with historical data, it starts tracking once reports are created.
Really, you could spend pages talking about the various features
of this product, but the crazy thing is that for a lot less money, the free
version of Google Analytics offers very similar functionality. In fact, there are some things that Google
does better than the paid version of SiteCatalyst. To outline some of these things, I spoke with
the Web Analytics Manager for 1800Contacts that has used both programs
extensively, here’s what he had to say:
- Google Analytics has “intelligence events” which are like looking at anomalies based on based on statistical algorithms of all data breakdowns. SiteCatalyst is still in beta on this so it’s not currently offered.
- Google Analytics has had segmentation for longer that SiteCatalyst and has a more robust interface for creating segments.
- Google doesn’t export to excel very well, there is an API, but it is not very good. SiteCatalyst works seamlessly with excel.
- Google Analytics offers “benchmarking” from their real time data and SiteCatalyst does not.
Obviously there are some differences. I think whomever you speak with will have
their own opinion about which program is better for the price based on
experience and situation. The way the market sits right now Google owns
the small business space and SiteCatalyst owns the enterprise space. Maybe there are too many analysts out there
who are afraid of losing their jobs by using Google Analytics so they opt for
the more expensive option (strictly opinion).
It’s the same reason IT managers buy Cisco switches, so that when it
goes down, at least you bought the best “perceived” switch and you don’t have
to answer questions about why you didn’t buy Cisco in the first place.
