Guest Author: Justin Kistner, Webtrends

Recently there have been several stories trying to understand when to use paid solutions over free solutions like Google Analytics. One post was talking about Google’s Achilles Heel referring to the fact that they don’t identify individual visitors. Another was a question asking “When is Google not enough?” From our most recent launch we saw two stories comparing us to Google: Google Eat your Heart Out and Webtrends steals Google’s lunch money and spits in its face.

We wanted to take a moment to offer some insights into the decision on whether to use a free or paid service. The truth is, it’s not us vs. Google. We like Google! Their free service has spread the power of analytics to a much broader audience, which has helped businesses understand more about what analytics is and how it can help them. While we’re both in the analytics market, we don’t necessarily serve the same customers. To help clarify, let’s take a closer look at some of the factors that determines whether or not to use a paid analytics service.

All analytics tracks visitors in aggregate, but it’s tracking them in detail that is the deciding factor. If you’re wanting to connect an individual’s site behavior with your CRM profile, you’ll need to look at paid solutions. If you want to integrate with your data warehouse or a marketing automation solution, then you’ll need a paid solution. If you’re just getting started in analytics and don’t have budget, time, or program maturity to track individual customers; then Google Analytics might be right for you.

Some companies (and government) want to keep their data inside their firewall. Google Analytics is a SaaS offering and isn’t available as an on-premise software solution, which is also true for most of the paid solutions in the analytics space. If data privacy is a requirement for your business, you’ll need to look at on premise software solutions, some of which are free. Google does offer Urchin Analytics, which is available for download and installation on premise.

Google is used to handling large amounts of data. Gmail, for example, has a 7GB limit. Most users won’t use that much space. Shoot, many users can’t dream of how you could use that much space. Similarly, Google Analytics has data threshold limits and then starts to sample data. If capturing all of your data is important and you have a high volume of data, then you should look at solutions that don’t sample data. Many paid analytics services sample data as well, so this factor isn’t about paid vs. free.

Comparisons to Google make sense because we both offer analytics. More recently, the comparisons have been drawn because of our new interface. Clean, intuitive interfaces in analytics were a standard set by Google. Now that enterprise vendors like us are developing better UIs, it makes sense that people would draw comparisons to the standard.

It bears mentioning here, that most people just want basic stats for their blogs or small business websites. Even some larger businesses that do not use the web as a primary business driver might not need more than Google can offer. If someone is trying to figure out if a free service will work for them, they probably aren’t a good fit for Enterprise analytics. For reference, our customers are looking to build an enterprise measurement strategy that scales and meets sophisticated business needs. It isn’t technology issues, it is sophistication/maturity of your needs and being able to get the high touch services you need to grow your business. If that sounds like your needs, then you should consider paid Enterprise analytics.