Why you, as a businessperson or web analyst, should put your web analytics data on a database.
Google Analytics is free to use. It is relatively easy to incorporate into an existing webpage. It generates reports that meet most simple needs of a business. Beyond that, there are a number of challenges to working with Google Analytics.
Google Analytics is Not Designed for Business Users
Data captured by Google Analytics can normally only be viewed in Google Analytics. A user must be logged in to an active account to view your chosen reports. This is inconvenient for a business user who has no interest in creating their own custom views. Business people want to use their business intelligence tools for a reporting solution. Unfortunately, Google Analytics does not integrate with traditional operational support systems.
Business intelligence products are specifically designed to transform data into meaningful business terminology, and produce groupings that are consistent with the business goals. Google Analytics is more suited to web analytics needs, and business people will not find these metrics and dimensions help them stay informed.
Business Intelligence Software Can Use Database Data
If web analytics and eCommerce are to be part of a reporting system, then the easiest approach is to download the data from Google Analytics and store it in a database.
Business Intelligence tools allow you to build reports that show trends, patterns, and outliers in the data. You can also pivot the data to get a wide variety of cohorts. By adding additional dimensions, an analyst or business person can create a table showing the information they consider useful. Use different dimensions on your pivot tables to clearly display data in customized cohorts. Put the ‘time’ dimension on the column axis to get a trend across a given period.
BI tools have been built to perform offline and are designed to distribute reports and dashboards across an entire organization.
How We Can Help
NEXT Analytics supports storing database on your servers or on cloud-hosted databases including Google Cloud SQL, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure. If you’re in a hurry, you can take advantage of our consulting services. This reduces the time needed for training and gets you the reports you request quickly.