How are you overcoming the complexity of Google Analytics?
Ali Alsayed
15 replies
It seems hard for a lot of the smaller product owners to get actionable insight form Google Analytics due its complexity.
So I'm interested to know what you are doing to overcome this issue (if it exists).
Replies
Fabian Maume@fabian_maume
GA is not the tool I'm using product management.
GA is nice for marketing metrics: conversion tracking & attribution.
For Product management it is good to have a tool which allows to build funnel on historical data like Mixpanel or Amplitude. Qualitative tools like Smartlook Qualitative Analytics are also a must to have.
Share
First time I saw Analytics I freaked out. 😄 I think that the better way to overcome the difficulty is to dive right in and to force ourselves to explore the tool. 10mins a day is enough. Google analytics online classes are a good start too. Plus, they are free!
If you want to see your metrics right away, I suggest you upload a dashboard template and modify it as you like. To create an awesome report, you also have Google DataStudio.
@cica_laure_mbappe I agree - the Google Analytics courses are a great start but they take time. I like your Google DataStudio suggestion! I didn't know that existed. Thank you.
It is indeed a problem. There are too many metrics and detail for a small play. Best is to create some basic dashboard with key metrics, check this out: https://startupanalytics.co.in/s...
This is not about complexity, this is about chosing the proper metric related to your business KPI. For a start, only three metrics should fit your need
By using Fathom analytics :D It's simple + privacy focused and you don't need cookie policy with them.
GA 4 is a bit more intuitive.
Find GA overkill for most purposes. We use Plausible Analytics, know the founder and get great service for very little cost. Also, GA uses cookies but Plausible does not so now we don't have to display that awful cookie notice that everyone hates on our website.
All depends from what you need from Google Analytics. If you just want to get reports about your audience, traffic and conversions that's a great free tool.
However now I suggest everyone to use tag manager instead. Why?- because tag manager is kinda more tracking tool, where you can implement all tracking pixels.
The only code on your website is tag manager. All other codes goes to tag manager.
I don't, I use it as Google default, and it's good enough for marketing and audience measure.
For everything else, i use jupyter notebooks with some custom events I save to a database. It's not great, but allow me to do really complex metrics and evaluation, like clustering and regressions.
Here's a tip: used the Saved Reports feature. When you're digging into your data and you find something useful, there's a good chance you won't even remember how you got there, so save it as a new report so you can quickly access it in the future.
This will change your behavior over time as well. You'll go straight to your saved reports for review and only dig through the menus when you need to answer a new question.
@ali_alsayed If you are looking for a simple Google Analytics reporting which gives you actionable insights based on ABC (acquisition, behaviour & conversion) model, please check https://www.datamyth.com/google-.... DataMyth provides ready to use reports along with data-driven analysis & insights which helps you understand what is working and what is not.