Difference between webtrends omniture and Google analytics?

Answer 1

WebTrends and Omniture provide their analytics service or software for a fee. Using their service, they will host, generate, and store the reports and data. Using their software, those responsibilities fall upon the administrator.

Google Analytics is a free service. The traffic reports are hosted, generated, and stored by Google.

WebTrends and Omniture provide multiple methods for generating web traffic analysis reports. This is done using either client-side tracking via a javascript tag included on all of the web site pages requiring analysis, or via analysis of the web server generated log files.

Generation of reports in Google Analytics can only be done via client-side tracking, analysis of your server web log files is not possible with this option.

In terms of product capabilities, all provide the ability to filter and segment the data, create custom reports and dashboards, and perform advanced techniques such as URL search and replace or campaign tracking. There are small differences in reports, for example, Google Analytics will not display IP address information, while WebTrends and Omniture will. Google Analytics will integrate with Google Webmaster Tools to provide Google specific SEO reports.

The big differences occur in the product suites that Omniture and WebTrends have available to integrate with their base packages. These extra products will add to cost, but allow the data from the base products to become more robust by enabling more complex features like data warehousing. Google Analytics does not go so far as to have these extras available.

Generally speaking, for basic web traffic analysis needs, these three products will provide similar capabilities, but only Google Analytics is free. In terms of scalability that medium to large enterprises may need, Omniture and WebTrends could be better candidates and testing both in a lab environment, as well as negotiating prices and deals, would be advisable.