This post will compare the various features and capabilities of the Omniture SiteCatalyst, Google Analytics, and Yahoo Web Analytics applications, and determine how appropriate each is for the measurement and analysis of website traffic. This post is likely to get quite wordy, so I apologize in advance. This analysis is intended to be comprehensive for evaluating analytics solutions.
While writing this I will attempt to show no bias towards one application over another, and if I am presenting my opinion, I will be sure to point this out.
Overview
Omniture SiteCatalyst has long been a major player in the analytics market, meeting the needs for many large, corporate clients. Google Analytics emerged just over 3 years ago after Google purchased the analytics solution Urchin, and as of the date of this posting (1.7.2010) Yahoo! Web Analytics is still in a beta stage, only allowing access to certain small business customers and News Consortium members.
The Omniture, Google, and Yahoo solutions rely on the standard JavaScript/Image beacon methods to measure web traffic. In short, each time a page is loaded, a piece of JavaScript builds an image request that is sent to a data-gathering server. The image request consists of query parameters with data about the page view. The query parameters are then parsed by the analytics applications and input as data into the appropriate traffic reports. Continue reading »
