Selecting an analytics tool is not something you and your organisation will do every year, or even every couple years. That's why it is important to take the time to find out what your needs are and perhaps even what they might be in the future.

When identifying the right analytics tool for our clients, we like to ask a lot of questions to get down to the exact requirements. This can sometimes be quite difficult as there are lots of factors that might influence the choice of tool and as analytics specialists we like to stick to the data. That is why we like to use an evaluation matrix that attributes a numeric value based on performance to every characteristic selected. In addition, every characteristic can have a value based on its importance - but this might be over-engineered for some. With the matrix complete, you can easily identify the best tool for you based on the overall score it received. Sounds simple right?

Well as I said, we like to start by asking a lot of questions and without the right questions you might end up with a skewed or inaccurate score for the tools and will select a tool not right for you. I want to help you ask the right questions, and the easiest way is to split up the questions into categories: price, performance and privacy.

Price

This is arguably the most important category for a tool evaluation and can make or break the selection. That's precisely why it is important to break price into several characteristics in order to really understand your requirements.

  • What is the annual cost of the tool?
  • Are there any additional costs related to the tool(such as plugins, features..)?
  • Is there a limit set for actions, pageviews, users that will increase the cost?

Performance

This is quite a loaded category as it can include pretty much anything related to the analytics tool. This is where you might want to use characteristic value as some features might be more important than others. Or you can just limit yourself to only the top 10 characteristics - this might be easier and clearer when it comes to the scoring.

  • Can the tool collect data on your website? How easy is it to implement?
  • Can the tool collect data on your mobile app? How easy is it to implement?
  • How is ecommerce data collected? How easy is it to implement?
  • Can you export the collected data?
  • Can you import data from different sources? Google Search Console, Google Adsā€¦
  • Can you access the raw data from the reports?
  • To what extent can data be manipulated in the tool? For example: Visualization, segmentation, exclusionā€¦
  • How easy is the tool to navigate and understand?

Privacy

Privacy is becoming an increasingly important category when it comes to selecting an analytics tool due to the tightening laws and regulations for user privacy. Based on your organization's current and future efforts towards legal compliance, you will want to talk to your data protection officer (if you have one) to ensure that all the characteristics are scored.

  • Which laws is your website subject to? And is it a goal of yours to be compliant with it?
  • Can the tool be configured to be compliant with those law(s)?
  • Where is the data collected from the tool stored?
  • How easy is the data deletion process - in the event of a data deletion request?
  • Can the tool operate without collecting cookies?
  • Does the tool anonymize IP addresses?

You might use some of these exact questions or you might be inspired to ask similar ones, no matter the case, don't hesitate including your colleagues to ask and score. It's better to take the moment now and save time and resources in the future. Speaking of costs, donā€™t be afraid to spend some money on a good tool, afterall, the good stuff is never free :)

If you are intrested in getting some support from us, please get in touch!