Google Analytics (GA) platform provides this marketing intelligence for free. It also has the necessary dashboards and reports where you can monitor and analyze your visitors.

Google Analytics captures all the actions and events on your website, but it does not provide access to raw event-level data via reporting tools in the Google Analytics Dashboard and Google Analytics Data Export APIs. This makes actions like segmenting users by behavior using machine learning tools challenging. because you are limited by the granularity of data being exported from Google Analytics.
On top of that the data provided is

Google Analytics is free! Google Analytics acts as data repository for all the web traffic data on the website.

• Pageview and Traffic: Figure out most viewed pages, time spent on pages, etc.
  Traffic Source: Understand the web traffic source, example search engine, paid ads, referral, etc.
• Events: Register the events such as Video views, white paper downloads, etc.
• Goal Conversions and Attribution: Create or track goals for form fill-ups, attribute the leads to certain marketing channels.

However, with all these benefits mentioned above, Google Analytics does not provide direct access to the underlying raw data. You can only get reports and aggregated data.

1. Data Sampling: In Google Analytics, if you select historic data with large amount of data, Google Analytics will sample the data. This ensures that few power users do not monopolize the free platform. This data sampling is different from the limit of 10 million records for hits or events, per property, per month.

2. Aggregate Data: Since you do not have direct access to hit level data, the only way to see the data is through reports. These reports data might be pre-aggregated resulting in limited usage.

3. Pre-canned Reports: The reports and categories are prebuilt, and you can only modify the template. This is extremely limited if advanced analytics is needed.

4. No Data Ownership: You do not have direct access to data in the database. So if google decides to purge it you have no control.

5. No Data Integration: The Google Analytics platform has the data for mostly web traffic data and some Google ads data. There are few data point that can be imported from the other sources like Facebook; But it is extremely limited.

6. Fragmented Reporting: For web traffic report you will have to login to GA dashboard, for Ad performance data you need Google Ads Dashboard, for organic search keyword you need Google Search Console Dashboard and the list is never ending. Because of reporting fragmentation omni channel reporting is not possible.

7. No PII Data Provided: Google Analytics does not provide any visitor information; even the public WAN IP address of the visitor is not provided.

Fortunately, most of these problems can be solved with raw data. Pretty cool, right? You can read more on how to get raw data here.

Now that you know the limitation of aggregated data provided by Google Analytics, let us see what you can get out of raw data.

1. Event Timestamp: With google analytics raw data, you can easily get the precise timing of an event for a given user and compare it to another event for the same user. For a larger analysis, you can aggregate data any way you want, average, median, percentile distribution, or some advanced statistical model. It is important to know that X% of your users convert within 5 minutes and Y% take more than 7 days. Based on these factors you can communicate differently with these two groups of visitors.

2. Integration with other Data Sources: You can join GA data against data from other sources, such as database, data warehouse, mailing list, accounting, CMS & CRM and from any other source that would make sense. Some specific use cases include:

3. In-depth Data Analytics: Even though Google Analytics has many pre-defined reports and you can create custom reports in your GA portal or using its published APIs, you will find limitation in GA query APIs and reports, including data sampling, query dimension/metrics limits, etc. With raw Google Analytics data, you can run queries with unsampled data, large date range, unlimited number of dimensions and metrics. It’s easier to query databases or date warehouse than to query Google Analytics API. It will speed up your workflow and enable you to gain greater insight more quickly. Below are some sample queries you can run over raw data:

4. Data Cleansing and Transformation: The data stored on Google Analytics servers cannot be changed. With raw data, you can clean data or modify data. For example:

5. Create Marketing campaign strategy for top customers: The top 20% customers bring 80% of your revenue. You need to identify and retain top customers and create more top customers. You can use the following two steps to create personalized marketing campaigns for top customers using your raw data.

This method will help you raise the ROI of your ad spend by a lot and will provide you with a ton of new data. The data you can use to fine-tune your algorithms and make it even more effective.

6. Customized Target Audience: Data scientists and analysts can use raw data to create data models and update data models using new data collected every day. This type of automated user assignment is often used by digital marketers looking to identify and group users based on common interests. For instance, a pipeline can be created to automatically add new users to a specific audience or user group based on their online behavior. Customer profiles can be developed based on the exported data and can be used to build personalization platforms, customer scoring, customer segmentation and lifetime value models.

7. Powerful Dashboards: You can use the raw data to create business dashboard with data visualization and reporting tools. Using raw data in conjunction with other BI reporting tools, you are not restricted by the segments created (or allowed) by Google Analytics. It is simply a matter of writing the query, creating a connection in BI reporting tool to automatically refresh the data daily, and publishing this dashboard to the rest of the company.

Fortunately, most of these problems can be solved with raw data. Pretty cool, right? You can read more on how to get raw data here.

Google Analytics raw data is invaluable and is worth exploring. Electrik.AI makes it possible to get google analytics raw data to your datastore in just a few clicks. Give Raw Google Analytics Data a try, you would be surprised with the amount of depth it adds to your marketing data analysis.