What's the difference between Trovus and Google Analytics? - 5th March 2010

A common question we are often asked is: what's the difference between Trovus and Google Analytics? In this blog we aim to answer this question with some help from some of our clients.

 1) Trovus provide a Solution, not just Software

If over the last 12 months, Google Analytics and their consultants have helped you to increase your revenues by 4-5% and taken out unproductive marketing costs then Google Analytics is probably the solution for you.

If on the other hand, it has only produced some interesting information such as the number of visitors to your site, the keywords sending you traffic and some conversion data linking into Google Adwords you may be asking yourself the question "so what can I do with this to drive value?"

This is where we can answer the" so what" question and help you to commercialise the value of your website intelligence - by setting up processes to track, measure and engage your marketing activity and driving value from all your sales and marketing investments.

2) Our solution is designed to answer the question - Who and Why? not How Many?

In the words of one of our clients Phillip Woodgate from Goodman Jones Chartered Accountants - a firm who have consistently won Accountancy Age awards for their use of the internet (Phillip also sits on the Institute of Chartered Accountants Committee advising on IT Strategy):

In the past we've used Google Analytics or similar to analyse out our web data. The information they provide tends not focus on what is actually of most value to us. For example, we may have 10,000 visitors, but we are only really interested in those visitors that are relevant to our organisation. For example, large global companies and educational establishments look at our site, but neither of these groups is unlikely to generate leads and business. Trovus provides us with far more information on who is looking at our site and why. In particular, they have designed it so it is simple to use and easy to understand. We can therefore review the information and get a better understanding of visitors that are relevant to our organisation. Based on the information I can then ensure that our site delivers in the areas for these visitors to assist in generating additional relevant visitors and leads. This leads to more feedback from Trovus Revelations and us evolving our site to maximise our objective i.e. lead generation.

This enables us to look at a relevant visitor and understand what they have found interesting in our site and the level of interest. For example, our client base is mid-sized companies so I was able to see a mid-sized company that has been actively looking at our site and finding out about us. Taking this data gives a good overview of possible warm leads and their areas of interest.

The best way to understand the above is to have your data loaded into Trovus and review it for yourself. In my case I instantly saw it was giving valuable information I just wasn't getting before. For us the benefit easily outweighs the cost.

At a functional level there are 5 key differences between Trovus and Google Analytics:

1) Company Profiling - Trovus allows you the ability to browse the entire history of an organisation which has looked at your website (we aggregate this data on an organisation by organisation basis) - from what we have seen of Google Analytics they don't have the functionality to show this overall history which is what is so powerful in providing an entire view of that organisations browsing history.

2) Watch List Alerts - the ability to add an organisation to the Watch List which delivers automatic email alerts when specific companies look at your website.

3) ISP List Filtering - the global ISP list which we maintain and continue to "clean up" so that the user is only shown the company traffic and not the whole volumes of ISP traffic which means the user can go straight to the relevant information.

4) Individual Page Drill Downs - the ability to identify every single page on the website and then to drill down and see every organisation which has looked at that page.

5) Searchable Database - we build a searchable database of companies which you categorise, tag and export to integrate with your existing internal systems (CRM, Marketing Databases etc).

For the clients we work with our processes coupled with these main differentiators above are the key between their website intelligence being just interesting and the information translating into tangible value for them.

The last word goes to another one of our clients who very kindly responded to a Twitter question - ‘Is Trovus any good?' - with the following response:

Hi, further to your request on Twitter.

I'm the head of marketing and communications for a professional services company in the construction sector. We rebranded in Jan 2008 to bring all 13 businesses together as one group and our major channel

to reposition was the new website which now has 900 pages of content. I needed a way to demonstrate to my board that the website had commercial value, and should not be viewed as a static piece of collateral but an active communications toolkit. Google Analytics was ok when we first launched the new site, but it didn't really tell me who. Which is when Casper and Ed called. I've had Trovus plugged into my website for nine months now. It's awesome, never fails to impress my internal clients and is very easy to use and analyse. It tells me who comes onto my website, where they go and how often really, really easily. I basically use it in four ways: bidding intell, language and content improvement, buzz in the marketplace and identifying potential customer segments and companies.

Best wishes

Cat

If you'd like to speak with us and understand what the Trovus Solution could do for you, we'd love to chat....

Back to blog..