If you are using Google Analytics, then you’ve seen this message on a recent login:

System Message: Analytics Processing Delay from April 30th to May 5th

Google Analytics experienced a data processing error from April 30th to May 5th. Almost all of the data has been recovered and is currently being reprocessed. The recovered data will be reflected in your reports within a few days. Please note that a small percentage of data, particularly in the area of e-commerce reporting, was not recoverable from those dates.

This hiccup on Google’s part touched off a heated debate in the webanalytics Yahoo! group. The two extremes of the debate:

• Google Analytics is a free toy, you get what you pay for, and anyone who is serious about their web site would never consider relying on it for actionable information
• Google Analytics meets the needs of the majority of companies, and Google has all sorts of incentives to stay honest and provide a reliable service

As is usually the case, both extremes have some valid underpinnings. And, as is usually the case, “the real truth” is more complex than an extreme oversimplification. Stéphane Hamel, who is Google-like in his own way, as the creator and provider of the free and widely adopted Web Analytics Solutions Profiler Firefox plug-in, captures this truth well when he assesses the debate using this fruit analogy:

Google Analytics (or other low-end solutions, some of them very good) and high-end tools are like comparing strawberries and oranges… still fruits and you can still get pretty good juice out of them, but not quite the same. Some will even mix both juices to make pretty good cocktails… In fact, around 10% of the sites use both GA and another solution.

As it turns out, we, and many of our clients, fall into that “10%” case (Stéphane’s statistic there is based on information that he collects — anonymously — from people who use his tool).

We use Google Analytics for our analysis of our web site, its content, and how visitors interact with it. We’re a small site, and we’re a small company — we easily garner a lot of value from this free tool, and we’re not making real-time, massive-investment decisions using the data in such a way that an occasional hiccup really impacts us.

We also have Eloqua deployed on our site (and on many of our clients’ sites). Eloqua captures visitor data through a Javascript-based page tag deployed on the site — just like any page tag-based tool does. But, Eloqua is fundamentally different when it comes to its primary intent behind capturing that data — it’s oriented more towards the visitor than towards the content. Laura Ramos from Forrester Research summarized the different types of technologies that B2B marketers use on the Forrester blog a couple of months ago, and she (correctly) put Eloqua in the “Marketing Automation” bucket rather than the “Web Analytics” bucket. Eloqua’s web analytics report don’t hold a candle to Google Analytics.

Eloqua is decidedly not free. Google Analytics is. We use them both. The strawberry is good for one type of analysis. The orange is good for another. In the end, we’re looking for a higher level piña colada of effective lead marketing! Drink up!