You're absolutely right. Personally, I'm not a big fan of the setup procedure and style of Analytics' own report feature. Over the longer term, we will add other data sources to enrich the information that Analytics provides. At that point, the difference will become clearer. Also, we made the surprising experience that even the process outlined by you can be quite challenging for some website owners who try to avoid as much hassle as possible to get to their data, even if it means sacrificing a bit of depth. That's the situation we want to address by making the process as simple as possible, although (obviously) we have some work ahead of us.
As you or someone else mentioned, your service will probably not stop at just GA. If so, then this will be quite valuable - creating a unified interface to all major analytics systems. My vision was too limited when I first thought about what you were doing. Great work!
Comments
You're absolutely right. Personally, I'm not a big fan of the setup procedure and style of Analytics' own report feature. Over the longer term, we will add other data sources to enrich the information that Analytics provides. At that point, the difference will become clearer. Also, we made the surprising experience that even the process outlined by you can be quite challenging for some website owners who try to avoid as much hassle as possible to get to their data, even if it means sacrificing a bit of depth. That's the situation we want to address by making the process as simple as possible, although (obviously) we have some work ahead of us.
As you or someone else mentioned, your service will probably not stop at just GA. If so, then this will be quite valuable - creating a unified interface to all major analytics systems. My vision was too limited when I first thought about what you were doing. Great work!