Tracking Customers Beyond Google Analytics A marketing shop gleans powerful insights on visitors to clients' sites, filling in the details where Google Analytics leaves off.

At Novatex Solutions, a 10-person digital marketing firm based in Sugar Land, Texas, marketing manager Jason Ephraim was dealing with a common shortcoming of Google Analytics. While excellent at tracking broad trends over time for a website, the service doesn't quickly reveal the kind of individual visitor information that can make or break a site's ability to generate leads. And the amount of time Ephraim spent unpacking that data was eating into the company's margins.

"It's not that [Google Analytics] was lacking, it's that there was no way to form a complete picture, especially of an individual user," he says. He wanted real-time, at-a-glance data on those visitors that would quickly alert him to any site issues, and more important, allow him to tweak his marketing efforts to generate solid leads from the relatively small number of visitors to his clients' websites.

His goal: Find a tool that would complement Google Analytics' big-picture snapshot and free up his time so he could manage more campaigns--and clients--effectively.