: It really comes down to flexibility & the amount of work you want to do. If you run a small to medium website and want some generic analytics about your traffic, by all means, throw

@Bethany197

It really comes down to flexibility & the amount of work you want to do. If you run a small to medium website and want some generic analytics about your traffic, by all means, throw your data into Google Analytics and never look back. It's an excellent system that reliably gives you timely insight into user behavior on your website.

If your site is complicated & has many unconventional user flows (lots of AJAX?) that you'd like to follow, you might not be able to shoehorn things into GA. Also, if you want to correlate multiple sources of data with your web traffic (eg user information from your database), you're going to need to start thinking about a custom solution as well.

Beyond the capabilities of the tools, you need to look at the tradeoffs between client and server-side logging. Server-side logging always works, regardless of what the client does but, unfortunately, it is only able to gain a limited amount of information from the HTTP request. Client-side logging can be more flexible & gather more information but you have to worry about setting up an extra layer of services to collect them & there's the chance that you might miss some small portion of your traffic.

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