Having dealt with lots of customers who take the stats generated by GA as gospel despite multiple problems, I disagree.
Some example problems: referrals unreliable, countries unreliable, sampling distorting figures, no warnings when data displayed is based on very little data, sessions often misinterpreted as clicks by users, inexplicable disparities with other methods of tracking because their methods are pretty opaque and because of sampling, in-page analytics looking deceptively like click-tracking when in most cases it uses page load data. Some of that you can attribute to user error, but it is not good for the market that google dominates tracking like this, and GA is sometimes misleading.
Just as an example of a problem I ran into recently - the free GA doesn't offer referral stats for https websites, but this isn't made clear to end users. As a result they simply trust that referrals have collapsed if a referring site switches to https.
The https referral issue isn't unique to GA, nor is it their fault. The browser doesn't pass a referrer value for HTTPS->HTTP traffic. Best way around this is to use HTTPS yourself, or use custom UTM tags on your link (if you have any say).
GA gives prominence to referrals in a world where more and more sites use https. People are making real business decisions based on this flawed stat, and most people have no idea that this is in fact a useless stat without https if any of your referrers are secure pages. Google says website x was your top referrer, and they just take that as truth.
I think they should just take it out and recommend using campaign links or landing pages or at the very least make it very clear that this is only a partial and distorted view. Same goes for in-page analytics etc. the presentation of overlays on page items (implying clicks) is misleading.
I don't think OP is saying GA sucks; I think he's saying that you can't take the results that GA gives you as being to-the-numbers accurate. They're still directionally accurate, and GA is so easy to implement that it gives you a lot of bang for relatively little effort.
Many people actually don't realize that GA does sampling, or the effect said sampling can have on their numbers.
Exactly. Knowing its limitations, and being able to communicate them well to the people you need to convince to succeed in your job, is the right way to go.
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I agree with your summary but don't agree that it's click bait. I read it as the author's warning that you should RTFM when deploying GA, which I doubt most people do.
In a perfect world where everyone understands every single data point completely or you don't have to work with everyone else that's completely true. That kind of thinking is however extremely limiting to 9/10 organisations out there because team work and team buy-in is so important for how decisions are made. Believing that GA can do anything and everything, which is the belief of more managers than you'd like to think, is exactly the underlying issue.
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tl;dr: Google Analytics is a great tool and informs you exactly what it does very well. You need to read what it does though.
I would say its a click bait.
Having dealt with lots of customers who take the stats generated by GA as gospel despite multiple problems, I disagree.
Some example problems: referrals unreliable, countries unreliable, sampling distorting figures, no warnings when data displayed is based on very little data, sessions often misinterpreted as clicks by users, inexplicable disparities with other methods of tracking because their methods are pretty opaque and because of sampling, in-page analytics looking deceptively like click-tracking when in most cases it uses page load data. Some of that you can attribute to user error, but it is not good for the market that google dominates tracking like this, and GA is sometimes misleading.
Just as an example of a problem I ran into recently - the free GA doesn't offer referral stats for https websites, but this isn't made clear to end users. As a result they simply trust that referrals have collapsed if a referring site switches to https.
The https referral issue isn't unique to GA, nor is it their fault. The browser doesn't pass a referrer value for HTTPS->HTTP traffic. Best way around this is to use HTTPS yourself, or use custom UTM tags on your link (if you have any say).
GA gives prominence to referrals in a world where more and more sites use https. People are making real business decisions based on this flawed stat, and most people have no idea that this is in fact a useless stat without https if any of your referrers are secure pages. Google says website x was your top referrer, and they just take that as truth.
I think they should just take it out and recommend using campaign links or landing pages or at the very least make it very clear that this is only a partial and distorted view. Same goes for in-page analytics etc. the presentation of overlays on page items (implying clicks) is misleading.
I don't think OP is saying GA sucks; I think he's saying that you can't take the results that GA gives you as being to-the-numbers accurate. They're still directionally accurate, and GA is so easy to implement that it gives you a lot of bang for relatively little effort.
Many people actually don't realize that GA does sampling, or the effect said sampling can have on their numbers.
Exactly. Knowing its limitations, and being able to communicate them well to the people you need to convince to succeed in your job, is the right way to go.
- Simon
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Thanks for the heads up. I'm quite new here :)
I agree with your summary but don't agree that it's click bait. I read it as the author's warning that you should RTFM when deploying GA, which I doubt most people do.
In a perfect world where everyone understands every single data point completely or you don't have to work with everyone else that's completely true. That kind of thinking is however extremely limiting to 9/10 organisations out there because team work and team buy-in is so important for how decisions are made. Believing that GA can do anything and everything, which is the belief of more managers than you'd like to think, is exactly the underlying issue.
- Simon