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.
Comments
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.