I was one of the first people to preach about the greatness and added-value of Google Analytics. I suggested it to all of our clients. It is sad however to see that Google Analytics is not what it says on the tin.
Five reasons why:
- The filters don’t work. I challenge anyone to prove to me that this is untrue. I have tried using them on at least 5 profiles but they do not work. I have correspondence with Google Support to back this up and plenty of live examples. So if filtering is important to you do not use them.
- CPC vs SEO traffic. Unfortunate to say, but GA still does a pretty lame job of distinguishing between the two. Not something you would expect from the kings of search, is it?
- Goal Tracking. 4 goals are not enough if you are serious about tracking your results online. This was great a year ago, but things are moving fast and need change.
- The Benchmarking service. Having seen the results I have to say that if this is a joke, no one is laughing. Considering that you trust Google with all your traffic data, there is no value coming back from these numbers.
- Language. Google insists on reporting the same numbers with different names. Unique visitors vs visitors vs visits is not only confusing for your average marketing manager but also for agencies, that find it very hard to explain to clients.
If you are still in the dark ages of NOT analysing your web traffic, Google Analytics remains a good starting point, but the advice to medium and large companies is to go after a more professional package where you have control and can exclude certain traffic sources, but also measure different scenarios, without the limitations of free and debatably not very accurate software.
12 Responses
You are not the first person that complains about GA. I find the product great but it is frustrating not to be able to rely on it for business decisions. Google need to improve, but this is still miles ahead of any other free stats program out there.
I agree with Michael, it is far ahead of a lot of free programs the only one that comes close to it is Statcounters free service.
There are far too many metrics to consider and when you try and translate the results to non savvy clients it turns rapidly into a conversation about how many links have we got then?
More often I have felt that,Google Analytics is totally unrealiable.They show a data about the traffics based on some phantom calculations.To my gratest astonishment I have seen the no of visitors have come down,the countries and locations from where the site was visited and intially listed have vanished,they show locations only if they wish,show a random no(abt the no of hits etc).Actaually Google needs real improvement…
what the need to do is to drop JAVASCRIPT! A lot of people have javascript disabled or use programs that disables javascript on certain sites.
It’s too cool and beautiful but has it’s issues GA.
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Totally agree but Google Analytics is still the best for getting stats and think they are trying to improve the product
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