Google Analytics Innacuracies

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CHR

CHR

Design matters
Nov 28, 2002
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If you're using Google Analytics to track info on your site, be sure to read The disturbing inaccuracy behind Google Analytics.

The author details how misleading data, especially 'bounces', can distort your analysis.
Treating bounces as visits doesn't just affect the accuracy of average duration -- it affects any metric based on the number of visits.

  • Visit count
    When you see a figure in your Google Analytic reports for Total Visits, ask yourself: What do you think that represents? If you see Total Visits as the number of people who entered your site, who reacted to the sales pitch, who engaged with your content, who potentially could have bought products, then you are wrong. It is the number of people who arrived at the front door of the site, nothing more.
  • Conversion rate
    The Conversion Rate tells me how successful my site is at selling. It is legitimate to calculate Conversion Rate including bounces, but my personal experience is that it is misleading to do so. I use Conversion Rate to improve my site's sales pitch. People who bounce were never exposed to it, so including them in the calculation means I cannot possibly know whether my sales pitch is working or not.
  • Exit rate
    Google Analytics tells me how many people exited the site from any given page. Like Conversion Rate, this is useful for assessing the sales performance of the page. However, getting someone to enter the site and getting them to stay in it once they have entered are two very different tasks. They have different factors and processes involved, and they have to be measured and improved separately. You can't assess the ability of a page to hold someone in the site and the ability of that page to engage a new arrival in the same number. Including bounces in the Exit Rate makes the Exit Rate metric useless.
  • AdWords
    It is important to bear in mind that this error does not affect the assessment of key metrics for AdWords traffic. You pay for people to come to the site, whether they bounce or not, so cost-per-visitor and ROI for AdWords is not affected.
Click to expand...
Be sure to read the third page for suggested ways to tweak your data to get a clearer picture of your sites' traffic.
 
I take issue with the statement that Bounces shouldn't be factored into Conversion Rate because the user was never subjected to the sales pitch. Visitors don't just enter through the home page any more. Search traffic will likely land on the page that is relevant to the query - especially if you have a properly setup PPC campaign. You NEED to factor bounces into conversion rates, because you need to know how effective each page is as a landing page.

Further, his tips on correcting the stats deal with creating "genuine averages." Sadly, as the Analytics Guru Avinash Kaushik has said many times, site-wide averages are useless. The real key is segmenting, and then more segmenting. Deal with the numbers - including the bounces - in segments, not as useless and broad sitewide averages.

His analogy of people glancing at a store window versus entering the store is not correct. People walking by the store and glancing in the window have no intent. People visiting a website have some measure of intent - the bounce rate tells you if you're meeting those needs or not. Segmenting tells you what type of visitor you are /are not engaging. A bounce is more the equivalent of some who enters your store but leaves quickly, without speaking to a sales person.

Ryan
 
I just read the comments on this article ... the author has been pretty soundly rebuked.
 
Infinite said:
Visitors don't just enter through the home page any more. Search traffic will likely land on the page that is relevant to the query ...Ryan
Click to expand...

I agree looked at my stats last night. Out of the last 14 orders placed only 3 came in via the shop entrance all the other were either location name or funeral spray/ wreath etc.
 
My google stats never come close to the numbers from my log files.

I mean, WAY off, to the point I don't trust google.

That's why I am looking to try something different again. (Done Websidestory and webtrends already)
 
JB,

Log file analytics are just as bad as, if not worse than, JS-based analytics. Both have their strengths and weaknesses.

As Avinash Kaushik says: No two analytics programs will ever agree with each other. You need to compare a program's output to itself for any real measures of consistency.

Ex: Log files can't tell you a user's screen size, whether or not they have flash/Java active, whether or not they are a unique browser, return shopper, etc. Log files mostly reply on IPs to track users. However, if you have several people from one corporate network browsing a site it's impossible to distinguish them. You may also have a user from AOL who is moving from one proxy to another and changing IP several times during their visit.

Ryan
 
ahhh but these numbers are grossly off. These aren't small differences.

One PPC company billed me for 950 clicks - I complained cuz google showed me something like 75 - yet my log files showed 950.

I'm still certainly looking for something better.

I think I'm getting what I paid for with google, and that somehow their stats are weighted toward showing you google traffic.

Here's about how I see it

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-reliable-is-google-analytics
 
bloomz said:
ahhh but these numbers are grossly off. These aren't small differences.

One PPC company billed me for 950 clicks - I complained cuz google showed me something like 75 - yet my log files showed 950.
Click to expand...

That looks to me like bot-driven click fraud. Bots don't have javascript and wouldn't trigger the GA code.

Was this a PPC consultant, a PPC network or what? I'd be more concerned with the click fraud than the analytics.

bloomz said:
I'm still certainly looking for something better.

I think I'm getting what I paid for with google, and that somehow their stats are weighted toward showing you google traffic.

Here's about how I see it

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-reliable-is-google-analytics
Click to expand...

That's an old article, and again his issues point to over-reporting from log based analytics that doesn't properly filter bot & scraper traffic.

I've tested GA against Get Clicky and Mint, both tag-based services, and it's always been pretty close.

You may want to try out Urchin - it's the enterprise version of GA, and works as a log file analyzer. You might still be able to snag a beta invite.

Ryan
 
Ouchy spendy.....
 
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