Time to start doubting Google Analytics

Posted by Peter Labrow on 22 March 2010

When you can’t measure the activities of a significant percentage of your website visitors, all of your statistics are questionable.

There are some things that you use every day. If they were to disappear, you wouldn’t just miss them, you literally wouldn’t know how to replace them.

For website owners, Google Analytics is most definitely one of those things.

First of all, (and amazingly) it’s free. Secondly, it’s an excellent website analytics tool. Two reasons for website owners to look no further.

It’s no surprise then, that Google Analytics has around an 80% market share. Most of the world’s websites use it. There are alternatives – StatCounter, for example, works in a similar way as a JavaScript-based hosted solution. There’s a free version, but the stats are limited; for a few Euros a month, you get comprehensive stats.

Google Analytics has always had a (very small) Achilles’ Heel: it’s based on JavaScript. Any browser not running JavaScript doesn’t get tracked. But since that’s typically less than 1% of browsers, it’s never really been much of a problem. Take away 1% from any significantly large sets of statistics and it really makes little difference. (Actually, it has a second limitation, which is that its statistics are not real time, but that’s another story.)

That’s all about to change – and not for the better.

For what are probably sound ethical reasons, Google is about to provide an option for people to opt out of being tracked. Read that again – yes, that’s right, opt out. Seems fair enough – but what does that do to your analytics?

Probably not very much if Google buries the option to opt out in a series of menus, leaves ‘opt in’ as the default and doesn’t publicise it too well. Maybe we’ll lose another 1% from our statistics: no big deal.

But let’s say you lose 5% or 10%. That really is an amount big enough to skew your analytics. Any website owner would have to think seriously about implementing another analytics solution – either to supplement Google Analytics or replace it entirely.

And, as always, the picture can be a tad more complex.

If you’re an engineering company, like our client Rotrex Winches, your typical website visitor is probably not going to be very technically minded – so most of your visitors will probably not opt out of tracking.

But if you are selling to a technically savvy audience, such as our client QA (the UK’s leading IT training company), then the percentage of visitors with tracking turned off could be higher than typical. Worse, it could be specific communities – such as website developers, security people, application developers and so on, who are better informed about such things. If that happens, it will look like specific parts of your website are no longer visited – perhaps leading you to make product and marketing decisions that are based on misinformation.

Finally, of course, there are the organisations which control software settings centrally – most large businesses now do this. They could switch off tracking across the board, leading you to believe that you now have reduced market penetration with large business – or reduced interest in products that are specific to their needs.

You can’t really base business decisions on statistics minus 20%. So, although the reasoning behind the forthcoming opt out from Google Analytics might be laudable, the business reality is a frustrating nightmare.

Start looking forward to implementing a second analytics solution or spending more of your time just guessing what your website visitors are doing.

Comments

No comments · be the first to add a comment · this blog is moderated