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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:

1. 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.
2. 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?
3. 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 needs change.
4. 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.
5. Language. Google insists on reporting 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 a free and debatably not very accurate software.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 29th, 2008 at 2:50 pm and is filed under Analytics.