No 1. Use analytics to measure trends not traffic!

Date: 2009.05.07 | Category: General Web Analytics | Tags:

The worst mistake I come across on a daily basis is business managers who use their analytics packages to predict/forecast traffic and thus leads.

Why is this a problem?

1.  Google Analytics, for example, is a free tool where your data is hosted on Google’s own servers.  They are not accountable to you or your data in any way apart from what is inluded in their terms of service regarding privacy - http://www.google.com/analytics/en-GB/tos.html.

You will never know then what data has been missed/lost due to downtime or any other reason.

2. Google Analytics as other tag-based web analytics packages uses cookies to collect data.  In order for cookies to work, your browser must have them enabled. This means any visit that has come from a machine that does not have a browser enabled for cookies acception will not be tracked in Google Analytics.

3.  Google Analytics, for example, run development tests like ‘event tracking’ which are in Beta.  If you become dependent on the data whilst it is in Beta – you run the risk of your data disappearing if the beta run is not fully implemented.

4. It is not hard to make a mistake when adding profiles and filters to your google analytics package that can skew the data affected if not set up correctly.

5. I have seen many issues with adwords data collection where clients have had pages in their site redirected and so it has lost the gclid information.  In this instance, it would appear as organic search traffic when in actual fact it is paid search traffic.

6. Remembering to track all your campaigns with all the correct Google Analytics parameters in urls for e.g. yahoo/MSN PPC campaigns (as seen here - http://www.google.com/support/googleanalytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=55578).  In this case, the traffic would show as organic when in fact it is Paid.  Also, adwords recently made a change meaning that you have to be able to select your google analytics account from your adwords interface so that the ‘apply cost data’ field was enabled in analytics.  If you have seen a hike in direct traffic and a flatline in adwords – this is what has happened.

So what is it for?

Web analytics packages such as Google Analytics are tools to measure trends – peaks and troughs in your website traffic based upon what changes have been made to the site and how he online industry is affected.

Think of it like cause and effect.  You need to benchmark your current status, make a change and then measure its effectiveness.

Analytics packages take a while to understand that they are not entirely intuitive – in the words of Disraeli, there are ‘lies, damned lies and statistics’ and if you are not careful about how you interpret the data into information from ana analytics package then you are in fact faced with nothing.