Measuring Success with Google Analytics

As you may know, I occasionally write articles elsewhere (journalism.co.uk, eConsultancy, DaveChaffey.com). In case you miss these, and because I like to keep my thoughts in one place I also reproduce here a little later. The following is from my September post at eConsultancy.
Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are important to drive improvement for your website. Although it is obviously interesting and insightful to compare how your website is performing against your peers and competitors, it can be a mistake to place too much emphasis on external industry benchmarks.
These external benchmarks can be misleading and often end up with you finding the benchmark that fits your story, giving a false impression of success. KPIs vary greatly by business sector, and even within subsectors there is wide variance: think “flights” versus “holidays” or “food retail” versus “clothing retail”. Even comparing against your competitors with identically defined goals is fraught with gross approximations. [...]

I wanted to put this out there to illustrate the type of crap competitors will go to to discredit Google Analytics. The link takes you to an article by clicktale which is a rehash of a previous discredited post by Brandt Dainow last year. Take a minute to read it and the two so called flaws of Google Analytics…

Privacy on the web has always been a contentious issue, as the vast majority of users wish to remain anonymous while browsing. However, little attention has been given to the privacy of mobile phone users. Hence I was interested to read the article on mobile apps from Sarah Perez:
www.readwriteweb.com/archives/dear_iphone_users_your_apps_are_spying_on_you.php
Compared to computer use, mobile phones have a greater potential to infringe on your privacy for the following reasons:

Mobiles are registered to a unique user (legally this is very difficult to avoid)
Mobiles are rarely shared (though this is more common in Asia)
No such thing as “Internet cafe for mobiles”, user almost always use their own phone
Mobiles broadcast their position by triangulating with transmitters typically with an accuracy of 500m radius (though with GPS enabled phones this can be much more precise).

Putting the web analytics privacy debate into perspective
Since Google, Microsoft and Yahoo entered the market with their web analytics tools, privacy [...]

Leaving aside the issue of privacy, is it valid to track visitors as individuals? From a marketer’s perspective, tracking individuals sounds great in theory – you understand your customers better right? But if you receive 10,000 visitors per day and have weekly marketing performance meetings, that equals 70,000 data points to discuss? Best practice is to consider longer time frames in order to mitigate against calendar anomalies i.e. weekends v weekdays, holidays, the weather, force majeure etc… So for one month that could be 280,000 data points.

This post comes in four parts:
1. Summary – there is no accuracy debate!
2. Introduction – why most of the web is junk and what role web analytics plays
3. On-site versus Off-site web analytics tools and how they work
4. Discrepancies – what’s accurate and how can accuracy be improved

This is a multi-page post
Page: 1 2 3

The term ‘uniques’ is often used in web analytics as an abbreviation for unique web visitors (i.e. how many unique people visited my site). The problem is that counting unique visitors is fraught with problems that are so fundamental, it renders the term ‘uniques’ meaningless.
Firstly, cookies get lost, blocked and deleted. Research has shown that after a period of four weeks, nearly one third of tracking cookies are missing, which means the visitor will be incorrectly considered a new unique visitor should they return to the same website (see Accuracy Whitepaper for further reading).
The longer the time period, the greater the chance of this happening, which makes comparing year-on-year data invalid for example. In addition, browsers make it very easy these days for cookies to be removed – see the new ‘incognito’ features of the latest Firefox, Chrome and Internet Explorer browsers.
However, the biggest issue for counting uniques faced by both [...]

         
Last year I wrote an article/whitepaper on web analytics accuracy. The intention of this was to be a reference guide to all the accuracy issues that on-site web measurement tools face, and how you can mitigate the error bars. Apart from updating the article recently, I wanted to illustrate how close (or not) different vendor tools on the same website can be when it comes to counting the basics – visits, pageviews, time on site and visitors.
To do this, I have looked at two very different web sites with two tools collecting web visitor data side by side:

Site A – This blog, running Google Analytics and Yahoo Web Analytics. According to Google, there are 188 pages in the Google Index and traffic is approximately 10,000 visits/month
Site B – A retail site that runs Nielsen SiteCensus and Google Analytics (site URL to remain anonymous). According to Google, there 12,808 pages [...]

I have heard the notion of Google being analogous to a bank for a number of years. Recently, Jim Sterne also referred to this bank analogy while we were discussing online privacy at the Orion Analytics panel of SES London . So I wanted share and expand upon this discussion.
Please take a moment to read my disclaimer before continuing – that is, the views express on this site are entirely my own and do not represent those of my employer.
Is Google entering into online banking?
In this respect no (I am not considering Checkout here). What I mean by being analogous to a bank, is in the way that data itself has become "currency". Information has always been valuable – no one likes to be the last to know, and being the first to know gives you a competitive advantage. So whether online or not, the storage and access [...]

This accuracy post is an extrapolation of a section in Chapter 2 of the book which has led to a separate PDF accuracy whitepaper available to download for free.
Why is this necessary? Well, the question of accuracy crops up all the time on numerous forums and at conferences. Essentially many practitioners of web analytics worry about accuracy. Some vendors even claim greater accuracy than others (though as I explain in the whitepaper this cannot be true), and there is the inter-industry debate about whether off-site analytics (for example, Hitwise, comScore, Neilsen//Netratings etc.), are better at predicting traffic levels than on-site analytics tools (such as Webtrends, Omniture, IndexTools, Google Analytics etc.). I won’t go into that debate here, except to schematically illustrate the two different web analytics approaches in Figure 1.
Figure 1 : On-site v off-site web analytics

The truth is, for either approach, web analytics [...]

Recently, the perception of ABCE’s role for the web analytics industry appears to have become blurred. Hence I wanted to post some comments here – these were also posted on the Web Analytics Association’s forum last month.
ABC ELECTRONIC is the trading name of Electronic Media Audits Ltd. To briefly summarise from their web site:
ABC ELECTRONIC is the industry owned, not-for-profit organisation that works with and for media owners, advertisers and media buyers to help them gain confidence in the data they use. The UK company performs many services but essentially conducts independent audits of client’s digital data to ensure it complies with agreed industry standards – as defined by JICWEBS (The Joint Industry Committee for Web Standards in the UK and Ireland).

To clarify, an ABCE web audit is NOT an accuracy report – it is a verification report for web site owners. Simplified that means ABCE auditors verify [...]

The Google Analytics business model is unique for the web analytics industry – a deep dive reporting tool suitable for companies of all sizes (see Who uses Google Analytics? ) given away free of charge. But is there a catch to this uniqueness? Well in my view there is none. Of course, given my background I am slightly bias, but the idea behind giving away Google Analytics makes perfect sense:

Provide accountability and transparency to existing Google advertisers
Provide confidence and prove the value of online advertising to potential new advertisers

Happy customers are good for business
For Google, may be as a result of using Google Analytics, customers will remain advertisers for a longer period, become less likely to lapse their accounts (take breaks from advertising), even raise their AdWords budgets to capture a greater share of the search market. For those users that are not advertisers, perhaps Google Analytics will give them [...]

Its actually quite easy to detect which web analytics tool a web site is using – you can simply view the source code and look for the page tags yourself. Of course pure logfile analysers cannot be detected in this way, but those are now much less common due to their inherent limitations.
*This post was updated 26-Mar-2009*
To save you the laborious task of manually checking html source code, there are now various tools available that can detect the javascript page tags for you. One excellent one I use myself is WASP – a Firefox plugin (by Stephane Hamel , Immeria blog ) that shows you the web analytics vendor as you browse around the web. It can currently detect 32 different vendors including GA, Urchin, Omniture, Visual Sciences (Web Side Story), Webtrends, Unica, Clicktracks, Indextools plus many others.
Last week, I spent 30 minutes browsing around and found a number [...]