I frequently see organisations, large and small, using Google’s Analytics (GA) as their method to measure RoI or whatever else they think they need to establish and I wonder what drove them to that decision. I know it’s free and I know that Google is all cuddly but there are a couple of issues that I am torn on:
1. Google’s role as an advertiser and a reporting agent are in direct conflict. I am sure that one does not directly affect the other but they will gather market data and the temptation to mine this for commercial gain must be huge. Avoiding using GA would remove this all together. Have a read of “Google minding your own business” from Donna Bogatin to see an expansion of this topic
2. Session-based analytics are pretty useless in the grand scheme of things. Knowing that 1000 people visited your site today and 10% of them converted from the search term “blue widgets” might, on the face of it, tell you a lot but misses out so much important information such as “which people are the 10%” and “how much did these 10% go onto spend over x months”. These are real e-business questions that Google Analytics fails to answer.
3. GA works by running a script on the page, this script has a size over 5k - doesn’t sound a lot but the Google search page is just 12k. A good target size for your landing pages are 25k so this is a 20% increase in size = 20% longer to load the page.
4. There are some legitimate privacy concerns as Google is acquiring information about private individuals such as their IP address and their buying and browsing history. Now you could argue that this is not personal information but I think if you look at it from a moral standpoint it is, in many ways, far more personal than, say, my date of birth or maybe even my name. Tracking me via my IP address is far more reliable and finds every place I go - tracking me by name only works where I use my name so I can choose whether I can be found. You don’t have the option to switch off your IP address.
5. If GA is so good then why does Google not use it themselves?