Sunday, April 22, 2012
Are Analytics Trustworthy?
I have Google Analytics in place at my job and integrate my AdWords campaigns into the reporting functions. We also use Statcounter for several purposes (www.statcounter.com). I was reminded when I read a recent article in iMedia Connection, "3 reasons your analytics are useless" that we must use these tools with data quality in mind. Since this data is entirely unanalyzed, we must remember some of the outside variables that affect our data. As this article reiterates, make sure your implementation is correct, remember how many different devices access our websites these days and what that means for "unique" visitors, and last that Vendors change how these metrics/algorithms work all the time. All things to keep in mind when looking at our metrics. Makes you wonder, just how reliable are these statistics?
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You're using 2 different sources, which is invariably going to produce variance in the data, which you have to try to understand. And if something like social media is not being covered well, that suggests another platform, which will give another set of results.
ReplyDeleteI think most positive way to look at it is that analytics is partly art, not all science--or that it is an inexact science!
Good points to observe in our data-driven world. I used HBX some years back and we really had to evaluate the numbers on a common sense level upon implementation since there were no comparison figures. Our overlay data appeared off and indeed they were. I think it's only going to get more complicated as you pointed out, where even vendors like Google change metric definitions like "visits." I guess we'll have to look to these numbers as general customer trends (e.g., popular content and navigation pathways), not exacting figures. In the end, conversion data will remain key and substantive.
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