Google Analytics Review/Rant
May 26th 2009 04:31 pm
No internet marketing blog would be complete without an Google Analytics rant.
It annoys the heck out of me!!
I know it’s very powerful, it can help you analyze your website and see where people are abandoning sales, etc.
But to me, Google Analytics is like the genius who can do complex calculus but can’t add 2 + 2.
Here’s what I mean: GA is all about telling you what percentage of visitors did X, how many went to Y, etc. but it can’t give you any specifics. It can answer ‘how many’ but not ‘which ones.’
For example, I set up a goal of reaching the sale confirmation page on my site.
I could see that I got 3 sales over a month. Great!! So I sat down with Google Analytics to try to figure out where these people came from so I could beef up that source.
To me, this seems like an obvious piece of information someone would want. But do you think there’s an easy way to get that info out of Google Analytics? Nope!
None of the goal conversion reports have a button or option for Show Source. Instead you have to try to guess where the visitor came from and then run the report from that angle.
Hmm, I thought, maybe they came from an organic search. So I went into Keyword report. Ok, so I could see that two of the keywords it showed me have a goal conversion.
But what about the remaining sale? Did it come from PPC? Nope. Referrals? Nope. You see the problem here. Even though GA knows this info, it doesn’t just tell you. You have to guess correctly to find out for sure.
At first I thought I was just being thick. I am after all a very newbie GA user. But after searching the web, I found a lot of people who asked this same question, how to relate goal conversion with source. And there was never an answer.
The closest I could get is to do a custom report and show the metric of Goal 1 Completion and the Dimension of Traffic Sources/Source. Aha, this shows me that 1 came from Google, 1 from MSN, and 1 from a website where I have a banner ad.
To see the keywords I have to add a submetric of Keyword, which means that for the Google and MSN results I have to drill down to see the keyword.
Again, this is such an obvious piece of data that people would want to see. Why goes Google Analytics make us jump through hoops to get it?
Another thing I was trying to do (ok, this is a little complex) was to assign a unique id to each visitor and then use GA to get some info related to that number.
Why would anyone want to do that? Because I was passing that number to my affiliate network and showing it on commission reports.
In other words, I knew that #2839 bought something from a vendor which gave me $22.50 in commissions but I wanted to know more about that person. What keyword did they search for? What browser did they use? What time of day did they come to my site?
I figured out how to do the hardest part of this, or so I thought: how to set Google Analytics’ User Defined Variable to be a unique number for that visitor. I thought the easy part was going to be running reports. But I was wrong. No such GA report would show me the value I set along with any source info.
As a matter of fact, I got so excited when I first discovered this new Custom Report feature (still in Beta). I thought that at last I’m going to be able to create reports with exactly the columns I want!
Alas, no, that would be too obvious. The best you can do is select a ‘dimension’ and a ‘metric’ to show, which means you can see a single piece of information for a visitor, but if you want any thing else, that would be a submetric that you drill down for.
I could see a list of all the ids for the visitors, but I had to drill down to see keywords. But you can’t export all the drill down detail, you can only export what you see on your screen at one time.
Here’s another complaint: since I have Analytic tracking code on every single page of my site, don’t you think GA would be able to show me all the pages someone visited? Why can’t I choose a single visitor (such as one of the people who reached goal 1) and see a trail of all my web pages he went to?
Google Analytics has all this info. Why can’t I see it?
So my conclusion is that Google Analytics is great for big corporations who want to know generalities and don’t have any inclination to get involved with specifics. But for me, it’s frustrating that it can’t tell me some really basic and obvious data on my visitors.
But it is free, which I why I use it. If I ever make money on internet marketing, I’ll get an analytics tool that is a little more user-friendly. I’ve heard good things about Hypertracker.
It annoys the heck out of me!!
I know it’s very powerful, it can help you analyze your website and see where people are abandoning sales, etc.
But to me, Google Analytics is like the genius who can do complex calculus but can’t add 2 + 2.
Here’s what I mean: GA is all about telling you what percentage of visitors did X, how many went to Y, etc. but it can’t give you any specifics. It can answer ‘how many’ but not ‘which ones.’
For example, I set up a goal of reaching the sale confirmation page on my site.
I could see that I got 3 sales over a month. Great!! So I sat down with Google Analytics to try to figure out where these people came from so I could beef up that source.
To me, this seems like an obvious piece of information someone would want. But do you think there’s an easy way to get that info out of Google Analytics? Nope!
None of the goal conversion reports have a button or option for Show Source. Instead you have to try to guess where the visitor came from and then run the report from that angle.
Hmm, I thought, maybe they came from an organic search. So I went into Keyword report. Ok, so I could see that two of the keywords it showed me have a goal conversion.
But what about the remaining sale? Did it come from PPC? Nope. Referrals? Nope. You see the problem here. Even though GA knows this info, it doesn’t just tell you. You have to guess correctly to find out for sure.
At first I thought I was just being thick. I am after all a very newbie GA user. But after searching the web, I found a lot of people who asked this same question, how to relate goal conversion with source. And there was never an answer.
The closest I could get is to do a custom report and show the metric of Goal 1 Completion and the Dimension of Traffic Sources/Source. Aha, this shows me that 1 came from Google, 1 from MSN, and 1 from a website where I have a banner ad.
To see the keywords I have to add a submetric of Keyword, which means that for the Google and MSN results I have to drill down to see the keyword.
Again, this is such an obvious piece of data that people would want to see. Why goes Google Analytics make us jump through hoops to get it?
Another thing I was trying to do (ok, this is a little complex) was to assign a unique id to each visitor and then use GA to get some info related to that number.
Why would anyone want to do that? Because I was passing that number to my affiliate network and showing it on commission reports.
In other words, I knew that #2839 bought something from a vendor which gave me $22.50 in commissions but I wanted to know more about that person. What keyword did they search for? What browser did they use? What time of day did they come to my site?
I figured out how to do the hardest part of this, or so I thought: how to set Google Analytics’ User Defined Variable to be a unique number for that visitor. I thought the easy part was going to be running reports. But I was wrong. No such GA report would show me the value I set along with any source info.
As a matter of fact, I got so excited when I first discovered this new Custom Report feature (still in Beta). I thought that at last I’m going to be able to create reports with exactly the columns I want!
Alas, no, that would be too obvious. The best you can do is select a ‘dimension’ and a ‘metric’ to show, which means you can see a single piece of information for a visitor, but if you want any thing else, that would be a submetric that you drill down for.
I could see a list of all the ids for the visitors, but I had to drill down to see keywords. But you can’t export all the drill down detail, you can only export what you see on your screen at one time.
Here’s another complaint: since I have Analytic tracking code on every single page of my site, don’t you think GA would be able to show me all the pages someone visited? Why can’t I choose a single visitor (such as one of the people who reached goal 1) and see a trail of all my web pages he went to?
Google Analytics has all this info. Why can’t I see it?
So my conclusion is that Google Analytics is great for big corporations who want to know generalities and don’t have any inclination to get involved with specifics. But for me, it’s frustrating that it can’t tell me some really basic and obvious data on my visitors.
But it is free, which I why I use it. If I ever make money on internet marketing, I’ll get an analytics tool that is a little more user-friendly. I’ve heard good things about Hypertracker.
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David responded on 20 Jul 2009 at 8:29 pm #
I empathize. The lack of drill down data when exporting has driven me nuts, and has certainly made me spend way too much time on the analysis side of things.
Advanced Segmentation was a big advantage when it became available, and I can’t wait to try out the new pivot table features that are due out soon. I’ve been working on setting up auto reporting with the API, but that’s taking longer than I thought too.
Still, like you said – its free. And great, as long as you can live with some gripes.
If you’re big into data analysis, I can’t recommend tableau highly enough. I’ll take a look at Hypertracker.