How good is Google Analytics?

“In God we trust, everyone else must bring data.”
I read this interesting quote some time back and have tried to follow that in my professional life i.e. make decisions based on hard data. But the question I’m going to explore in this post (and the next one) is can we trust the data that Google Analytics shows us.

Before you turn back thinking that this is just one more of those Google bashing blogs, I must quickly point out that most of the issues discussed here are applicable to any analytics tool that uses similar technology. And yeah, there will be a point when I turn my attention to a possible “Google is evil” theory; but I’ll give you some advanced warning before we reach that point.

It has been a while that I’m noticing a lot of discrepancies between the GA’s data and the internal tracking data (server logs) that we maintain for our site. I turned to my linkedin network to understand if anyone else has noticed such issues and got a few responses that confirmed the problem with GA.

Google Analytics gives us the following important (albeit inaccurate) pieces of information
• Site Usage (number of hits, page views, bounce rate etc)
• Visitor overview (new vs. returning, visitor location etc)
• Traffic sources (search engines, referring sites)
• Content Performance (top content, top landing/exit pages)
• Adwords integration

Let’s look at these points one by one.

Site Usage: It has been observed by many people that GA under reports the traffic of your site; although it’s not clear to what extent, but I’ve read about cases where GA reports only 40% of the actual traffic.

One of the responses I got in linkedin was from David Kutcher, President of Confluent Forms, who very nicely explained the issue with using JavaScript (as GA does)

“Google Analytics is good, but it will never replace server log analytics, for the main reason that it relies on Javascript (the Urchin code).
Javascript's main drawbacks for this are:
1. it can be cached by a proxy server
2. it can be disabled on the client
These two points alone can wildly skew your results….”

Combine David’s explanation with the fact that our server logs typically over-report the traffic because most of the times they fail to ignore the spiders or bots (which GA very appropriately excludes from its report), and you can understand why the huge discrepancies are there.

Perhaps we could have lived with this serious issue if we knew (approximately) that GA under-reports the traffic by a certain percentage; but as Michael Martinez points out in this article (again thanks to David for the link) he has noticed GA diverging from the server data “in a consistently downward spiral” over few months. So what that means is GA is not only inaccurate in its traffic reports it’s, to make matters worse, inconsistent.

We’ll look at the other GA reports in next posting.

The secret blog and the unforgivable curse

(This post is a deviation from the common theme of this blog. If you have not read my other blog or the Harry Potter series, then I'll recommend you to skip this post)

I knew this day would come… I always suspected he knew… but I was not looking forward to the day when we’ll come face to face.. I walked down the dark corridor .. there was a certain chill in the air.. I don’t know how long I walked.. may be five minutes .. may be five hours… I had lost the sense of time…

and then suddenly I could see him.. a dark figure was sitting behind the desk .. the red eyes clearly visible even in the dark….

He saw me.. the lips curled slightly to show that he was finding the situation amusing… “so you are here.. I knew you wouldn’t refuse to come.. not that you had the choice.. sit down”.
I disliked being told what to do.. so I decided to keep standing.. in any case I felt better protected that way. “No thanks.. so why did you want to see me”…

“Ah! Right into the heart of things.. I liked the attitude.. we would have been great together in one team”

I had already calmed myself… the fear of unknown was no longer there.. “I never liked you P*****.. I would have never worked with you.. get to the point quickly”

His eyes got narrower.. “I heard that you are writing a blog on me”

“Yes”
“Why?”
“Some of my friends find it very funny”
“And what do you think has happened to my reputation”

I almost laughed. “ You never had a reputation P*****, in any case the blog is not public.. I never display the URL on my profile.. only my friends know the URL and only they can read it”

“Give me the URL”

“No.. I can’t .. it’s not for you”

He raised his hand… I was too slow to react.. He shouted “Crucio” … several things happened at the same time..

The curse hit me in full blow.. the chillness I was feeling before was gone.. the night was getting hotter.. There was a loud crack as if someone had just apparated .. and the cracking noise was enough to wake up the portrait of Sirus’s mom… she started screaming… not the usual screams like “scum.. mudblood”… but she was screaming as if she was in pain.. that was unusual…

What was more unusual was the state I was in.. I knew the crucio curse has hit me and was expecting severe pain all over my body.. but the pain was there only in my left hand..

I knew the time had come .. I looked up at the figure… he seemed to have been slightly distracted by Sirus’s mom’s screams.. I had just enough time to fire one curse.. I didn’t know which one to use.. nobody had told me

Then it suddenly came to me.. of course.. I was stupid not to think of that before.. I raised my wand and shouted “Yippee Ki Yay M*&%$^%$^”.. nobody in Hogwarts knew this curse. I had learned this from John McClane.. the LAPD cop from Die Hard series…the curse hit him on the chest.. he fell back from the chair.. I charged ahead.. not sure what to expect.. he opened his mouth.. but no words came out of it.. he whistled . a strange loud whistle that echoed everywhere in the still night.. I knew he was calling someone and I had to run.. but I was losing my sense.. the pain in the left hand was killing me.. I fainted…

I forced myself to open my eyes … I was not sure where I was.. I could still hear the screams coming from the portrait of the Sirus’s mother. .. where was I……..

And then to my great disappointment I realized what has happened.. I was still sleeping in my apartment.. the Harry Potter book lied next to my bed.. the pain was coming from my left hand because I was sleeping on it, not enough to kill me though…

the night has become hotter not because of the curse , but because of the power cut.. the fan and ac in my room were off….the source of the cracking sound, that I thought was the sound of someone apparating, was the stabilizer of my ac which switched off automatically as the power went..

but the screams? Ah, that was coming from my inverter which got overloaded and the buzzer went off.. and then I heard the whistle again.. the security guard outside my house was patrolling the campus..

So I was a muggle again ..*sigh*.. it all seemed so real.. the “jiju blog” that I write secretly… the Die Hard movie dialog to kill him..

I was feeling very low again… my throat was dry.. but I was too lazy to get up and fetch the bottle from fridge.. I shouted “Acio Bottle”.. ahh !! nothing happened.

To CTC or not to CTC ....... and Google security issues

Apparently, Google has decided to discontinue the Click-to-call (CTC) feature from their Google Maps site. I wonder why they did that, as it seemed like a very useful feature to have. Looking at the response of users to this news in Google groups, it seems most of them share my disappointment and surprise.

On a different note, many iGoogle and Google reader users have reported that they are able to login to other accounts or notice the accounts switch automatically mid-way through the session. You can read the reports here, here and here. Well, maybe now that Lord Voldemort is back in power, we might expect such eerie events occurring.

Updated:
Since I didn't have a clue regarding why Google discontinued the click-to-call feature, I designed a very well thought out systematic step-by-step procedure to find out the cause. I opened the browser, typed in google.com in the address box, and used the Google search engine to look for the cause.

The plan failed. There is not much information available about Google's thought process (and it may take a little while before bloggers with more expertise than me on this subject try to enlighten us with their views).

But the search revealed something very interesting. I stumbled upon this one year old article , which is by the way a post on Google's official blog, where Google explains that someone hacked into their blog and posted a "fake" article saying Google has decided to remove click-to-call. The Google official added "As for the click-to-call test, it is progressing on schedule, and we're pleased with the results thus far".

Well, it seems the hacker had more insight about this feature than the Google officials. And strangely that one year old article combines the two issues I've mentioned above (click-to-call and Google security issues). I wonder whether the hacker is related to Professor Trelawney.