Google Analytics is a free web analytics service offered by Google that allows website owners and marketers to track the visits and user behavior of a website. As the platform is user-friendly and free, many business owners solely rely on Google Analytics to gather information about their website performance. Even though the platform is very functional, and it can be a right step towards making use of your data, it has many limitations. Read on and discern the drawbacks of Google Analytics and the need to upgrade your business to advanced and foolproof Data Analytics Solutions.
Sampled data
Google Analytics does not provide an overall picture of your data, it only analyzes a subset of your website’s traffic and gives a report based on sampled data. It randomly focuses on a dataset to reduce the volume of processing required to analyze every free account and estimates the overall results.
This approach only gives accurate results when the leads you receive on the website are uniform and the website visits are seldom uniform. In a nutshell, if you really wish to make precise sense of your data and understand your visitors better, you need to rely on better data analytics services.
Raw Data Access
Google Analytics only proffers aggregated information of your data which is provided in a summarized format. You cannot access the raw data with this service and the reports you get may not include valuable details. Data Analytics solutions yield better results when it is applied to raw data as you can mold the data into any form or report. Google Analytics will thus limit your data capabilities; it cannot perform sophisticated analysis or advanced evaluations. Even though the paid plan of Google Analytics gives you access to raw data, it still has some limitations. To dig into details of your data and derive insightful visualizations from it, you will have to upgrade from Google Analytics to focused data analytics solutions.
Bots & Spams
Every device that loads your website is not always a visitor. There could be bots and spam traffic that crawl into your website which can skew your data. The way bots use websites is different from typical users and its traffic hampers the efficiency of Google Analytics. It misrepresents conversion rate and pages per session as bots usually load just one page of the site. You can overcome this drawback by setting up custom segments to filter the traffic, but it requires extra effort and monitoring, and it still may not deliver the desired results.
Missing Information
Google tracks the visitor’s behavior via JavaScript and Cookies. Many visitors might have switched off JavaScript or blocked the Cookies because of which such visits are not tracked properly, leading to under-reporting. Follow this link to read an article by Forbes, detailing the ways bots can affect an ordinary Analytics platform.
The only way to ensure that every bit of your data is effectively analyzed and guarantee actionable insights from it is to avail the services of a reliable data analytics company. Site Lantern’s data analytics solutions will help you to overcome the limitations of free analytics tools and will set up the right data tools, specifically tailored for your unique business requirements. Log on to our website to know more about our services or talk to our experts.