Blog - Google Analytics

TWS does not use Google Analytics.

That’s the first thing to say. I thought I would take a few moments to expand on that and on why Google Analytics is not a great tool and why the COUNTA is.

First, Google Analytics is a robust and powerful tool that is used by billions of people, probably, certainly millions.

It is essentially the de-facto tool for web site analysis. But why? It is after all pretty complex, difficult to use, unintuitive and un-insightful.

2002

Lets go back to 2002. In 2002 TWS was just starting out. Based on immediate experience it soon became apparent that customers didn't actually just want a website, they expected their new website to go hand in had with fresh enquiries and new business. This drove TWS to pay particular attention to what we now call 'performance'. And how to measure performance? Well, with a counter. There were lots to choose from back them, one of which was NedStat. I believe they are still around today but not in the same guise.

Essentially NedStat provided a clear and simple hit counter. However, it was divided into two main sections. There were other parts, but the two main sections were the most useful and they covered total hits based on a daily basis as well as another section that explained what the last 100 hit were. Back in 2002 search engines still provided referrer tracking which was truly crucial intelligence and was included in the second section of NedStat.

Just for the newby's, referrer tracking is when a search term used by the web user was transferred in the referrer string to the server. Google does not allow that anymore which is a major issue that not many people seem to bother about. Google is not the owner of the internet. Referrer strings are part of the internet, but Google has determined that we are not worthy for that information.

Anyway. Nedstat was a great tool and I started putting it on all my sites to measure performance.

However, the issue came down to the fact that I was offering a web service but was using a third party tool. Without going too far into what that means, I essentially realised that if I were to provide that sort of service then I would need to supply my own tools. In short, using NedStat was a cheat. What happened if they stopped their service? What about the adverts? So I built the COUNTA.

The COUNTA is essentially the analytics tool that TWS uses to manage web sites and website performance and to address issues of accountability. It was initially based on NedStat except I put the two main features on the first page, so the total hits plus the last 100 hits in detail could be seen in one hit together. This is still today the fulcrum of the system. Its simple, you can see immediately what the status is of your site is. You can immediately spot traffic blips of any nature. Over the years the tool has grown to become a virtually comprehensive web management tool for SEO and search engine performance.

Reality

However, this is not a blog about how great the COUNTA is. Its about the reality of current marketing and use of analytics. To start off with, the singular issue that 99.9999% of marketing 'specialists' use Google Analytics and not their own in-house tools speaks volumes to me and should do to you. Just to make that clear. They are still doing what TWS did in 2002 and that is use a third party tool that they do not own to focus their own marketing efforts around. In short that is just wrong. I accept its not a very big 'wrong', but its still central to the bigger picture. They use Google Analytics as a de-facto choice. And  why? Why? Because they don’t really know what they are doing. They just slap Google Analytics on and think they have done a great job. It’s a scam.

Hard Questions

As such, I often recommend that people ask marketing agents and SEO specialists why they use Google Analytics. Its an important question. Ask them 'WHY?', and I imagine the answer will be that its the industry standard or that its offers great features or some other lame attempt at demonstrating competence and overall mastery of their discipline. The truth is, none of them have a clue. They are following the Google bandwagon.

In short, Google Analytics is crap.

Total Crap

It might sound strange to describe Google Analytics as total crap, and largely it is not, but sometimes you need to state an extreme to get a point across. It is essentially a bad tool. First, Google Analytics is incredibly complex. I have yet to meet a customer that knows how to use Google Analytics. I have had customers that have Google Analytics and can log in to it but never one that can demonstrate a clear understand of how their site works based on the information from Google Analytics. Often they refer to bounce rates and total hits, which says nothing really when you know what you are looking at. I have 15-years experience with web design and I find Google Analytics complex. How can I expect my clients to understand it when many of them find the most simple of tasks beyond them?

Obfuscation

Not only is Google Analytics difficult to use, its obfuscates information. That is, it presents so much information that its impossible to truly understand what you are looking at. When you look into a Google Analytics control interface you are shown a graph that shows total hits and then some general statistics on visits, pageviews, bounce rate and average time on site. Great, that sounds important, but its not. On its own its totally uninformative. That mass of information present obfuscates the true picture. When you look at the COUNTA you get a clear picture of the true state of the site, and that’s not by accident.

The true picture, essentially is the need to know who visited, why, and what they saw. Its simple. If I can see that a person from IBM visited a page on outdoor signage after typing into Google 'outdoor signs', then I immediately know the quality of that hit. For example, if that hit was from IBM for outdoor bands, then I know the hit was irrelevant. Its not the number 1, or a number within a bigger number, 1 of 40 hits that day. Its hit that has substance and value. From there we can take immediate action or make an immediate consideration into what happened. With Google Analytics you just don’t get that, and if you choose to make an advanced report then you might get an idea, but that’s not as simple as it sounds. However, why is Google unable to deliver at that level? First, they don’t supply referrer strings so you can’t see what was used to make the search. Secondly, they don't, without digging, offer a correlation with the landing pages. Whilst I understand that the reporting or some views might enable a replication of that, its not a fundamental aspect of the Google Analytics tool.

Clients Can’t Work It

A primary consideration in the development of the COUNTA was that it was easy for clients to use. If I ask a client to log into Google Analytics, there will be problems. They don’t know how to, they don’t have their password, or they get blocked for being in an unusual location. If getting a customer to even access a tool online can be that problematic, surely it says volumes about its value? So, assuming you can send a link to a client and they can click it and log in. Then you need to interpret what they see. The first page is straight forward. however, once you start to ask clients to follow you, you will soon get into trouble. Essentially, I know of no client that could follow a shared narrative across a Google Analytics interface without getting lost. It would be just a matter of moments before you realised that the client was not looking at the same information as you. And there could be many reasons for that. In short, if a tool is too complex for a client to understand, then it is a bad tool for client interaction. The COUNTA is designed to be idiot proof. All a client has to do is click a button and the information on a page is set. For example, when looking at search engine rankings, on button shows you all your search engine rankings. Another shows you landing page popularity. There is no need to spend time setting variable to condition that view.

The singular effort to make a COUNTA something that clients can look at and understand is central to why its a great tool.

Further, the COUNTA has been developed since 2002 and has been designed to answer all questions that a client can have. This is something that people always ignore. I have  had websites change hands following liquidation and will often talk to the IT person at the other end and will hear them say, sadly, 'yeah, know all about analytics', and then never look a moment further. My point is that people often just ignore the important details. However, the tool is massively superior to anything else out there and has been developed over years of listening to customers. This means that the important questions have been integrated with the development of the tool. Unfortunately, the fact that important decision makers ignore it is a sad travesty of the current state of how things work in the UK. Being in control is often the main priority, even if it means not having a clue.

To put this into another perspective, today I was asked for the page views, No. of users, average session duration and bounce rate of a site. So that a 'marketing person' could create a 'digital content plan that will increase the number of leads being captured on the website'. For this they wanted Google analytics placed on the site. However, this is already present in the COUNTA, except bounce rate. In short, it was a puerile request from a person with common marketing foresight blinkered by the Google Analytics paradigm. My point is that the world is full of people that just don’t know what they are doing and have just read a few marketing blogs written by people on the internet, or have even studied it, and think they are experts Analytics is hard graft and it comes from understanding the website, not ejaculating some hard worn marketing rhetoric.

Print It Out

Its hard to explain, but I often find that people, when asked to review their website will print it out, and after that, they clearly feel like they have been active, and are satisfied that they have done some work. So much so, that clients will often present their printout in a meeting with no edits. I might say 'did you review your site' and the client will say, 'yes I printed it out'. The point here is that the exact same activity placebo is present in Google Analytics. marketing people simply need that sense of well being derived from some activity, regardless of how productive it is. In short, they will spend an hour generating a Google report. Feeling clever that they have achieved that they will then send it to a client who will think it must be awesome and that’s the end of it. With the COUNTA the information you see directly IS THE REPORT. Its there in real time, designed to be immediately digestible.

A continuation of one of two recent engagements with client marketing agents went on to the issue of creating more enquiries. The marketing agent said they wanted to 'digital content plan that will increase the number of leads being captured on the website'. I replied that from the COUNTA I could see that already this month, as of 21 February the client had already had 10 substantial enquiries by form mail. Form mail is usually the tip of the iceberg being where a customer has filled out a form and not sent an email directly or made a call which is more common. For ten form enquiries I would expect 30 phone calls. Ten enquiries is a lot on its own, and the month is not out. The issue is not generating enquiries, its converting them. But this marketing genius, REQUIRED Google analytics to measure page views, users, sessions and bounce rate to increase inquiries. My point is that marketers hide behind Google Analytics as a tool that the client doesn’t understand and because its perceived as an industry standard they think it must be good and the marketing person scrapes through as an expert and as competent, often making broad and very important sound statements which upon expert consideration are empty and misleading, usually ending with something like, ‘and generate more sales’.

Lies

Today I spoke to a separate marketing agent who had insisted I set up google Analytics because they couldn't and also set up Google Tag Manager for them because they couldn't. I asked the girl three times in a row how they are marketing on Facebook and each time she was unable to answer the question. She essentially said three times that they consider hundreds of variables including demographics and behaviour. This is nonsense. Nothing is so complex that the primary strategy cannot be intelligently detailed. For example, the client was based in a small northern town and I asked if it focussed on that town. She was vague on that answer leading me to consider that maybe they didn't have a clue. Getting hits from Facebook by paying money is not difficult. Getting hits that convert into sales is.

Conclusion

In short, TWS does not use Google Analytics and would recommend that anyone that is using a company that does asks why. Ask 'Why do you use Google Analytics' and LISTEN to the answer. Listen and then think. Google Analytics is a good tool, it’s very powerful, but its scaled to meet every requirement, for example, its great for airlines, major global corporates and such where large scalable analytics are required, FOR FREE! But for small businesses, it just doesn’t add up. It just doesn’t offer the immediate insight that is required when dealing quickly over the phone or looking to make immediate and intelligent determinations.

If you don’t have a counter tool on a website then Google Analytics is great because its free, anyone can get that.

But seriously, Google is not a philanthropic enterprise, and its giving nothing away for free. Googles Analytics offering is a classic poacher/ gamekeeper complex. Google is monitoring itself. Simply the denial of referral strings is evidence enough to see that. If Google truly wanted people to understand their website traffic they would provide that. after all, they get that information. Are we not worthy or trustworthy enough for that? No, its deeper rooted. Information and intelligence are POWER and Google does not want people getting power. This might sound alarmist but after 15 years of monitoring traffic I see that as a fact. Instead of providing the fundamental information that was inherent with the common sense pioneers such as NedStat, that is, who, when, why and where etc, they supply obfuscated information that is of no use to anyone. It also means they can supply false information, how will you know? Google gains because it gains intelligence which is power that it can then leverage. When you apply google Analytics, you are essentially extending Googles tentacles to every aspect of your business on the internet, who your customers are? What they want? How well your business is doing. That’s why its free. Does that concern you? Maybe it should.

So all you need to do is ask yourself, WHY? Why do so many people reply on google Analytics, a third party tool, for the most important task of understanding their sites performance and their business? Its a question without an immediate or clear answer.

However, suffice to say, you will find yourself hard pressed to find ANY web design/management company that offers its own in-house analytics such as supplied by TWS via the COUNTA. My final word on the matter is that it should be clear that Google has a hidden agenda and that is to limit true intelligence and to set expectations through monitoring and management of its own ecosystem, i.e. controlling the internet.

To discuss your sites web performance and find out how TWS can help you, please feel free to call.