Blurry Future of Web Analytics
May 16th, 2008 by admin
My friend, who works as a web analyst, called me today and told a story about Google Analytics. It turns out that from April 30 to May 5 of this year, Google Analytics experienced processing errors and lost a lots of valuable data. Naturally, as all corporations do when they try to save face, Google claimed that almost all data would be saved (but not all of it) and “re-processed” by May 14.
Well, to put it mildly, my friend’s valuable data was not recovered as of today. In spite of great reports that he presented to his clients previously, his GA shows 100% of bounce rate for three days in a row, although the number of visits and unique visitors were preserved and “re-processed”. Naturally, as a web analyst, my friend is frustrated, because he worked really hard to get good ratings and traffic. And now he will get a lot of questions from his clients and feel bad for them.
This unfortunate event brings an interesting issue for discussion. It also shows that web analytics is still in the process of growing up. Personally, I still think that Google Analytics is a great web analytics tool and, mind you, it is free, while other tools on the market are not. We will never find out the whole truth about what happened, but it was definitely something out of the ordinary, because I don’t remember any other time when Google Analytics let us down.
What bothers me is that when I decided to contact Google and ask the question about this issue, I could not do easily through my Google Analytics. They kept re-directing me to various places on the Net and in the end I found myself on Google Analytics group with other dozens of web analysts asking the same question and not getting any answers. Some of them, who were obviously hanging in that group long enough, were complaining that Google Analytics team completely ignores that group.
He was obviously right because I did not find any monitoring administrator representing GA, who would try to help these guys, or even say hello, to say the least. I would not want to think that Google is just another mammoth corporation. If it is then the transformation was fast, because this was not how it all started. We have three leading search engines - one is falling down, another is, mostly irrelevant, and the third one is quickly forgetting that it came to power not only thanks to its great capabilities but also due to a great support of users who chose it and put on pedestal.
