“Arguably, the number of real visits it fails to record is now so great as to render the tool's hit-counting prowess worse than an educated guess.”
One decade ago, any suggestion that something as eminently sophisticated as Google Analytics could be deemed unfit for purpose, would have categorised the suggestion-maker as something of a fruit loop. Offered free of charge, by a true leader in the tech genre, Google Analytics had become the gold standard in web traffic monitoring, and had found its way onto the majority of websites you or I would be likely to use.
Of course, GA does not only deliver data to the admins and owners of the websites who use it. It also delivers data to Google. And based on the “knowledge is power” principle, that phenomenal scale of insight into public behaviour has given Google an incredible advantage as a force in online advertising.
Google is thus desperate to maintain its standing in the analytics genre, but of late, things haven't been going quite as smoothly as the marketing world has been led to believe. In this post, I'm going to make the one-time sacrilegious assertion that Google Analytics may no longer be fit for its original purpose, and I'm going to explain why…
