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If you hadn’t noticed, Google was down to upwards of 14% of it’s users at one point this week.

Yes – down - as in “very slow” for some, even “not working at all” for others.  Only for an hour mind you, yet down nonetheless.  They even blogged about it.  Given what we know about Google’s market share, that’s a LOT of people who lost their ability to search the only really good search engine on Earth.

And that prompted me to think once again (yes, I have a very bizarre way of connecting dots) about web analytics – the tracking and analyzing of site visitor information that is so important to my small and mid-size business clients…

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THE END IS NOT UPON US

Personally, I learned about the down-time thanks to an article by Jordan McCollum, who confirmed that the End Times weren’t actually upon us (yet).  See, I wasn’t directly affected.  Either because I was surfing elsewhere at the time, or I actually was at Google (probably looking to see where my mesothelioma law firm clients were in the SERPs for one of their key word phrases – yes I really do have a client in that arena) and in that moment, wasn’t one of the fourteen percent.  Heaven forbid.  I would have been extremely upset.

Well, not really – I get paid whether Google is down for an hour or not.  I am, after all, the owner of my own company.  And I ALWAYS pay myself for my time, regardless of circumstances outside my control. 

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MARKET SHARE OR SMOKE & MIRRORS?

Depending on who you believe, Google owns anywhere from  65%,  to more than 70% of all search on the web.  Andrew Lipsman over at comScore tried to explain the variations in these statistics earlier this year.  Of course, his spin attempted to put comScore in a good light as compared to the others.  Because it’s in his financial best interest to convince you that comScore is reliable, trustworthy and necessary.  Except the truth is they use old school statistic methods that come out of the Television marketing world.  Archaic.  Barely not really plausible even in the 20th century.

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I LAUGH IN THE FACE OF “FACTUAL” STATISTICS

Anyone who knows me, knows that I’m a statistics agnostic.  I used to be a crime statistician, and if it suits me, I can show you in five minutes how to turn soup into nuts, water into wine, and five visits into five thousand.  On digital paper at least.  So when it comes to statistics, I inherently know that you can’t take them at their face value.

Now, I don’t go around just mocking stats and web analytics companies.  I always put them in context, and fact check.  And use other information to help form business decisions.

However I firmly believe that when it comes to Competitive Insight, statistics are inherently a bear trap waiting for the unsuspecting camper to meander right into.  Especially when it comes to Internet analytics.

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GIRL SCOUTS AND HELLS ANGELS

For example – if a web site is in a truly niche market – let’s say they cater to Girl Scouts, hard core bikers, Gen Y, or hundreds or thousands of other niches, then it is most likely that solutions from comScore, Nielsen, HitWise, Alexa, Compete, and all the rest, are going to be completely misleading at best, and patently false at worst.

Why?  Because none of the players have any real grasp of those  user bases, or, in the case of “comparisons to your competition”, access to the real traffic statistics on those web sites.

Sure, Alexa may have slipped their toolbar onto the computers of a small number of unsuspecting Girl Scouts.

But a “few” is far from any kind of large enough share to be a valid basis for extrapolation.  And its’ more likely that the only reason those Girl Scouts have computers that got that Alexa ToolBar on them is because their older brother was probably surfing for illegal music downloads at some point. Or porn.  And the statistics from that household are then tainted, to say the least.

The point though, is that if the market focus of a web site is Girl Scouts, Panel based stat companies can’t possibly have enough Girl Scouts on their panel to give you real data to work with.

Calling All Volunteers

Exactly how many hard core, shiv carrying, barroom brawling bikers do you think voluntarily allow their computer to be loaded with a 3rd party user activity tracking solution from comScore or Nielsen?  Okay, so YOU may not cater to that crowd, but again, it’s illustrative of the diversity of markets served through the web.  And a perfect example for this article.

Hells Angels Disclaimer: If you know of any Hells Angels who are participants on the ComScore or Nielsen Net Ratings panels, please let me know and I will peacefully and most respectfully revise this article.  Or I’ll just call one of my friends from the Diablos and let them work it out with the Angels. 

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Commercial Break

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SMALLER SITES AND COMPETITIVE DECISIONS

In my example above, with say, Girl Scouts, there are probably hundreds, if not thousands of web sites – perfectly legitimate, professionally designed web sites, that cater to people in the Girl Scout demographic.  How well do sites like HitWise or Alexa provide insights into market reach for sites like those?  Not well at all.  Terribly in fact.  Beyond pitiful. And it’s even worse for specialty sites with that market focus.

Just to test and either validate or debunk my own theory, I ran a check on three web sites that fit this arena.

GirlScoutShop.org

This site, run by Girl Scouts of Eastern Massachusetts, sells uniforms, books, insignia, camping supplies and more.  They’re a legitimate web site selling authentic Girl Scout products.  A small site, for sure, yet if I want to market to Girl Scouts, and I want competitive insight into other web sites that cater to them and come up in the top five at google, they go on my list.

YouthLeadership.com

This site is not focused specifically on Girl Scouts as their market.  In fact, according to their web site, they are “An online information center for youth leadership education and development.”  Their market is Teachers, Parents, Kids and Teens.  A site that would make a perfectly fine destination for any up and coming Girl Scout looking to have a positive impact on the world.  Better still, with such a large scope, the site must have lots of visitor traffic data.

LearnAndServe.gov

According to their web site, Learn and Serve America supports and encourages service-learning throughout the United States, and enables over one million students to make meaningful contributions to their community while building their academic and civic skills.  Again, this is quite an appropriate web site suited for Girl Scouts.  And since it’s a U.S. Government site, surely there’s plenty of traffic.

Now, I picked these three not because any one of them might be just like your web site from a products or services perspective, but to illustrate a point.

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ALEXA IS WORTHLESS

While all three are appropriate for the Girl Scout market, checking on them statistically at Alexa is worthless.  Alexa shows NO statistics on any one of these sites.  As though they don’t even exist.  Or aren’t “worthy” of tracking. Because if they’re not in what Alexa deems the top 100,000 web sites (at least the top 100,000 that Alexa has statistics on), then you don’t get any info at all.

HOW FAR DOWN THE RABBIT HOLE DO WE HAVE TO GO?

Well heck.  In order to be Alexa’s top 100,000 sites you need to be pretty special.  How Special?  Let’s take a look.

One of our clients, Carlos Santana (maybe you’ve heard of him?) has a web site called Santana.com - a site that Alexa says is ranked number 219,860.  And that 0.00049% of all web users have visited the site in the past month.  And another client’s site, RedRocker.com (have you heard of Sammy Hagar?), doesn’t register on the charts at Alexa either.  (Sammy only got a paltry 0.00019% of the web’s users last month according to Alexa). SO even if you’re name is Carlos Santana or Sammy Hagar, you can’t even get comparative data of any significance from Alexa.  What a waste of time.

BUT LIKE I SAID

Like I said though – the basis for their statistics is massively flawed so even when someone comes to me and says “We’re ranked #1 at Alexa in our market”,  I say “SO WHAT.”  What I care about is – do you come up higher than your competitors in Google organics?  What is your conversion rate for your PPC ads?  What’s your Return on Investment in your total Internet initiative? And anyone who wants to advertise on your site or invest in your company should be asking the same questions.  If they’re not, they’re participating in what I like to call the Statistics bubble.  (Think Mortgage Bubble, Internet 1999 bubble)

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COMPETE.COM IS BETTER?

Compete claims that their data is the only real and valid data because they have arrangements with the major service providers.  They’re supposedly given direct access to Internet Service Provider traffic information.

So okay – let’s find out.

I ran all three sites through the Compete.com system.  Amazingly, what I found were apparently  numbers.  YouthLeadership.com supposedly had 549 unique visitors in April, LearnAndServe.gov had over 15,000, and GirlScoutShop.org was reported to have had 12,973.  Well the problem with these numbers is that I’ve done a number of tests over the past couple years with sites like this.  While I don’t have access to the actual server logs or analytics reports for any of these examples, I do have such access for over five hundred web sites – clients I have served.

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But wait.

How trustworthy are the Compete.com numbers?

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WAX APPLES VS EDIBLE APPLES

Well for RedRocker.com, Compete reports that in April, they had 38,387 total visitors and 18,413 of those were unique.  Well, according to Google Analytics, they had 68,946 total visits, and of those, 37,194 were unique.  And from my previous article, while we know Google Analytics is flawed, if anything, they UNDER-report visits.

So the next time someone tells you to check out Compete.com, tell them I said to take a bite out of that wax apple and let me know how it tastes.

And Suggest they install Google Analytics.  For Free.

For all it’s flaws, you get much more reliable information on your own site than any panel based extrapolation.  And if you think you can learn about your competition from any of those companies or Compete.com, fuggedaboutit.  (HEY – I lived in Brooklyn before moving to California)

And if one of those “panel based” statistic providers tries to sell you their products, or worse, someone insists on making a business decision based on statistics from one of those “We really don’t have access to real statistics, but we have access to the big ISP servers so TRUST US” companies (like Compete.com), please don’t believe them.  PLEASE.

Seriously.

I beg you.

And for the record, Hells Angel Photo copyright 2008 Alan Bleiweiss. (Do you really want to know the story behind that?)

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What do you think? Am I off my rocker? Or do you have similar experiences?

Alan Bleiweiss has been an Internet professional since 1995, managing client projects valued at upwards of $2,000,000.00. Just a few of his most notable clients through the years have included PCH.com, WeightWatchers.com, and Starkist.com. Follow him on Twitter @AlanBleiweiss , read his Search Marketing blog at Search Marketing Wisdom, and be sure to read his column at SearchEngineJournal.com the 2nd and 4th Tuesday each month. Competitive Insight, Girl Scouts and Hells Angels is a post from: Search Marketing Wisdom All content copyright Alan Bleiweiss unless otherwise attributed by me in the article.

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As the resident SEO and SEM expert at WebSight Design, Inc., I am responsible for managing the search engine optimization efforts for all of our over 600 web sites. At WSD, our clients range from the smallest sole proprietors to Carlos Santana, Sammy Hagar, and the band Tool. The vast majority – over 90% of our clients, either can’t afford full-on SEO work, or don’t yet understand the importance of this aspect of business marketing strategy. As we continue to help educate our clients, at the very least, we provide basic SEO services – keyword research, proper “under-the-hood” and on-page content seeding, and more recently, providing sitemap.xml files (to help Google, Yahoo, and soon MSN to better index entire web sites).

One thing that more and more clients are asking for is Google Analytics. We previously provided WebTrends site activity log crunching and reporting. WebTrends, in our experience and in the experience of many other industry professionals, is too much of a drain on precious shared-hosting server resources. In addition, server based analytics solutions typically don’t filter out non-human site activity. This can include search engine spiders and web crawlers (bots)- automated software designed to scan web pages, either for legitimate or quite often illegal purposes (such as hackers looking for vulnerabilities that can be exploited.

So like many other web hosting providers, this past year we began setting up Google Analytics (GA) in many of our client’s sites. Their code resides right on web pages, thus dramatically reducing server drain. It’s free, which our small business clients appreciate, and it’s provided by one of the most well known brand names.

While less than ideal in it’s reporting and analysis methods (a topic I will discuss in an upcoming blog post), the user interface offers what has become a quite popular experience for many small business owners. Big charts and graphs, large fonts, and bright bold colors. Everyone loves all things Google. Well, I don’t anymore – read on to learn why.

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For a few months I have been faced with a new challenge in the SEO arena – why Google Analytics is consistently showing dramatically less site traffic than WebTrends or my own web site visitor log analysis software. Upon my initial research, it was discovered that Google filters out spiders, bots and web crawlers from their statistics, in an effort to show only actual human visitor activity.

While this is a noble goal, it can not explain the vast difference I’ve seen consistently regardless of the size or scope of web site, or what the market focus of the site. For example, on one site, WebTrends was reporting over 100,000 unique visitors, while for the same period, GA showed just over 6,000!

Why am I so upset? Isn’t Google providing reliable information? Why would Google provide a flawed solution to millions of business owners?
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EXPECTED AND TRUSTED BY ADVERTISERS

Some of our clients reach market segments that big name advertisers want to reach. So they sell ad space on their sites – typically big Flash banners. Those advertisers won’t bother placing ads on web sites that don’t garner what they consider to be a large enough viewership. They want to put their marketing and advertising money where it will do the most good. So they rely heavily upon marketing metrics (statistics that show how many unique page views a site garners, or how many unique visitors, or average time spent on a page are just three such metrics guages).

Because these major corporations spend big money, they need to find a way to get reliable, trustworthy information. It’s too easy for someone to generate phony, beefed up statistics, and there are hundreds of analytics tools out on the market.

Google has done such a great job at marketing their brand (have you seen their stock charts?) that they’re the darling of the advertising and public relations industry. Everybody wants to be the next Google, or they have Google on a solutions provider pedestal. Kind of like Microsoft was in the late 80′s and 90′s.

So here we have a situation where WebTrends was reporting ten, twenty, even 100 times as many visits to our client sites as compared to Google. If GA filters out non-human activity, then it’s easy to assume GA is going to be more trustworthy when the advertisers determine whether a site is worthy of their ad spending dollars.

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RELIED UPON BY PROSPECTIVE INVESTORS

The other major area that GA can play a major role in affecting positively or negatively, is with prospective investors. As a web site garners more and more visitors, a time might come when the site owner seeks out investment money so they can grow or expand. Prospective investors rely on reliable and trustworthy market metrics to help in their “due diligence” process when deciding whether to put their money into the hands of web site owners.

For many of the same reasons as advertisers, and most especially because of how much money Google has generated in profits for early-on investors, a start-up’s prospective investors tend to view GA statistics as reliable and good enough for their decision making processes.
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BUT WHAT IF GOOGLE’S NUMBERS ARE WRONG?
Because this issue has been bugging me for a few months, I’d already done some base-line research on where the discrepancies come from, however I’m a busy guy – there’s only so many hours in the day, and oddly enough, I have a life outside of my work. Until recently, I hadn’t had enough motive to figure out the nitty gritty details, and as a result, I’ve had my intuitive and preliminary beliefs, but hadn’t had a fact based professional opinion.

That changed recently when a client came to us in a panic – they recently switched to GA, right at a time when they are seeking major investor money. So how can they go to prospective investors and say that the numbers they were seeing through WebTrends were severely inflated, and that GA doesn’t justify investor money? IF GA were truly accurate, they would need to abandon investor opportunities. Their hopes and dreams, and all the hard work they put into their venture until now would either be lost forever, or at the very least, their business growth would be put on hold indefinitely.

This prompted me to really dig. As deep as I could. Casting as wide a net as possible to find what others have experienced, to learn more about how GA works, and once and for all, either confirm my suspicions and preliminary findings, or to back off and be in the position of needing to break the bad news to our clients. And if it turned out that I was right, I would need to be willing to find another solution – one that I would have the confidence to communicate to my clients that we were providing them a truly reliable and trustworthy analytics solution.
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DOING THE HOMEWORK – AND WHAT I FOUND

The Google Analytics tracking code is a small snippet of code that is inserted into the body of an HTML page. When the HTML page is loaded, the tracking code contacts the Google Analytics server and logs a pageview for that page, as well as captures information about the visit and non-identifying information about the visitor.

If there is a disconnect between the site and Google when a page is loaded, that page view is not tracked.

If Google’s system is down, no visits during this time can be tracked. This happens from time to time. How often? Google claims it’s rare, and they also claim that even when their system is down, they’re still tracking – I don’t believe that’s 100% accurate at all.

If a site visitor has Javascript turned off, that page view is not tracked.

If you are in a different timezone than where the server is located, GA will report you visited the site at a different time, or even on a different day than you really did!

Google Analytics only records pageview requests with a status code of 200. If any of your site’s pages give a status code other than this, the page views won’t be recorded even though someone did view those pages.

Something the Google help files don’t discuss is on-page Javascript conflicts. I got hold of a live Google rep, and they confirmed that if there is other javascript on a page, a possibility exists that the code in that can conflict with Google Analytics – and an error in tracking can occur.

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SO WHAT ABOUT SOLUTIONS LIKE NetRatings, Omniture, CoreMetrics?

Everyone has a solution. They all claim to be the best, the most accurate. If they do their statistics from code directly embedded on the site or from the server’s log files, the information is based on how well they filter out the noise of bots and spiders – yet none are perfect.

If they rely on their own pool of members – people who have agreed to put that company’s code on their computer so that the company can track their web surfing – then that company will create a baseline trending system – for example – if ten thousand of their members visited site X, the company will claim that 100,000 or 10,000,000 people around the globe visited that site during the same period.

How can they claim that? Well, they claim that their members are a “fair” or “reasonable” sampling of web users from enough different consumer groups, and that statistically it’s an accurate measure.

Personally, I say Bull! Too many sites are in too many niche-focuses – too many people surf the web for different reasons at different times… Having many years ago been a crime statistician, I know too well that such extrapolation is horse-hockey.

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THE BOTTOM LINE – GOOD FOR TRENDING, BAD FOR FACT STATING

Okay – so Google Analytics isn’t perfect. No web visitor tracking solution is.

You can not say for a fact that the number of people supposedly visiting your site is really what they report.

But you can use it to get trends

If three months in a row Google or one of the other javascript or log file crunching solutions says 80% of your visitors go to a particular page or section of the site, that’s pretty much going to be accurate. If in that same three months nobody apparently went to that great FAQ page you spent fifty hours on, then maybe you don’t need to spend that extra 20 hours this month adding to the FAQ page.

In addition to having Google Analytics, it can’t hurt to have the site’s actual log files processed through a reporting solution that does a decent job at filtering out spiders and bots. There are many such solutions out on the market. I happen to use a program called WebLog Expert. The professional version filters out spiders and bots.

To what degree and how accurately Google or WebLog Expert or any analytics and site visitor tracking program filters out the noise is anyone’s guess. But if you use multiple solutions that each handles things in it’s own way, you can at least get a much better handle on general trends.

Alan Bleiweiss has been an Internet professional since 1995, managing client projects valued at upwards of $2,000,000.00. Just a few of his most notable clients through the years have included PCH.com, WeightWatchers.com, and Starkist.com. Follow him on Twitter @AlanBleiweiss , read his Search Marketing blog at Search Marketing Wisdom, and be sure to read his column at SearchEngineJournal.com the 2nd and 4th Tuesday each month. Why Google Analytics is flawed is a post from: Search Marketing Wisdom All content copyright Alan Bleiweiss unless otherwise attributed by me in the article.

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