Google Analytics: Fact or Fiction? How well is your website REALLY performing?

If your business relies upon its website to drive sales and leads; and if you are making decisions based upon usage and behavioural data for your website, it's critical that you have accurate statistics on which to base your decisions. Many people falsely assume that their Google Analytics data gives an accurate picture. That's exactly what I thought too until I realised things just weren't adding up - it turns out there are some significant issues.

The giveaway for me was the number of hits suggested by my impressive analytics charts weren't being matched by an equally impressive growth in sales. I was paying a lot for clicks, but the expense just wasn't converting to sales.

So, if like me, you suspect a disconnect between your website hits and sales/leads, then chances are you might be falling victim to some inaccurate reporting of your web stats. Read on...

Ghost hits and referrals:

Ghost hits come from referrers who use your website tracking code to fake hits to Google Analytics. These hits don’t actually exist - no-one (not even a bot) has actually visited your site but instead has tricked google to think your site has had a visit - and to confuse you in the process. There are many of these fake referral sites like “free-share-buttons.com”, "darodar.com" or "ilovevitaly"and they are constantly changing which makes stopping them a game of cat and mouse. On the positive side, ghost hits can be identified relatively easily. Why do they do it? Well possibly so that unsuspecting and curious people click on the referral link to investigate driving their own hits and possibly malicious code.

Spam hits

Spam hits are slightly different and originate from “bots” that create random hits on sites. Often these are very difficult to identify and hide themselves well, but if your site is getting large volumes of hits from an unexpected country, or high bounce rates with zero (or near zero) duration and low pages/session then it's a good indicator that it’s happening to you.

The problem for business owners is that these spammers create false impressions that masks true information that could be used to assess and improve your business and website performance. They confuse people and take up time and resources. The solutions can be tricky to implement, especially for the novice – and even the pros struggle to keep up. Google doesn't seem to have identified an effective solution as of writing either so for now it seems we're stuck with it. It can make a significant difference to your stats too - here's a chart showing an example of my site before and after filtering the spam:

So what can you do?

First up, its important that you are aware of the problem so you can take a closer look at what is being reported to you in your stats. It is important to question your web developer (if you have one) and dig a little deeper on your web stats and charts to check that they are valid.

- Are your hits coming from expected sources in line with your markets and marketing? If not, can you legitimately explain why?

- Are your stats like the average visit duration, pages viewed and associated bounce rates of visits reasonable and realistic? (If you have bounce rates of near 100% and visit duration of near zero then these are probably invalid).

If you are reasonably technical, you can create a filter or segments in Google Analytics to try to eliminate the fake hits and referrers from your views – but you’ll constantly have to keep them updated, and in some cases it isn’t easy. In creating filters and segments, you also need to be careful not to eliminate legitimate traffic. You may also be able to cross check your Google Analytics stats with those directly from your website hosting provider if you can view them (though this will only let you reconcile the referral spam and not the bot spam unless you have specific filters on your .htaccess file).

My Own Example

Here’s a real example using stats from Google Analytics from my own website to take you through the problem. I have a simple UK retail business which makes analysis easier as I don’t have complex channels established or huge volumes of traffic.

First up here’s a screenshot of my Google Analytics stats over the last couple of months:

At first sight, I thought this looked pretty reasonable for my small business? Some nice steady growth over the period from around 100'ish sessions up to a peak of around 300 sessions per week.....but now let's look at where these hits are coming from:

...mmm....hang on a minute.....around 33% of my hits are from the US, but I’m UK based! Here’s where my alarm bells start to ring - I don’t promote in the US at all and I don't think I've been getting any media over there.

Now let’s look at the pageviews:

This shows a significant number of page hits are direct to my root directory with no path – another alarm bell.

Now let’s take a closer look at the source of my traffic:

This shows around 28% of my source traffic is referral traffic – let’s take a closer look at that:

Here we can see a list of the referral sites - mostly spam referrals like "free-share-buttons" and the like. Luckily this referrer spam is relatively easy to filter out by creating a filter or segment (subject for another day).

In the meantime, let's now have a look for the bot traffic. This is more complex as they seem to hide quite cleverly – often with unknown/unset identifiers.

For the more technical amongst you, here’s how I think I finally found the source of much of my spam (which in my case is through the Acquisition > Source/Medium > Secondary Dimension: Browser Version). You can see for the browser version 40.0.2214.111, I have 100% bounce rate, 1.00 pages/session and 0.00 duration – a sure giveaway.

So overall in my case, I estimate that around 40% - 50% of the stats reported by Google Analytics are not genuine visitors. That’s a pretty appalling amount of noise on my stats and prevents me from clearly seeing the true picture of my customers, including where they are from and their behaviour on my site.

Hopefully the clever people at Google will sort out this problem at some point before too long, but in the meantime we're faced with a moving target.

Want more info/help?

If you want more help with your stats, please feel free to contact me.