Success or failure is a difficult thing to measure. If you are anything like me you keep moving the goal posts. Success one day can just mean earning enough to get food on the table, pay the bills and sleep easy. Another it might mean paying for an expensive vacation or, in my case, buying a vintage guitar (I’m a sucker for well made guitars)
The steps that lead to success are important to. In terms of generating profit for your business there are a lot of KPIs (key performance indicators) that you probably should keep an eye on each step of the way. After all a good customer acquisition method could be spoiled by poor customer service at point of sale, get both of those right and the product itself might let you down – get all three of those correct and you might still get into trouble in the medium and long term if you fail to provide good after sales support.
Every step needs to be right. Every one monitored for signs of weakness, and to see where improvements can be made.
Perhaps the most talked about KPI in internet marketing is traffic generation and flow. We all know how important visitors are, but recently I’ve come to the conclusion that the tools we use to measure visitor metrics are, for the most part, pretty darn poor.
All Visitor Tracking Tools Seem To Have Flaws
Google analytics, which is (or was – I’ve now ditched it) correctly installed to appear in the header of every page and post of this site reports an average of 44 visits per day.
Now – that I find shocking. 44 visits a day is incredibly low for a site this size with a few years behind it. It also doesn’t make any sense.
So I picked a day (Yesterday – 9th June) and tried to tally up exactly what was going on.
- On the 8th of June this site generated 55 double opt in members to my email list. 18 of them used Cpanel emails all seemed genuine.
- I also sold 7 products
- I had 4 comments that seemed entirely genuine. No links in them what-so ever
Apparently I managed that with 43 genuine visitors? Those figures would suggest a number 15-20 x higher than that.
Then there was my Facebook marketing. Facebook informs me it sent over 450 visitors via clicks from a sponsored post, I’d run the campaign for 2 days. The image here shows the results for both days 958 click-through, of which just under 50% were on the second day (9th June 2014) almost exactly 450.
I checked my onsite analytics and sure enough, Facebook traffic shows up. It stays pretty well as well, under 40% bounce rate, average page views almost 3 and average time on site close to 5 minutes. Nice
But where was this traffic on Google analytics? Just this alone is 10x higher than the total Google reported.
I checked the overall figures from Slimstat which I have running on site.
I did this screenshot quite early in the day yesterday. It picked up to about 1350 human visits in total and just under 1000 unique IPs. The trend shows around 1500 visits a day.
Interestingly, the drop on the 20th was when I upgraded to dedicated server for my hosting account. I just happened to pick “Panda 4” day. Other than a few bounces a a week later as my server was migrated to another stack (4th June) traffic has been pretty good. Up a little overall.
I check Twitter – yes my Twitter ads have sent traffic, only around 50, but that in itself is more than Google say my site has had.
I recheck the analytics code, open the HTML up in a file for random pages to make sure the correct code is present. In every case it is. I re-check with Google that I haven’t got a mis-spelling with the code. No problems there, everything seems fine.
The Four Things That Screwed Up My Google Webmaster Analytics
Does A WWW And None WWW Version Of The Site Exists In Google?
Yes – really something that simple. They are treated as different entities. You may need to register both, and then join both together inside the analytics tools. This can be done, and it does solve part of the problem. Suddenly I had 212 unique visitors a day. Still a fraction of the amount I knew I had (given I had so many referred from Facebook alone) but a start.
Shared Hosting? Is The Site A Primary Or An Add On?
Add On Domain? Well, by that I mean that, for example, this site exists in a sub folder of another site in my hosting account, a legacy of the beginnings when demondemon was on shared hosting that already had a primary site assigned. I checked with my provider (Bluehost in this case) and asked whether this could have any effect.
Yes, and quite a profound one. Luckily most providers will allow you to switch your primary domain or move it wholesale to another hosting account with minimum fuss and downtime. Costs seemed to range from free to $100 for a managed move, then factor in hosting costs on top if you are moving to a new account. How much of a difference this makes is hard to say. I’m planning to undergo the change to separate hosting and will let you know what impact it has in a couple of weeks once it is complete.
Youtube Videos
Now come on. Youtube is Google after all, how can that mess up visitor analytics? Well, embedded Youtube videos in particular can indeed cause visits to go uncounted, and this site has almost 250 of the 370 posts with videos embedded in them. Apparently you need to switch to the new tracking code and alter some settings in your Google account to get this to work properly. To be fair to the search engine, the feature set they offer once you upgrade seems very good indeed. But be warned, if you are using the old style code and aren’t set up right? Then Youtube embeds can cause some miss-steps in your visitor tracking.
I’d love to get technical with you as to why, but it’s beyond my ability. Instead you might want to read this.
Through The Net
Google don’t own your site, and can;t really spend the time and effort required to monitor every page for every event. It has to make some assumptions. Is a request for page data a human or a crawler? Could this be ”bot traffic” using SOCKS or even a browser based spam bot? Some of these tools are very good at spoofing.
Take a look at this image
June so far has gleaned 6000 human visits – and almost 21,000 bots – 350% more bots than humans.
Human bounce rate looks incredibly low at under 8%. However with the bots included, it jumps dramatically to 5x that amount.
Sometimes Google just gets it wrong.
Finally, Just Stuff That Google Doesn’t Seem To Be Able To Do
What? They aren’t all powerful? Able to bend the world to their will.
No. They aren’t it seems. Not one referral from Twitter or Facebook (or Linkedin) shows up in my analytics. Not a single one. Yet I know from data from those sites, comments, purchases and seeing these visitors on my sites internal stat packages that they did come. Facebook said it sent around 450, and I look in my site, and there they are. Twitter and Linkedin the same. Yet Google doesn’t record a single one.
Conclusion
Straight forward search traffic from Google itself is very well recorded. If the visitor is logged into Google at the time of the visit then a lot of useful data can be obtained. That’s all great, useful and something to consider.
The further you move away from this ideal situation, the more uncertain the results are.
Bad code embeds, failing to put the code on every single page of your site. People coming to your site via category or tag pages for example, can all mess up the code.
Java and Flash embedded into a URL can cause a miss-count as can the set up of your own hosting solution.
Major social network traffic seems sometimes ignored altogether. Why? I don’t know. I have other sites that use the same hosting provider that show all social network traffic, and some that don’t show any despite me knowing it exists.
My aim is to follow this up in July with some answers to these questions, and then, hopefully, restore my analytics code and treat the numbers it provides with a bit more knowledge and confidence.
Hi. I’m Designer of Blog Magic. I’m CEO/Founder of ThemeXpose. I’m Creative Art Director, Web Designer, UI/UX Designer, Interaction Designer, Industrial Designer, Web Developer, Business Enthusiast, StartUp Enthusiast, Speaker, Writer and Photographer. Inspired to make things looks better.
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