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There was a huge rush to sign up for Google Analytics when it was first announced a few weeks ago. Online Web site traffic analysis services are not new -- search the Web for them and you'll turn up dozens, both commercial and free. But Web-savvy people have come to expect great things from Google over the past couple of years. The Google search engine is widely believed to be the best on the Web. Google Gmail was a smash hit that offered unprecedented storage space for a free email service. Froogle was a success, too. So why does Google Analytics suck?
Bad numbers
The major dealbreaker for Google Analytics is that it collects inaccurate data, and it would take extraordinary measures to fix the problem. The Analytics code is written in Javascript, so if any visitors have Javascript disabled, if they are using a browser that does not support Javascript, or if they have such scripts blocked through utilities like NoScript, Google Analytics will not know that they exist. That means that Analytics will almost certainly show lower numbers than expected.
Google Analytics reports less than half of my actual traffic to The Jem Report. I have the Analytics code embedded in my template file, so it is on every page that the software renders. Looking at internal statistics in Mambo (the content management system in use on The Jem Report) and the trusty old Webalizer Apache log file analysis tool, I have a fairly good impression of traffic numbers and trends. Just to be sure that my Webalizer numbers weren't inflated, I checked my Webalizer config file and verified that my own visits aren't counting toward the total; only PHP and HTML files are being counted; and page views generated by the site software itself are also not counted. I'm as sure as I can be that the Webalizer numbers aren't wrong. This means that Google Analytics is a total waste of time for me. How can I, as a webmaster, possibly use this data to show advertisers what kind of traffic I'm pulling in? I'd be crazy to cut all of my numbers by that margin.
The only workaround that I can think of is to stop using Javascript. The Analytics code must be supported by all browsers and remain unblockable for the data to be trustworthy.
Bad format
Once your emaciated data has been collected, Google Analytics shows it to you in graphs and charts. I found many to be redundant and most to be useless, but I'm sure there are people who would find some of it highly valuable.
The problem with the graphics is, Analytics depends on Macromedia Flash to display all of its statistics. Despite Macromedia's claims of ridiculously high market penetration for the Flash player, a lot of people -- especially among GNU/Linux, *BSD, Solaris, and other alternative and free software operating system users -- don't have it or don't want it. While I realize that I do not represent any kind of majority, I can't have a Flash browser plugin because my Web browser is compiled for 64-bit, and presently it's impossible to use 32-bit plugins with it. Macromedia has no plans to release a 64-bit Flash player, so the only way I can view Google Analytics data is to switch to a 32-bit binary of Opera, Mozilla, or Firefox.
 | | Google Analytics: unreadable graph labels |
Because of the use of Flash, the data, as you can see in the screen shot at right, is very hard to read. The font size is too small to properly render. If it were anything other than Flash, you could resize the font by changing your browser settings. I have Firefox set to increase all too-small font sizes to at least 10 point, which is still a little too small to read comfortable. The Flash plugin doesn't read browser settings, though, so Analytics users are stuck trying to decipher what the graphs and charts say.
There's also no way to rearrange the scale or labeling of the statistics, so at times it's difficult to extract hard numbers from the graphics.
Bait and switch?
On top of the fatal flaws of Google Analytics, Google has restricted new signups and prevented existing users from adding any new accounts. This is apparently due to an overwhelming demand for the service, and Google must add more resources to accommodate more accounts. Add that to the frustration of knowing that your numbers may not be accurate, and you have a pretty frustrating situation. That's where the commercial, proprietary Urchin comes in.
Google bought Urchin last spring. Although Google Analytics is based on code from Urchin (and paying Urchin customers were inconvenienced by the launch of Analytics), Google now offers it exclusively through "partners" which sell "services" that many webmasters don't need and cannot afford. You can't just buy the program and use it. The only nice thing about Urchin is that, according to Google, it analyzes Web access logs instead of the hacky and unreliable method that Analytics uses for data collection. In other words, it actually works.
It's nice of Google to offer a free service, but it's not nice to offer a service that doesn't actually work, then push users into buying a service that does. So much for "do no evil."
Sources
Copyright 2005 Jem Matzan.
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