Google Analytics Keeps Dissapointing
While Microsoft is developing the “next generation of analytics”, Google’s competing product keeps letting its users down. The recent outage, which lasted two days straight, was the fourth outage in the month of July alone.
Ever since Google Analytics became free, more and more webmasters have been counting on it as their sole stats provider and like any other free service out there, users start to realize that you always get “what you pay for” and in this case it is a very unreliable platform. As noted by Chrissy Icamina, web producer for FHM Philippines, “It’s quite inconvenient because my fellow producers and I file weekly reports of our statistics, and inaccurate statistics render our reports useless.”
I find it hard to believe that a world renown magazine relies on this platform for such reports, and am personally using two different ones (Google Analytics and a paid service) for my analytics, but these problems play directly to the hands of Microsoft and their new Gatineau platform.
The bottom line is Google Analytics is a free tool, so use it with a grain of salt. Anyone serious about tracking their Website with the intent to use that information to improve business/increase ROI, etc, should be using a paid tool — bottom line.
And don’t forget for a second that Google is not in the Web Analytics business, they are in the ad spend business and Google Analytics is nothing more than the worm on the hook to get people to spend more money on AdWords.