Five Challenges of Google Analytics

Do you use Google Analytics (GA) as a starting point to answer questions such as: “What is the optimal customer journey?” Or “How are my marketing channels performing?” Do you then use these answers to influence how you spend your marketing budget?

Of course, the answer is yes, most marketeers do. But did you know you can ask much more of your data? In theory, GA is a great data source. It is available on most websites; it is free and used by a variety of teams – from econometricians to digital marketing. However, GA is a reporting tool and is designed to provide aggregated reports, not raw data. Meaning many of us frequently come up against the same challenges.

Five challenges of Google Analytics

1. Data is sampled and aggregated within GA. Which is sufficient for top line information and weekly spends but difficult to see the detail of what an individual is doing.
2. Because data is aggregated, it often hides outliers. In some cases, over a thousand visits from a single individual – which is lost in GA aggregated reports.
3. Identifying segments cannot be applied retrospectively, due to the functionality within GA. This makes it difficult to hypothesise “what if” scenarios.
4. Google’s policy is not to allow access to personally identifiable information (PII). Information such as order numbers, cookies and browser fingerprints may be considered PII.
5. From a development and integration perspective there are several limitations too.
   1. Without the permission to store PII, it is harder to link data sources together
   2. You are not allowed more than 30m impressions per month
   3. The API is designed to provide integrated reports. Attempts to extract large levels of meaningful data can break the GA policies and are sometimes restricted – making it hard to build a robust solution

In many cases here at XCM we work with GA for our clients and find solutions for these challenges. However, these options can still be restricted, less valuable and often exceed the cost of a dedicated web browsing solution.

Why including web browsing data in your CRM database is essential

There is a wide range of off-the-shelf products for retargeting, but the trouble with totally automated solutions is the sale challenge. If you have two products that are similar and one is on sale, you may not want to push the sale item on all customers because some are likely to buy the full price item.

With all of your digital browsing data sat alongside your Single Customer View (SCV) you can run analysis to set the correct triggers and rules, or you can push a dataset into your personalisation or Email Service Provider (ESP). You can then select people and create rules.

Also, when you run this analysis centrally, you have more control to influence combinations of activities. For example, you can align trigger emails, campaign emails and web personalisation.

With so many combinations and possibilities there is a limitless number of questions that could be asked, and hypotheses to test. Rather than continuously coming up against barriers and limitations of third-party tools like GA, it is important to take full control of your data so that you have the data on hand to react to any situation.

If you have a set of questions, or challenges that you previously thought impossible to ask of your data – why not challenge us here at XCM to see if we can find the right solution for you?