Google Analytics – Do you understand your numbers?

Hi,

Our business (The Dolls House Emporium) has been around since before the internet, and we have since taken up most of the opportunities the web has to offer.
Advertising, PR amongst other marketing activities take place both on & off-line.  With each channel fighting for its share of the marketing budget, accurate reporting of results is important.

For the past few years, I’ve been working with my colleagues in a bid to formalise a set of reports, to help us understand how our business is performing on-line. We’ve looked at page views, page rank, exit pages, abandoned baskets, funnels, CTR & ROI, all the usual stuff.
We’ve used various tools to different extents, included agent web ranking, click tracks, plus our own tracking and recording methods to tie up visits to customers, and subsequently orders.
Over the period we’ve managed to gradually fine tune the information, only to find it isn’t perhaps the complete picture one would hope for. Reasons for inaccuracies include web browser clients blocking java scripts or cookies, and antivirus software blocking referrer information, and inevitably an error in some code responsible for tracking.

Google analytics came along, I thought this would be something for us to compare our stats against, and maybe give us a better understanding of what’s going on, along with some confidence in the figures we’ve been looking at. The discrepancies were alarming.  Google analytics reported 75% & 113% more sales from Adwords (over a two month period) than our own reports.

Our in-house tracking attributes sales to the method by which the customer last came to the site. Google looks at last click to site. The difference here being, our stats record all entries including those with no referrer (bookmarks, clicks from emails), and attributes sales to them accordingly.
Therefore if a customer clicks through from an Adwords ad in January, registers on the site, requests catalogue, & receives monthly emails from us with promotions, but does not buy until June (and visits from a bookmark, or keys in URL seen in our catalogue or advert, or from a link in an email), our in house system records sales as either from “no referrer” or “link from email”, google analytics will report it as sales from an Adwords ad.

Its debatable which is correct, as all marketing activities will contribute to the customer finally buying (I’m sure there are other post on this topic).

My point is if you don’t understand what you’re looking at its very easy to make wrong decisions, not sure whether that’s down to my inexperience or misunderstanding, or maybe the big “G” could have been a little clearer in its reporting?