Wednesday, January 21, 2009

Google Analytics Bug - The Sum of its Parts is More Than the Whole

Google Analytics is a great product, in general, but sometimes I come across things that are totally head-scratching.

Their relatively new feature for Advanced Segmentation will be very very useful once it reaches some semblance of reliability. As for now, though, I cannot rely on it.

The image does not lie.  I have 2 segments applied:
  1. All Visits (basically, unfiltered)
  2. True Non-Paid (all visits that are not CPC)
GA tells me that yesterday I had about 110 more conversions coming from my non-cpc traffic than all of my traffic combined?????

I know that the little red tag says "Beta", but we have come to expect very reliable behavior from a lot of other "beta" products from Google (eg., Gmail , Google Earth , Maps for the longest time, etc...).

This is something that needs to get fixed quickly.  The worst thing that GA can do is put doubt in the minds of its users about the accuracy of the data.

No comments:

Post a Comment