168 Billion reasons to stop using Google Analytics
Lots of marketers, both affiliate and otherwise have been encouraged, bribed, cajoled or otherwise convinced to use Google Analytics to track their campaigns. I actually suspect that Google reps are incentivized to get advertisers to use the product.
The main selling point is that it ties into Adwords and uses tracking to determine your cost per lead/sale/whatever back to each keyword with little or no effort on your behalf. If you know which keywords perform good or bad you can then improve your ROI and become more efficient in managing your campaigns. The pitch is perfect for affiliates since they are typically both lazy and like the pricepoint of free.
Google recently bought Doubleclick and there was this huge uproar that they might be in the business of selling rankings via their Performics unit (which they said they would be selling that part of the company), but it turns out performics is also an affiliate marketing network.
Yesterday Google announced that they had renamed the affiliate network to the Google Affiliate Network.
Seems innocuous enough… NOT!
Heres why I think this is a major red flag… If you are an affiliate marketer using Analytics for a product through another network where you are driving traffic via search and Google also has that or a similar offer on their network, then they can simply arbitrage your conversion data and use it to identify the best converting keywords etc.
Say you sell Widgets and Google’s free analytics tool say that the keyword ‘blue widgets’ converts for you at a cost of $6 a sale, yet the widget manufacturer has an affiliate listing through Performics
paying $12 a sale. Your 100% ROI profit is in danger of becoming a $12 profit for Google. Why should they share that with you? afterall it was their visitor in the first place. Your free analytics tool has now cost you 100% of your profit!
Think Google will not do it? The last time I read their terms and conditions, there is nowhere that it says they cant do this. They will make oral statements saying things like “If we did that we would lose the trust of our advertisers and go out of business”, but they have refused to put that in writing in any way, shape or form. In other words, they can do it.
Something to think about next time you take the easy way out and throw Google Analytics on your pages. There is no such thing as a free lunch.
July 2nd, 2008 at 12:58 am
What web tracking do you use/recommend as an alternative to analytics?
July 2nd, 2008 at 5:48 am
People dont listen diorex.
, they still beleive in that shit about “do no evil”
Pretty effective marketing if you ask me.
July 2nd, 2008 at 1:53 pm
Great insights, Diorex…
Related to this, did anyone catch that G also launched a new version of Google Trends in the last 2 weeks or so? This new version looks quite a bit like the Compete.Com platform, showing things like traffic estimates, top keywords, related sites, etc…According to an article over at SearchEngineLand, the data comes from “Google search data, aggregated opt-in anonymous Google Analytics data, opt-in consumer panel data, and other third-party market research”…
So basically they’re exposing your top keywords to everyone, including your competitors.
July 2nd, 2008 at 2:08 pm
http://tracker.icerocket.com is a analytics alternative. Not as good though, but it has some statistics.
Also, Yahoo! will launch IndexTools as a free service!
July 2nd, 2008 at 2:49 pm
Scary… ditto on that request for any alternatives - you guys put it together in-house or are using another commercial product?
July 2nd, 2008 at 4:32 pm
I propose to start calling it G$, just like the other one (M$).
July 2nd, 2008 at 7:12 pm
i like statcounter. Not quite as feature laden but the data is updated real-time (or appears to be).
http://www.statcounter.com
July 3rd, 2008 at 2:38 am
You might try these instead:
http://getclicky.com/
http://www.woopra.com/
July 3rd, 2008 at 10:23 am
Oh run - it’s big bad google!
I don’t do any affiliate work or use adwords so i’m ok then (for now)
but seriously - whats the alternative? Seriously? You give me an analytics package as complete as GA for free - statcounter -pffft. Truth is - getting people to leave Google Analytics means someone out there will have to step it up a notch or two. Nearest i’ve seen to a good competitor is WOOPRA - but they’re only free for certain functionality and certain amount of hits.
If google use this tactic - you think yahoo and m’zoft won’t? Seems like another “evil google” story to me.
July 3rd, 2008 at 11:43 am
Let me also add that Google uses you own stats against you to determine the effectiveness of your site’s stickyness.
Have you ever noticed the “bounce rate” in Google Analytics? That is Google measuring your site’s ability to hold on to a visitor that comes thru a link in a Google result, or any link for that matter.
A bounce rate of 70% or above is considered a negative indicator by Google, or so we believe. The same thing for FeedBurner and Google RSS reader. They calculate how many subscribers you have via RSS and use this as a indicator of your site’s quality.
I blogged about this 3 months ago here:
http://www.keywebdata.com/?p=72
A number of us believe that Google is using the items from the Google Blogsearch patent to rank blogs both in Blogsearch and Google Websearch.
Even though Matt Cutts says I am incorrect I do not believe him or anyone else, my testing of how my own blog ranks due to the little known indicators that I have been testing says that this is true.
Things like social bookmarking popularity, RSS subscribers, comments on your own blog and others (participation in the Blogosphere), not to mention that spamming social bookmarking sites with your own content kills your rankings too. I believe this last point is about to become more relevant soon.
July 4th, 2008 at 7:55 am
Sorry for delay in responses - I am out of the country and all of a sudden I get like 20k hits in 2 days… Most common question is what do we use? We built everything in house, works great for us and is ideal for our test platform. I dont have a commercial alternative I would suggest.
Point of the post is that they could do this if they wanted, not that they are or about to start, but that once you share that data there is nothing inthe T&C that says they cannot use the data against you. Happy 4th of July.
July 6th, 2008 at 10:49 am
Diorex,
how to do you track the performance of single ads? Is there a way to append he ad id automatically (ie. something like {ad}) or do you have to add a custom string manually?
July 6th, 2008 at 11:12 am
Use a custom landing page for the ad and set it up as a goal in Google Analytics. Goals are what make GA powerful, although there are a number of things I wish it did do, but that’s another article.
Once you have various goals set up in GA, you can see how various sites convert, keywords and referrers. You can do this with email opt ins, by setting a landing page as a goal and then when the form is submitted, you redirect the form to the landing page.
This way you can track conversions from most forms of media. It is pretty much the crux of what I teach on my site.
July 6th, 2008 at 11:43 am
Thanks, but I’m not using Google Analytics. I’m just wondering if there is an easier way to track clicks to their respective ads, instead of simply tagging each ad with an ad id manually.
July 7th, 2008 at 12:26 pm
Only major problem I see is, you’re fucked if you use google content network. Other than parsing referrers, you have no way of knowing where the click came from and how to tell which websites are attributing to sales/conversions.
July 7th, 2008 at 2:42 pm
I don’t see how you can be a serious affiliate without having a programmer or being one.. in which case building your own tracking *and* optimization systems are a fairly straightforward task. I haven’t seen anything free or commercial that do both.
July 13th, 2008 at 5:21 pm
The very scenario Diorex envisages played itself out over at Valueclick’s Commission Junction unit; in that case individuals at CJ used the conversion data to arbitrage search terms and it wasn’t until CJ forced employees to choose between their day job and their arbitrage that the activity was reigned in.
Incidentally, I wouldn’t be opposed to Google making such a move for the good of the greater [online] economy. Merchants in any given sector tend to have huge differences in visitor experience & conversion rates, and were Google to do this it’d definitely give tons of companies the kick in the pants they need to realize they’re flunking online marketing. That, in turn, would be good for the health of the online economy.
WRT Google Analytics, it’s amazing to me that people so smart use Google Analytics and accept its limitations just because it’s free. I don’t get it. Free web hosting, free business cards, free PC’s, free phones have all become either unacceptable or understood as having a cost that equates or surpasses that of not-free products. Why don’t people realize this with Google Analytics? Analytics is quite arguably more important than any of those other business tools.
July 13th, 2008 at 5:41 pm
@SearchQuant - Excellent analogy about how free is now perceived to have a negative value in so many markets - yet not in this one, where people are making the monthly cost of a solid analytics/testing program before breakfast most days - yet still wont cough up the cash to get what is bound to improve their business.
If you cannot build one yourself, spend the money to get a full featured one from one of the analytics vendors out there. Read my post ‘testing is for the rich’ if you dont understand why a better testing platform is critical to success in this space.
July 13th, 2008 at 6:08 pm
@Diorex - I’ve been telling virtually every SEM advertiser I meet for the last 5 years that investing in a good multivariate A/B testing tool like Offermatica or Optimost is THE most important thing they can do to succeed in SEM. Having been able to see the conversion rates of dozens of top 1000 AdWords advertisers in finance, travel, retail, automotive and B2B, I can tell you there are a few who get the importance of sustained, passionate multivariate testing, and a great many who do not.
Great blog by the way - glad I found it on a lazy Sunday afternoon…
July 22nd, 2008 at 7:34 pm
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August 11th, 2008 at 8:19 am
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