Using Google Analytics is a must because it allows you to measure your results efficiently. Or does it?
Data is good. Google Analytics makes it quick and easy to get it.
You absolutely need Google Analytics to measure your results. There’s no way around it.
But did you know that the platform can lie to you without you ever knowing? And that means your data might be totally wrong.
When your data is wrong, there’s no way to rely on it to make any future marketing decisions.
If you do, you might make a costly mistake that you can’t fix. Tainted data can’t be trusted.
It can be hard to get things back on track once data errors throw your data out of whack, even if you have a skilled analytics team on hand.
Luckily, there are ways to fix most lies. That is once you know what they are.
That’s why I’ve created a list of eight lies Google Analytics is telling you, along with ways you can fix each one.
The first place to look for lies is dark traffic disguised as direct traffic.
can simply be thought of as hidden traffic. And you need to shine a light on it quick.
It masks itself as “direct” traffic, but it’s actually everything else. Email, social, organic search, you name it.
Dark traffic skews a huge chunk of what you think you know about your visitor traffic statistics.
That’s mostly because analytics platforms, including Google, have a hard time tracking every single kind of traffic source.
TalkWalker did their own analysis to find out exactly how dark traffic affects their brand. Their findings? At least 21% of their direct traffic can be categorized as “dark social” traffic.
This is a huge chunk. And it’s happening to you, too.
Because of this, the campaigns you’re running aren’t getting the credit that they deserve. And neither are you.
But the problem is even worse when it distorts your .
It happens to the best of us.
Even Groupon recently discovered that as much as 60% of their direct traffic could be classified as organic search.
The good news is that you can prevent a ton of issues by tagging your links across social (or Email) with a UTM builder. and both offer easy-to-use UTM builders.
All you have to do is make sure that your links are tagged before they go live and you’re set.
But that solution doesn’t always fix the organic search issue.
Like your homepage, for example.
That’s because the homepage is usually the first place people land on your site.
But long URLs will be affected even more than homepages because they probably . Using a UTM builder will at least help with those.
Out of all dark traffic, hidden social referral traffic is probably the most common. Here’s why.
Arguably, the biggest data lie that Google Analytics is telling you is that it hides most of your Facebook traffic. And all social , for that matter.
Facebook and Google track visitors in very different ways, so the analytics results aren’t reliable. It’s hard to know which platform to listen to.
If you’ve ever noticed a difference between the number of Facebook clicks that Ad Insights says you’ve received versus the number you see on Google Analytics, you know what I’m talking about.
People began to notice this back in 2014, and it’s still an issue in 2018.
One of the main causes for these differences is that Facebook Ads send people to in-app browsers once their links are clicked.
These in-app browsers don’t work the same way as traditional ones.
This means that the interaction won’t show up as referral traffic from Facebook.com, even though it technically is.
Solve this problem by using and UTM codes for each social media platform (Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, etc.).
For Facebook, try out Google’s so you don’t have to leave the platform to track links.
Tip: Generate these links using Google’s URL builder to use across all social media platforms, including your Instagram, Pinterest, Twitter Ads, LinkedIn, and more.
This will help you keep track of any social referrals that Google Analytics is missing.
