Is Google Analytics really worth getting?

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Just wondering if it seems to be useful to other buyers? What do you do with the information, for example did it help you to adjust your tags or anything like that to reach a larger audience?

Thanks! xx

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I’m about to commit heresy here!

I don’t find Google Analytics that helpful at all. The most important information to me is how many views I have had, on which items and on which day.

Google Analytics is very good at showing you

  1. Your own views (yes, I know you can exclude them, please see point 5);
  2. Phantom views from spam websites (yes, these can also be excluded, please see point 5);
  3. Views from people who look at the front page of your shop and then bounce straight off because they clicked on your link accidentally.
  4. “Spiders” which indicate that your item was 5 pages down on a Google search for something completely unrelated.
  5. It is also very good at wasting your time excluding views that might be suspect or your own views and creating lots of charts which ultimately tell you what the Folksy View Counter would have told you in 5 seconds flat.

I also find that the geographical locus widget on Google is rubbish. It insists that I am in London (there is a small London borough that I’ve never heard of called Burgess Hill) when I am in Burgess Hill in Sussex, a medium sized town with lots of businesses based there. If this is the case for my own locus, the other locus data must be suspect, after all there are lots of towns in England that share names, Dorchester being another one.

So I’ve got Google Analytics, but I never use it. I suspect that this tool is more suited to larger concerns than mine who may want to look at the performance of their business across lots of “segments” but I simply don’t have time for that.

Love Sam x

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Thank you so much for your detailed reply, definitely lots to think about!

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I’ll back up alot of what Sam said - I get a lot of non people views and the rest of the data isn’t all that helpful. For example I’ve set my date range to the last 3 months - they were busy with lots of views and sales so there should be some indication of how they found me right? If I go to the direct segment I see a list of web page where people landed - some of these i know are in gift guides but there is no indication of whether people landed their via the gift guide or other search. The top webpage that people land on is the one on my business card so I shall continue to hand those out like sweeties. In the organic search segment my top search term is… (not provided) - that is a massive help with tags and key words, thanks google.
The only bit that is slightly useful is the social segment - from that I can see that twitter and facebook have generated equal amounts of traffic to my shop so its worth putting the effort in there but pinterest is lagging along way behind so that is perhaps not worth the time. I also like to periodically have a look and compare which style of post generates more traffic to my shop (I don’t do the 'look what I’ve just listed type posts so I tend to not see a spike in specific item views that folksy shows me).
So for smaller fry like us I’m not sure its worth it.

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I used to love GA but something changed, probably about 2 years ago?.. and then my most useful stat (the search term) vanished - and I’ve not been able to find it since!
I can get close but it just keeps saying “not provided” so I gave up.

Oh, and I used to get a lot of hits from nudey video sites!

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@SashaGarrett @bojanglies Thanks for your replies, perhaps if I have the time I will look at setting it up, but I won’t make it a priority!

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I have it but not used it for ages. I didn’t find it useful at all. :slight_smile:

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