Comments on: Analyze This! Lesson Two: Issues Affecting Accurate Reporting

By: Justin Knightley

Justin Knightley — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 07:09:58 +0000

We’re a fairly IT led company when it comes to reporting, and experiencing difficulty with management buy-in of GA goal data (we’ve been running GA for 2 years now).

When someone completes a goal, e.g. website registration, what % tolerance would you say is acceptable comparing to our CRM database?

We’re finding monthly differences sometimes over 20%.

How accurate should GA be? Is GA any more/less accurate than other tools?

I’d be really interested to learn about other people’s experiences here!

Justin

By: Andrew F

Andrew F — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 14:31:22 +0000

Thanks Joe,

This is definitely an interesting read. While I am not passionate about the technical details of analytics. I am passionate about trying to make good decisions based on this data and you have definitely given me something to think about.

Andrew

By: Michael B.

Michael B. — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 21:52:52 +0000

Great post Joe….

…i think the biggest discrepancy we face is due to cookie deletion.

You have given us a lot to think about here.

Keep the great posts coming!

Michael B.

By: Dave Graham

Dave Graham — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 18:13:08 +0000

With DNSSEC becoming more and more available this should cut down on the amount of fakers and spoofers. With accurate accountability from the source location with “finger printing” as with SSHFP. HTTPFP and HTTPSFP should help.

IPv6 should also help with collecting data from users as well. Though it’s not widely used (but should be) it is becoming more and more availble as well. With operating systems such as Vista which use link-local it does make it a bit more difficult to get accurate reading as well.

Also with the help of applications that track people (like WebTrends) coming in from the Internet should also help analyze the frequent visits from a location (NAT included which hinders some).

I’ve stated many options, in not major detail, but the future of analysis could make it easier to track these types of things.

By: Matt

Matt — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 17:59:40 +0000

Thanks for the info Joe — great stuff.

By: Bethany

Bethany — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 17:58:35 +0000

Thank you,

The explanation was excellent. Thank you so much.

By: Mia

Mia — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 17:50:15 +0000

Thanks again for the great information! I’m glad you wrote about these issues as some of them I had no idea about!