Google Analytics is a giant machine collecting information and analyzing user activity on the web. For sure there are advantages of using it, but in this article we are going to expose only the disadvantages.
- Accuracy: It’s known by many marketers and analytics experts that Google Analytics is inaccurate. GA’s cannot identify users who are behaving differently on one or more devices.
- Hard to set up: Have you ever tried to add a new website on Google Analytics? If your answer is yes, you might encounter some steps involved, screens, options, jargon, etc… If your answer is no, we recommend you to follow an extended guide before starting.
- Instructions confusing: If you land into GA’s help documentation, you will enter into a genesis book and you will need to spend hours clarifying the infinite options they provide.
- There are many dashboards, settings, user views and metrics: When you finally set up your website on GA’s you will find tons of screens, tabs and information that could be overwhelming.
- Unwanted information like bots and internal traffic: If you don’t know yet, this not-human traffic is processed by GA’s and seems like legitimate traffic.
- Sampled data: Data sampling in GA’s involves analyzing a subset of data to understand the entire data set. Instead of assessing all your website data GA’s samples a slice of that data to provide actionable and accurate reports.
- Free version is entirely dependent upon cookies: GA’s use cookies to track visitors. If a user rejects them, no tracking is recorded.
- Hit limits: This is the message GA’s will show you when you exceed their limits:
“Your data volume (XXX hits) exceeds the limit of 10M hits per month as outlined in our Terms of Service. If you continue to exceed the limit, we will stop processing new data on XXX.” - Doesn’t comply with the EU law: GA’s is not GDPR compliant according to the Data Protection Authorities from Italy, France, Austria and the Netherlands.
- Doesn’t offer privacy by design: It’s against GA’s terms of Service to send PII (personal identifiable information) data to the Google Analytics server
- Customer care and support: The only option available is either a community forum or an online documentation.
- Expensive on Pro versión you can spend $150k per year.
We hope this article helps you to make a decision when choosing your next and right Analytics provider.