Google Analytics is a great Google service (from the company of “Do No Evil”), but, how useful is it really?
They don’t seem to have much in the way of Adwords integration with Analytics for testing a complete visit from click on search engine through to complete sale, and even then, they don’t report adequately on the path a sale took, or how long the sale spent on the different pages.
A more useful report would be one that could categorise the conversion failures, so that they are easily identified and able to be worked against.
Or, if that’s anti-Google (and therefore Google doing evil) then perhaps an alternative is ideal, a report that takes out all non converting traffic, so you can see the detailed sales statistics of where a sale originated, and how it finished (did they read everything, or just 10 seconds?).
Those reports could be used by e-marketers to determine what keywords work best, what doesn’t work at all, and what is ideal for use on a regular basis, and what has short term good or bad effects.
Essentially, the tool is a great tool for analyising traffic, but it doesn’t meet the standard required for isolating traffic which isn’t sales related, meaning the data is inflated, and doesn’t isolated clicks wasted on Google Adwords (where the viewer didn’t actually view content, or where they didn’t wait for page load).
The reason behind this is, 560 clicks registered in Google Adwords, yet only 455 visits from that keyword registered in Google Analytics place the statistics in a question of accuracy (the numbers should match, right?).
I’d like to see someway of them improving the accuracy of statistics so that there is accuracy, and where a click on an ad doesn’t hit the site, credit applied for such cases (they obviously have the ability to detect such activity if you have Analytics running).
Enjoy!