Top 5 limitations of Google Analytics that stop your business from growing
Google Analytics (GA) is a go-to tool to perform marketing analytics, whether you are running a blog or a business. GA is great for measuring the performance of your website: page views, bounce rates, time spent on a page. If you spend enough time, you will also be able to build more complicated tracking & analytics settings.
But what are the limitations of this free software that might be crucial for the growth of your business?
In this article, let’s dive into the world of Google Analytics and learn top 5 limitations this tool imposes.
1. Google Analytics samples data
If you starting to learn the basics of marketing analytics, you should understand the difference between raw and sampled data.
Raw data is a complete set of information about advertising or marketing that has been delivered to you straight from the analytical source.
This data has NOT been processed or altered by machine learning or any other frameworks. It is data as it is.
Whereas sampled data is processed data when only the average value will be taken to give you a model of the performance.
The best analogy would be cooking from scratch VS using processed food. When you are doing all the shopping & cooking yourself, you know exactly where the groceries came from, you know the proportions, you know what exactly influenced the final result (taste of your meal).
Meanwhile, using processed food can be easy. Just throw it in a microwave and it’s done. But you have no idea what makes your meal: ingredients, spices, quality of groceries.
Therefore, you don’t know how the end meal was created and why it tastes this way.
So, before you get hungry, I have to tell you that Google Analytics is using data sampling and modeling.
Meaning that you see those average values and data models, but not precisely an accurate picture of your performance.
Why does it matter? The bigger your business gets, the more issues you will have with those discrepancies arising from data models. You might make wrong assumptions about the performance of ads, campaigns, influencers, etc. which will influence non-profitable decisions.
2. Privacy issues with Google Analytics
As marketers, we hear “cookieless” and “GDPR” here and there. But what it really means and how does it affect marketing analytics?
Well, have you heard that France and Austria consider GA illegal?
Privacy concerns are very important in 2022 since GDPR and other regulatory measures restrict the activity of service providers.
What you have to keep in mind in 2022:
1. Use privacy-friendly tracking.
Meaning that your software of choice has to be GDPR compliant. No, Google Analytics is not for a couple of reasons:
- GA doesn’t have an in-built consent functionality. And GDPR insists on all users giving their consent on processing data.
- Google Analytics can not anonymize data on the fly, meaning that the data shared with GA is considered personal. And according to GDPR, users have to give consent for the usage of personal data.
- Google Analytics servers are all over the world and in the case of European GDPR, the servers have to be located in Europe.
2. Forget about third-party cookies
You need to make sure your marketing analytics software is using only first-party data as the cookieless future approach. Forget about gathering data through third-party data. (Google is preparing its Google Privacy Sandbox in order to eliminate third-party cookies, but it’s still a very uncertain system to actually understand what’s gonna happen).
3. GA doesn’t measure offline conversions
When your business grows, your conversion path and conversion funnel become more complicated and you wanna make sure you can measure and control all of the touchpoints.
Here it becomes crucial to measure offline conversions — conversions that happen on the back-end (for example, in your CRM: calls, purchases, etc.)
Free GA has very poor functionality in order to measures those events.
The consequence of the inability to track offline conversions results in the inability to understand how your marketing or advertising efforts affect the most important part of the conversion path.
Ideally, you should be looking for software that can give you an analysis of your performance including online and offline conversions.
4. Partner marketing complications
One of the biggest trends in marketing these days is partnerships. Marketers choose to collaborate with influencers or other businesses. In order to make these collaborations effective and measurable, you need to either issue tracking links that your partners will be using or issue special promo codes.
Ideally, you have to be able to use both methods to measure the performance across all influencer or partner campaigns.
Google Analytics along with Google Tag Manager will help you with tracking links, but Google Analytics does not support promo code tracking and attribution. And you might have a terrible desire to measure the performance in a spreadsheet. And let’s say, it’s a big NO in 2022.
If you plan to invest in partnership marketing in 2022, I definitely recommend you invest in software that supports tracking and attribution for promo codes and links. Ideally, you should be able to see this data in one report.
5. With Google Analytics you are on your own
For many of us, a big problem would be staying alone with all those numerous GA tutorials on YouTube and yet, not knowing what to do to perform the analytical job we wanna do. GA is a free tool (which is amazing), but it has no customer support to give you a hand in need in case you are in trouble.
You might go to freelance marketplaces to look for specialists who will be solving your problems and spending extra cash.
Therefore, looking for marketing analytics software that has dedicated customer support is of great advantage.
Final words
Marketing analytics is a complex topic and Google Analytics is doing good job measuring your website performance. However, when you start growing you might need more features unlocked.
If you wanna level up your marketing analytics game, look for the following features in the software:
- Multi-channel tracking: track all of your marketing channels and provide insights about the performance of each of them.
- Conversion attribution: analyze the conversion path and see which touchpoints are more valuable for users to convert.
- Privacy-friendly tracking: ensure you are ready for the cookieless world and will not be in trouble with GDPR regulations.
- Access to raw data: will give you the exact numbers about your performance without modeling.
- Promo code tracking & attribution: crucial feature for those involved in influencer marketing.
If you are looking for a new tool to do all the hard work with marketing analytics, consider RedTrack. It’s an all-in-one solution that combines ad tracking & conversion attribution, as well as complies with all privacy regulations.
Start with a 14-day free trial or talk to one of our specialists to unlock all the possibilities.
