Positives and Principal Limitations of Google Analytics That You Should Know‍

Google Analytics is the most popular website analytics tool currently on the market. It’s true!

31% of the market share belongs to Google. 24% belongs to Google Universal Analytics. That means, out of millions of websites, a good half are using a Google product.

That must mean these are good tools, right? They provide you with all your analytics needs, correct?

Unfortunately, that’s not exactly so. Google Analytics is a free product, and, as such, it’s going to have a number of limitations; limitations you should definitely know before you actually start using it to track data vital to your website.

This little article will go over some of Google Analytics’ positives, as well as principal limitations. Let’s see what Google does right and what it does wrong and what your alternatives are.

Advantages of Using Google Analytics

Easy to Set Up

Let’s start with some of the qualities of Google Analytics. For starters, it’s easy to set up Google Analytics on your website, and start monitoring traffic right away.

In fact, it’s so easy that it is often very warmly recommended for novices. Google features plenty of documentation and educational vids on how to set up your GA and start collecting data immediately.

Another thing that makes Google Analytics preferable is its smooth integration with platforms like Shopify or WordPress. It is also recommended you install Google Analytics with Google Tag Manager because then you get to manage your tags and scripts first.

Finally, one of the things GA does better than most tools out there is data visualization. Being a novice-friendly tool, Google Analytics is designed to display data in various forms of charts and graphs that are easy to read and analyze.

However, after its initial use, Google Analytics starts to gain a bit of a curve.

Most of the metrics beyond the most basic ones require manual setup. So, yes, Google can track more complex things, but you’ll need to be a more experienced digital marketer to make full use of it.

Website Focus

Google Analytics is a great tool when tracking website activity. If your intention is to track metrics for just your website, then Google Analytics is the perfect tool for you.

However, problems come when you have an app that accompanies your website, and you want to combine data from both sources.

Google isn’t great at handling apps and has limited funnels, so if you intend to use the same tool for both assets, we suggest you look into alternatives.

Improvements to SEO

We all know how important SEO is when it comes to driving traffic to your website. Luckily, Google Analytics is one of the best tools for tracking how your SEO impacts your website.

GA lets you measure traffic coming from a wide variety of sources, such as organic traffic from search engines, emails, social media, and a few more. This lets you get a better look at how your SEO strategy is developing, and make adjustments ahead of time.

Visitor Segmentation

One of the greatest benefits of Google Analytics is its ability to segment and categorize your visitors.

Visitors coming to your website come for a number of reasons. Some are just doing research, others are looking to buy. By being able to categorize them, you can develop effective strategies targeting specific categories, thus improving your bonce rates in the long run.

Google lets you divide your visitors based on visit frequency, location, referral path, etc.

Pricing Flexibility

Perhaps the greatest advantage of Google Analytics is that it has a free version. For small-time businesses, this makes Google an invaluable resource they can rely on at the beginning of their venture.

In addition to their free version, Google also offers Google Analytics 360, a paid version with more tools that allow for more comprehensive analysis of data, and a significant expansion of services provided by the free version.

However, Analytics 360 will set you back significantly. At $150.000 a month, 360 is not a prudent choice for businesses that are just starting out.

Limitations of Google’s Analytics Tool

As you’ve seen, GA is not all that bad when it comes to providing basic data analysis services to smaller and even some medium-sized businesses. Its ease of use, segmentation capabilities, and SEO tracking, coupled with the free version, makes this tool a favourite for a decent chunk of the internet.

However, Google Analytics is not without its downsides. In this second part of our article, we’ll go over some of those limitations, as promised in the intro, and some alternatives that might fit your bill a lot better.

Data Sampling

Google says: “For example, if you wanted to estimate the number of trees in a 100-acre area where the distribution of trees was fairly uniform, you could count the number of trees in 1 acre and multiply by 100.”

That’s fair enough, Google, but here’s the thing: people aren’t trees. People are individuals (as corny as it sounds), and they tend to have preferences when interacting with anything and everything in their daily lives. The same applies to your website.

No interaction with a website is truly similar to another, let alone uniform.

Custom reports are a great deal, as they provide you with accurate data that will help you reduce that bounce rate you’ve been so worried about.

And worried you should be, considering bounce rates across the Internet sit at about 47% across all devices. If you can’t tell accurately why your visitors are bouncing, then how will you resolve the issue and increase your visitor retention, let alone conversion rates?

Fortunately, Google Analytics gives you ample time before turning on data sampling. It gives you 500,000 sessions of custom-made reports, and only after you’ve exhausted those does it turn on sampling.

For smaller websites, this 500K sessions should be enough - however, larger ones with more traffic might find this number constraining.

But that’s not all. Google also turns on data sampling on lower-traffic websites due to the complexity of your data collection formats. If you use custom reports, segments, and long timeframes of data collection, sampling will turn on even faster.

A good alternative to Google Analytics when it comes to this is HubSpot. It’s a CMR-based tool that offers custom reports, as well as page performance stats, traffic sources, and much more.

No Access to Raw Data

This is a big deal. Having access to raw data enables you to create more accurate reports, deeper, more sophisticated analyses, and glimpse important variables within that data. Google Analytics, however, does not grant you access to this aspect of analytics, unless you’re using the paid version.

That said, we already mentioned that 360 is a relatively pricey venture. On top of that, you’ll still need additional tools like BigQuery to complete your toolset.

With that said, this might be the biggest disadvantage of Google Analytics. We already mentioned how important it is to have custom reports, and having no access to raw data nips that idea in the bud.

Combine this with data sampling and your reports will look generic and bland. Plus, you won’t be able to glimpse anything useful from them before long.

Your alternative here is Matomo (formerly Piwik). It is a great and diverse analytics tool; however, while it does have a trial version, you’ll have to subscribe to their paid plan to gain all the benefits. That said, at $19 a month, it’s not too expensive either.

Limited Number of Hits

Google Analytics limits your hits to 10 million a month. That isn’t a bad number, especially for smaller websites. This many hits, combined with 500.000 sessions allow for relatively accurate data gathering. However, what you need to know is that a single session can involve multiple hits, as each click on your website counts as one hit.

What can you do to not exceed your set number of hits? You can always go with the paid version, but, as we mentioned, that comes with a hefty price tag that you might not be able to afford.

Alternatively, you can increase sampling, or, simply, go with less detailed reports that cut virtual page views and custom events, but, as the best digital strategy firms in the industry will give you an explanation, that’s not a good idea, as, again, you’ll start generating less accurate reports.

So, what happens when you hit those 10 million hits and exceed the number?

According to Google, they cannot assure you that any hits beyond the specified number will be processed, and any reports you make beyond this number will most likely suffer from inaccuracies.

No Privacy Policy

This one is quite concerning: Google Analytics does not offer, by design, the privacy of data collected. That means any data collected on your website by Google can be traced back to the end-user, and you cannot gather anonymous data.

Google Analytics doesn’t offer a good consent framework, and because you cannot gather anonymous data (data collected when the user ignores or declines a data collection consent form), this can run you into trouble, especially in Europe where privacy laws are a lot more stringent.

On top of all this, Google Analytics also reserves the right to use the data you’ve collected. Google, and all its subsidiaries, can access the data you’ve collected on your website, which is a big no-no for companies that prize their data privacy.

This opens a whole avenue of potential data leaks and cyber-attacks. Just in 2021, there have been 1,243 security incidents (11% more than in 2020), with over 5 million records being breached.

Now, Google is big on data security, but even the most secure databases can be breached, and if they become endangered, your customers’ data can become compromised as well. If data security and privacy are your concern, you might want to reconsider using Google Analytics.

Wrapping Up

And with that, we’re going to wrap up our article on Google Analytics and its downsides. As you’ve seen, while free and accessible, Google Analytics comes with a number of features (or lack thereof) that might not be ideal for a growing website or one operating on a budget.

Fortunately, there are plenty of alternative options to Google’s analytics tool. Again, there are tradeoffs everywhere you go, so be sure to do your research thoroughly and select a tool that fits your vision for a website.

Author's Bio

Sophie Douglas is a digital marketing specialist and a journalist based in Columbus, state of Ohio. Her characters are passionate, innovative, and ambitious. Before becoming a writer for DigitalStrategyOne, she was writing short stories, screenplays, and directing short films.