This is a pretty stunning idea considering the level of decision making within the online industry that currently happens based on the statistics that are displayed in Google Analytics.

After talking to a few others about this issue, it turns out there may well be a growing question surrounding the importance that Google Analytics has in the decision making process. There’s this case study completed by Michael Martinez on SEOMOZ which, while a few years old, asks some very pertinent questions. How often have you questioned your Google Analytics package?

Thinking back 5 or 6 years in the online industry (prior to Google entering the web analytics vertical through acquisition) webmasters would regularly question anyone who quoted page views or page hits as it was widely accepted that the stats were particularly varied and often inaccurate.

With a company like Google taking on the mantle of free web analytics and effectively taking over the free market with a sophisticated product, the question just doesn’t get asked as often as it used to be. Do too many online professionals blindly trust Google to give accurate data through what is an imperfect tracking medium?

There is an interesting article available by Brian Clifton who took two sites and compared their tracking between Google Analytics, Yahoo Web Analytics and Nielsen Site Census. Here was the basic conclusion of his findings;

The methodology of page tagging with JavaScript in order to collect visit data has now been well established over the past 8 years or so. Given a best practice deployment of Google Analytics, Nielsen SiteCensus or Yahoo Web Analytics, high level metrics remain comparable. That is, can be expected to lie between 10-20% of each other. This is surprisingly close given the plethora of accuracy assumptions that need to considered when comparing different web analytics tools.
As tracking becomes more detailed – for example the tracking of transactions, custom variables, events and outbound links, the greater the discrepancies of metrics will be between the web analytics tools.

General discussions with a couple of industry people has suggested using a product like AWStats as a test against the particular product you’re using (e.g. Google Analytics) to make sure you’re not missing a part of the bigger picture through the use of only a single analytics package.

Do you have any data on the subject?

In reality, very little.

While the deal has been brokered to give Microsoft and Yahoo the opportunity to tackle Google in most markets (specifically the US where Google has 70% coverage), in New Zealand Google has well over 90% coverage which leaves very little room for competitors who are looking to lift their percentage of the search market above double digits.

One interesting question for those who follow local search is if in NZ Google is #1 and #2 is about to be Bing/MSN/Yahoo/Xtra, then who is #3?

Competition in search is a good thing, it helps promote innovation and pushes companies to facilitate better ROI for the advertising dollar. Some commentary on the deal has already begun discussing the openings potentially left for start-ups and smaller search alternatives that are nimble enough to move with the market as new needs are seen.

If you’re interested in reading more about the deal from their own perspective, they have set up a site specifically to present the case to the public – http://www.choicevalueinnovation.com/

I’ve needed a place to put general posts on the online market in NZ as well as discussions about things I’m finding interesting in the wider online world so it’s about time nzbase.com came back online.

I’ll be bringing this site back up to speed piece by piece and potentially porting the pre-2004 seo & sem stuff just for the hell of it. We’ll see how many late nights I’m willing to put in and how far the royal “we” get on that one