I am toying with the idea of ditching all analytics for one of our in house sites. We have a good metric: sales. Its the only stat that matters. We can track basic visitor numbers in the backend, the only thing that’s holding it back is advertisers want to see Google stats.

So we must persist.

The withheld figures aren’t too much of a problem – the content accessed generally points to the ballpark, and webmaster tools (as another commenter points out) also sheds some light.

One of our clients also uses another stat tracker, which gives this info even on logged in Google users.

I found your blog while doing some research on this for a blog post for our website (check it out soon!) the NP numbers for our client aren’t anywhere near as bad as yours but it is defintely a growing problem.

One thing to add to the discussion though is that I don’t think ANY analytics provider can ever get you the data back can they? I read quite a bit about this a while ago and discovered that G does all sorts of redirects to strip off the referring phrase so you will never be able to get it back. Unless you know otherwise?

Thanks for much for sharing your thoughts and for reading!

Take Care,
Nick

Although I could be said to be biased (disclaimer: being one of those low cost alternatives providers), we have discovered that most websites, even when losing data (yes, Google blocks us from seeing those keywords sometimes too), still have enough data to work on. It’s not perfect and doesn’t give the full picture, but it’s enough to find room for improvement with websites and SEO.

For example, if previously, a website had 100 people enter it on a ‘widgets’ page, then for most of those 100 it would have been possible to see the keyword phrases used. Suppose 30% of those get blocked in analytics – that’s still 70 people where you could see the keyword phrase typed, how each of them navigated through the site after landing, and (where relevant) what company they were from. That’s still a decent amount of data. If it showed you that many of those 70 went no further than the landing page (or got stuck elsewhere) then that’s still useful information.

Focusing particularly on small businesses, what we find is that our analytics users (within those businesses) are so busy (in their work) that they are content to use the data that analytics gives them because it at least tells them something they can fix. Yes, if they had 100% of the keyword phrases etc. then it could help more but in our experience they’ve got plenty to be focusing on without complete data.

Having said all that, perhaps it’s only a matter of time before Google starts blocking even more. After all, it works in its favour if end users can’t see where there is wastage (PPC being a particular money burner in the wrong hands).

When it comes to analytics in general, we are, unfortunately years away from the point where most businesses (especially small businesses) view strong analytics as being as routine activity as checking email, writing a Word document etc. I have to confess to being surprised at how many years it’s taking for the mindset to change.

Thanks for your comment and for reading.

Exactly, are there any LOW cost good quality alternatives? A product such as Ominiture tends to be out of the reach for most small businesses…

Thanks,
Nick

Our top “keyword” is “Not Provided” as well; I don’t know if making Analytics more convoluted than it already was is a strategic priority of Google – if so, they’ve succeeded thus far.

Oh, and Craig – they do already have a paid for service, GA Premium. I suspect your prediction is correct, which is unfortunate.

It will also be difficult for SEO copywriters who don’t have the budget to invest in expensive analysis programs (like me!!). I’ll be very interested to see what other low price or free options become available.