Before I get slaughtered, it should be pointed out that I do use Google Analytics and have it installed on every website I own. However, to what extent I look back at the statistics of the site with Google Analytics is a totally different question. There are many benefits Google Analytics brings to a website. It is free to use and the level of detail the statistics can go into is sometimes quite scary – how can a script installed onto a website have the ability to know so much about a web user! Nevertheless, I still find that I rarely look at the statistics of my sites with Google Analytics and here are the main reasons why.
 

#1 Time Consuming

My main problem when it comes to blogging, managing websites and anything online marketing is with procrastination. Most tasks I have to do I can do within an hour. However, with a little procrastination and a click of a button, that same task can take double the time. What is the solution to this? Stop procrastinating!
Unfortunately, I find that looking at the statistics of sites, especially in Google Analytics, is a huge source of procrastination for me. Looking day by day at what web users entered onto my site, what articles they looked at and whether they bounced away or not is all useful information. However, it really does suck the time I have on productive things dry. Therefore, I have kind of got into the routine of just staying away from heavy statistics for my own good (and only look at them deeply every month or so).
 
 

#2 Understanding Not Always Right

Another problem I find with Google Analytics is that digesting some of the statistics can be quite difficult. For the majority of people out there, they will be using Google Analytics to analyse where their website is going right and wrong. Where it is going right, great stuff! Where it is going wrong, well, let’s understand why it is going wrong, what has caused it to go wrong and how we can rectify this.
 
But that is exactly the problem.
 
For example, I had a website a few years ago that had quite a high bounce rate. Now, of course I did not want this so I looked at why the bounce rate was high – from doing research, it was one of 10 vague possibilities. So, in that case, I would have to change one variable at a time, give it a week or so and see how the bounce rate changed. Unless you know exactly why people left the website etc. it feels like shooting in the dark. From this, I could go back to my first point that it becomes extremely time consuming, especially when you are shooting for website improvements that don’t pay off in the short/long run.