This post was mentioned on Twitter by Richard Hawkesford….

Good luck

Thanks for your quick response. We’ve set a GA goal on the thankyou page for people who have registered with the website.
Last month this showed a 22% difference to our CRM database.
Surely GA should perform better than 22%?
Using the JavaScript console inside Chrome, it shows that _utm.gif is always taking much longer to load than all the other resources for the rest of the pages (sometimes over a second). Could it be latency? Could the user be moving beyond our thankyou/goal page before GA has a chance to register a page impression?

Justin

Thanks for reading. All being well your GA form submissions should be reasonably similar to what you see in the back-end database, with the main exception being duplication (i.e. people might submit more than one form, but if you are deduping the database before counting then you would have lower numbers). If the figures are completely out then something is wrong I would say.

GA is as accurate as any other tool. Commercial vendors would tell you different, but any improvement would be marginal.

When someone completes a goal, e.g. website registration, what % tolerance would you say is acceptable comparing to our CRM database?

How accurate should GA be? Is GA any more/less accurate than other tools?

I’d be really interested to learn about other people’s experiences here!

Justin

This occurs regularly for display, affiliates and search. The drop-off is mistakes, people not arriving because page loading at either the media tracking or landing page was so slow, tags being too far down the landing page that users had clicked on before it was triggered etc… and all the reasons you suggest about methodology.

I’ve seen major differences between reporting of channels when SEO, PPC, display, affiliates and direct traffic feature in the multiple visits required to buy a product (a holiday, for example). This can have a dramatic effect of how you optimize spend on each of these marketing approaches.

So one of the biggest outcomes for a planning team is that he whole business says they don’t trust the data you are using… so regularly communicating that all is well is very important.

Now that everything is starting to go mobile this issue gets even more complex. The key methods of visitor identification become flawed on mobile, whether on a standard phone, smartphone or a PC connecting via mobile broadband.

To start with cookies are less reliable – as well user deletion some handsets automatically delete cookies when you close the browser or restart the phone. Also some mobile operators block cookies – this often depends on the connection gateway used or the use of transcoders.

Secondly, the IP address is rarely the physical device but rather the operators gateway machine the device is connected through, so all Sprint customers and Sprint MVNO customers (like Boost) in the US come through the same range of IP addresses.

Lastly consumers now switch connections between operator networks and WiFi (see http://bango.com/wifi) which affects the ability to track, most systems will allocate a new identity in this case.

Fortunately, unlike the PC, mobile devices come with operator identity which can be used safely and anonymously to persistently track consumers. For example, Bango Analytics (http://bango.com/analytics) uses this technique through relationships with operators around the world. It means Bango can offer much higher visitor identification accuracy than other solutions. It also works on PC sites – it’s worth trying the free trial (http://bango.com/signup) and comparing.