#16: Why Your Analytics Are Bullshit & What To Do About It - Bamboo Chalupa Podcast

Google Analytics is an incredible enterprise-level application any website owner can use for free. However, the numbers and dashboards in Analytics not only provide insight; they can also mislead if they aren’t fully understood. In this episode, Nate and Brett talk about the power of Analytics, but also why you’re probably looking at the wrong numbers, and what to do about it.

Issues Discussed

• The power of Google Analytics
• Why Google Analytics is free & why it works
• Referrer Spam – Semalt, Darodar and others
• Sampling in Analytics
• Session tracking in a multi-device world
• International traffic
• Attributing traffic and conversions
• The role of Dark Social & Search
• Using regular expressions
• Using multiple views
• Looking at trends and multiple metrics

Links Mentioned

Adobe’s Attribution Commercial

Google Developers Guide (spamming referrer code)

Getting Rid of Referrer Spam

Google Analytics Academy

History of Dark Social

Groupon’s (direct) Traffic Experiment

Nate’s Guide to Filtering Bots from Google Analytics

Check out this episode!

Listen to this episode in iTunes