I use Google Analytics to see how many people come to my sites and how they get there. It’s pretty amazing, but it has a couple of things that really annoy me: no full referrer data and it’s unfriendly to tabbed browsing.

I know, I know. Some people say it’s foolish to give Google all that data for free. All my sites are (at least in my opinion), content-rich, above-board sites, so I’m not really afraid of Google seeing who comes and goes. I do understand that this is not a free service provided by Google, though, it’s a data exchange: I let them see my data and they keep track of it for me. Fine.

So now that I’m paying them so richly with my data, I wish they would make their service a bit less annoying. What’s annoying? Two things principally:

  • No full referrer data. When someone visits from a forum, the URL is often something like http://someforum.com/index.php?page=123456. Unfortunately GA does not bother to record the part after the ?, which means that you can’t possibly find out where people are coming from. I’m not exactly running the most high-profile, highest traffic sites on the net, so I try to stop in and say hello is a forum is having a substantive discussion of what I’m saying. Unfortunately, GA doesn’t capture that data unless you put some extra work in.
  • Tabbed-browser unfriendly. What’s wrong with Google? Don’t they use Firefox? They must, because if you click on THIS LINK and download and start using Firefox (that is, you switch from another brand of browser), they’ll pay me $1. So obviously they’ve heard of Firefox. Now when I surf in Firefox, I don’t click a link, read a page, click a link, read a page. I get to a page, click every interesting link to open in a new tab, and then go through them and close the tab as needed. GA doesn’t let me do that. Let’s say that I do this:
    • Open a page that lists all the sites that sent traffic to my site. I want to drill down and see which pages from some of those sites actually sent the traffic.
    • I CTRL-click on each link that interests me and it opens the page in a new tab, but it opens the root page, not the one I’m drilling down to! Come on!

    So why is that a problem? Simple. If it worked my way, I would go to the root page, open five links in new tabs and then work from there. Total pages viewed: 6. Total clicks: 6. If I do it the GA way, on the other hand, it’s down to the subpage, back to the root page, down to the sub page, back to the root page. And here’s the really bad part: if the root page lists sites ten at a time and has 200 sites, I need to keep navigating back to where I was. So to see those five pages, I might need to view 15 pages or more. What a hassle.

I’ve given up filling out the GA feedback form since they seem to be all about tab-unfriendly AJAX. Well, I only pay with my data and everyone else with anywhere near the same capabilities require me to pay with my data and my money, so I put up with the hassle, but if I had a site that was making me a living, I would rather spend my time building the site, not wrestling with analytics. So I suspect that GA is a bottom-feeder service that targets people like me with little traffic and no commerce, which is giving Google a somewhat skewed view of traffic on the net. I guess they’re getting data for the big-guy sites by using the ad revenue.

Filed under: SEO

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