Analytics programs are never going to be 100% accurate but you might not expect them to be over-reading by 2-4 times on your unique visitor numbers.
According to research this is exactly what’s going on. Scout Analytics has developed algorithms for tracking users across different devices using dozens of unique attributes and utilize patent-pending algorithms to derive a unique signature for the device, network, even the individual user (biometric). Their systems use things like typing patterns to identify people across different computers for example, you can read more on the blog.
During the past 6 months, Scout Analytics tracked hundreds of thousands of subscribers through a combination of patent-pending tracking technologies of device and biometric signatures. Scout Analytics discovered cookies have an inherent weakness that causes them to overstate the user counts on an average of two to four times.
“Virtually all measurement techniques have some rate of error, but online marketers who have a heavy reliance on cookies need to know this method has astonishingly low accuracy,†said John Lovett, senior partner for Web Analytics Demystified. “Because of this, we expect new innovations in measurement technology in the near future that will no doubt minimize marketers’ reliance on cookies and dramatically improve measurement accuracy.â€
I expect that some of the major analytics provided will be interested and worried about this. On the one hand they want their figures to be more accurate but on the other hand if they were to start using this technology all their customers unique visitor numbers would fall dramatically overnight.
Patrick Altoft is Director of Search at Leeds based digital & SEO agency Branded3. Patrick also runs Blogstorm.You can get our blog posts delivered for free by email every day - simply add your email address to the box below or alternatively grab the RSS feed.
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Whats your take on browser fingerprinting, does GA give enough information to track users via a browser finger print
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I doubt Google Analytics is particularly accurate but if you use the same thing all the time it doesn’t really matter. I’m sure their browser fingerprinting isn’t amazing otherwise they would be shouting about it somewhere.
More comments from Patrick Altoftany Browser finger printing analytics provider you would suggest?
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I’m always sceptical about research published by a company in support of one of that company’s products. That research is rarely unbiased.
More comments from badamsIt stands to reason that for sites where users don’t logon, the same person accessing the site from work, home, and from their laptop and/or mobile phone is going to be counted as at least three different users.
Likewise people who set their browser cookie permissions to ‘allow for session only’, will also appear to inflate the numbers of unique visitors who do not return.
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Comcast came to the same conclusion a few years ago too.
More comments from Patrick AltoftCrikey! Thats a bit upsetting. Mind you if everyone has to downgrade their counts then its not so bad… but who will be the first to give the true picture?
As someone who was charged with deriving UV numbers from raw traffic data (collected via the TeaLeaf system) I can appreciate the difficulties. However internally the numbers were generally treated as “relative” – what does it actually mean if you UV count is 50k or 100k? It’s just a number and doesn’t really equate to anything.
What we looked at in more details were the changes in UV counts.
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