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• Is Google Analytics Accurate ? 6 Important Caveats

  8 novembre 2022, par Erin

  It’s no secret that accurate website analytics is crucial for growing your online business — and Google Analytics is often the go-to source for insights. 

  But is Google Analytics data accurate ? Can you fully trust the provided numbers ? Here’s a detailed explainer.

  How Accurate is Google Analytics ? A Data-Backed Answer 

  When properly configured, Google Analytics (Universal Analytics and Google Analytics 4) is moderately accurate for global traffic collection. That said : Google Analytics doesn’t accurately report European traffic. 

  According to GDPR provisions, sites using GA products must display a cookie consent banner. This consent is required to collect third-party cookies — a tracking mechanism for identifying users across web properties.

  Google Analytics (GA) cannot process data about the user’s visit if they rejected cookies. In such cases, your analytics reports will be incomplete.

  Cookie rejection refers to visitors declining or blocking cookies from ever being collected by a specific website (or within their browser). It immediately affects the accuracy of all metrics in Google Analytics.

  Google Analytics is not accurate in locations where cookie consent to tracking is legally required. Most consumers don’t like disruptive cookie banners or harbour concerns about their privacy — and chose to reject tracking. 

  This leaves businesses with incomplete data, which, in turn, results in : 

  • Lower traffic counts as you’re not collecting 100% of the visitor data. 
  • Loss of website optimisation capabilities. You can’t make data-backed decisions due to inconsistent reporting

  For the above reasons, many companies now consider cookieless website tracking apps that don’t require consent screen displays. 

  Why is Google Analytics Not Accurate ? 6 Causes and Solutions 

  A high rejection rate of cookie banners is the main reason for inaccurate Google Analytics reporting. In addition, your account settings can also hinder Google Analytics’ accuracy.

  If your analytics data looks wonky, check for these six Google Analytics accuracy problems. 

  You Need to Secure Consent to Cookies Collection 

  To be GDPR-compliant, you must display a cookie consent screen to all European users. Likewise, other jurisdictions and industries require similar measures for user data collection. 

  This is a nuisance for many businesses since cookie rejection undermines their remarketing capabilities. Hence, some try to maximise cookie acceptance rates with dark patterns. For example : hide the option to decline tracking or make the texts too small. 

  

  Sadly, not everyone’s treating users with respect. A joint study by German and American researchers found that only 11% of US websites (from a sample of 5,000+) use GDPR-compliant cookie banners.

  As a result, many users aren’t aware of the background data collection to which they have (or have not) given consent. Another analysis of 200,000 cookies discovered that 70% of third-party marketing cookies transfer user data outside of the EU — a practice in breach of GDPR.

  Naturally, data regulators and activities are after this issue. In April 2022, Google was pressured to introduce a ‘reject all’ cookies button to all of its products (a €150 million compliance fine likely helped with that). Whereas, noyb has lodged over 220 complaints against individual websites with deceptive cookie consent banners.

  The takeaway ? Messing up with the cookie consent mechanism can get you in legal trouble. Don’t use sneaky banners as there are better ways to collect website traffic statistics. 

  Solution : Try Matomo GDPR-Friendly Analytics 

  Fill in the gaps in your traffic analytics with Matomo – a fully GDPR-compliant product that doesn’t rely on third-party cookies for tracking web visitors. Because of how it is designed, the French data protection authority (CNIL) confirmed that Matomo can be used to collect data without tracking consent.

  With Matomo, you can track website users without asking for cookie consent. And when you do, we supply you with a compact, compliant, non-disruptive cookie banner design. 

  Your Google Tag Isn’t Embedded Correctly 

  Google Tag (gtag.js) is a web tracking script that sends data to your Google Analytics, Google Ads and Google Marketing Platform.

  A corrupted gtag.js installation can create two accuracy issues : 

  • Duplicate page tracking 
  • Missing script installation 

  Is there a way to tell if you’re affected ?

  Yes. You may have duplicate scripts installed if you have a very low bounce rate on most website pages (below 15% – 20%). The above can happen if you’re using a WordPress GA plugin and additionally embed gtag.js straight in your website code. 

  A tell-tale sign of a missing script on some pages is low/no traffic stats. Google alerts you about this with a banner : 

  

  Solution : Use Available Troubleshooting Tools 

  Use Google Analytics Debugger extension to analyse pages with low bounce rates. Use the search bar to locate duplicate code-tracking elements. 

  Alternatively, you can use Google Tag Assistant for diagnosing snippet install and troubleshooting issues on individual pages. 

  If the above didn’t work, re-install your analytics script. 

  Machine Learning and Blended Data Are Applied

  Google Analytics 4 (GA4) relies a lot on machine learning and algorithmic predictions.

  By applying Google’s advanced machine learning models, the new Analytics can automatically alert you to significant trends in your data. [...] For example, it calculates churn probability so you can more efficiently invest in retaining customers.

  Vidhya Srinivasan, VP of Measurement, Analytics and Buying Platforms at Google

  On the surface, the above sounds exciting. In practice, Google’s application of predictive algorithms means you’re not seeing actual data. 

  To offer a variation of cookieless tracking, Google algorithms close the gaps in reporting by creating models (i.e., data-backed predictions) instead of reporting on actual user behaviours. Therefore, your GA4 numbers may not be accurate.

  For bigger web properties (think websites with 1+ million users), Google also relies on data sampling — a practice of extrapolating data analytics, based on a data subset, rather than the entire dataset. Once again, this can lead to inconsistencies in reporting with some numbers (e.g., average conversion rates) being inflated or downplayed. 

  Solution : Try an Alternative Website Analytics App 

  Unlike GA4, Matomo reports consist of 100% unsampled data. All the aggregated reporting you see is based on real user data (not guesstimation). 

  Moreover, you can migrate from Universal Analytics (UA) to Matomo without losing access to your historical records. GA4 doesn’t yet have any backward compatibility.

  Spam and Bot Traffic Isn’t Filtered Out 

  Surprise ! 42% of all Internet traffic is generated by bots, of which 27.7% are bad ones.

  Good bots (aka crawlers) do essential web “housekeeping” tasks like indexing web pages. Bad bots distribute malware, spam contact forms, hack user accounts and do other nasty stuff. 

  A lot of such spam bots are designed specifically for web analytics apps. The goal ? Flood your dashboard with bogus data in hopes of getting some return action from your side. 

  Types of Google Analytics Spam :

  • Referral spam. Spambots hijack the referrer, displayed in your GA referral traffic report to indicate a page visit from some random website (which didn’t actually occur). 
  • Event spam. Bots generate fake events with free language entries enticing you to visit their website. 
  • Ghost traffic spam. Malicious parties can also inject fake pageviews, containing URLs that they want you to click. 

  Obviously, such spammy entities distort the real website analytics numbers. 

  Solution : Set Up Bot/Spam Filters 

  Google Analytics 4 has automatic filtering of bot traffic enabled for all tracked Web and App properties. 

  But if you’re using Universal Analytics, you’ll have to manually configure spam filtering. First, create a new view and then set up a custom filter. Program it to exclude :

  • Filter Field : Request URI
  • Filter Pattern : Bot traffic URL

  Once you’ve configured everything, validate the results using Verify this filter feature. Then repeat the process for other fishy URLs, hostnames and IP addresses. 

  You Don’t Filter Internal Traffic 

  Your team(s) spend a lot of time on your website — and their sporadic behaviours can impair your traffic counts and other website metrics.

  To keep your data “employee-free”, exclude traffic from : 

  • Your corporate IPs addresses 
  • Known personal IPs of employees (for remote workers) 

  If you also have a separate stage version of your website, you should also filter out all traffic coming from it. Your developers, contractors and marketing people spend a lot of time fiddling with your website. This can cause a big discrepancy in average time on page and engagement rates. 

  Solution : Set Internal Traffic Filters 

  Google provides instructions for excluding internal traffic from your reports using IPv4/IPv6 address filters. 

  

  Session Timeouts After 30 Minutes 

  After 30 minutes of inactivity, Google Analytics tracking sessions start over. Inactivity means no recorded interaction hits during this time. 

  Session timeouts can be a problem for some websites as users often pin a tab to check it back later. Because of this, you can count the same user twice or more — and this leads to skewed reporting. 

  Solution : Programme Custom Timeout Sessions

  You can codify custom cookie timeout sessions with the following code snippets : 

  • _setSessionCookieTimeout. Set a custom new session cookie timeout in milliseconds.
  • _setVisitorCookieTimeout. Sets a custom Google Analytics visitor cookie expiration time frame in milliseconds.

  Final Thoughts 

  Thanks to its scale and longevity, Google Analytics has some strong sides, but its data accuracy isn’t 100% perfect.

  The inability to capture analytics data from users who don’t consent to cookie tracking and data sampling applied to bigger web properties may be a deal-breaker for your business. 

  If that’s the case, try Matomo — a GDPR-compliant, accurate web analytics solution. Start your 21-day free trial now. No credit card required.

  21 day free trial. No credit card required.

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  Your website address
  

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  Choose your analytics subdomain
  

  .matomo.cloud

  I hereby accept the terms and conditions and the data processing agreement (DPA)

  
  Your information will be used to create an account on our cloud service. For more information please consult our privacy policy.
  
  

  » Start improving your websites now

  

• 10 Matomo Features You Possibly Didn’t Know About

  28 octobre 2022, par Erin

  Most users know Matomo as the privacy-focussed web analytics tool with data accuracy, superior to Google Analytics. 

  And we’re thrilled to be that — and more ! 

  At Matomo, our underlying product vision is to provide a full stack of accurate, user-friendly and privacy-mindful online marketing tools. 

  Over the years, we’ve expanded beyond baseline website statistics. Matomo Cloud users also get to benefit from additional powerful tools for audience segmentation, conversion optimisation, advanced event tracking and more. 

  Here are the top 10 advanced Matomo features you wish you knew about earlier (but won’t stop using now !). 

  Funnels

  At first glance, most customer journeys look sporadic. But every marketer will tell you that there is a method to almost every users’ madness. Or more precisely — there’s a method you can use to guide users towards conversions. 

  That’s called a customer journey — a schematic set of steps and actions people complete from developing awareness and interest in your solution to consideration and finally conversion.

  On average, 8 touchpoints are required to turn a prospect into a customer. Though the number can be significantly bigger in B2B sales and smaller for B2C Ecommerce websites. 

  With the Funnels feature, you can first map all the on-site touchpoints (desired actions) for different types of customers. Then examine the results you’re getting as prospects move through these checkbox steps.

  Funnel reports provide :

  • High-level metrics such as “Funnel conversion rate”, “Number of funnel conversions”, “Number of funnel entries”. 
  • Drilled-down reports for each funnel and each tracked action within it. This way you can track the success rates of each step and estimate their contribution to the cumulative effect.

  Segmented funnel reports for specific user cohorts (with Matomo Segmentation enabled).

  

  What makes funnels so fun (pun intended) ? The variety of use cases and configurations ! 

  You can build funnels to track conversion rates for :

  • Newsletter subscriptions
  • Job board applications 
  • Checkout or payment 
  • Product landing pages
  • Seasonal promo campaigns

  …. And pretty much any other page where users must complete a meaningful action. So go test this out. 

  Form Analytics

  On-site forms are a 101 tactic for lead generation. For most service businesses, a “contact request” or a “booking inquiry” submission means a new lead in your pipeline. 

  That said : the average on-site form conversion rates across industries stand at below 50% : 

  • Property – 37% 
  • Telecoms – 40%
  • Software — 46.83%

  That’s not bad, but it could be better. If only you could figure out why people abandon your forms….

  Oh wait, Matomo Form Analytics can supply you with answers. Form Analytics provide real-time information on key form metrics — total views, starter rate, submitter rate, conversions and more.

  

  Separately the average form hesitation time is also provided (in other words, the time a user contemplates if filling in a form is worth the effort). Plus, Matomo also tracks the time spent on form submission.

  You can review : 

  • Top drop-off fields – to understand where you are losing prospects. These fields should either be removed or simplified (e.g., with a dropdown menu) to increase conversions.
  • Most corrected-field – this will provide a clear indication of where your prospects are struggling with a form. Providing help text can simplify the process and increase conversions. 
  • Unesserary fields – with this metric, you’ll know which optional fields your leads aren’t interested in filling in and can remove them to help drive conversions. 

  With Form Analytics, you’ll be able to boost conversions and create a better on-site experience with accurate user data. 

  A/B testing

  Marketing is both an art and a science. A/B testing (or split testing) helps you statistically verify which creative ideas perform better. 

  A good conversion rate optimisation (CRO) practice is to test different elements and to do so often to find your top contenders.

  What can you split test ? Loads of things :

  • Page slogans and call-to-actions 
  • Button or submission form placements
  • Different landing page designs and layouts
  • Seasonal promo offers and banners
  • Pricing information 
  • Customer testimonial placements 

  More times than not, those small changes in page design or copy can lead to a double-digit lift in conversion rates. Accounting software Sage saw a 30% traffic boost after changing the homepage layout, copy and CTAs based on split test data. Depositphotos, in turn, got a 9.32% increase in account registration rate (CR) after testing a timed pop-up registration form. 

  The wrinkle ? A/B testing software isn’t exactly affordable, with tools averaging $119 – $1,995 per month. Plus, you then have to integrate a third-party tool with your website analytics for proper attribution — and this can get messy.

  Matomo saves you the hassle in both cases. An A/B testing tool is part of your Cloud subscription and plays nicely with other features — goal tracking, heatmaps, historic visitor profiles and more. 

  You can run split tests with Matomo on your websites or mobile apps — and find out if version A, B, C or D is the top performer. 

  

  Advertising Conversion Exports

  A well-executed search marketing or banner remarketing campaign can drive heaps of traffic to your website. But the big question is : How much of it will convert ?

  The AdTech industry has a major problem with proper attribution and, because of it, with ad fraud. 

  Globally, digital ad fraud will cost advertisers a hefty $8 billion by the end of 2022. That’s when another $74 million in ad budgets get wasted per quarter. 

  The reasons for ad budget waste may vary, but they often have a common denominator : lack of reliable conversion tracking data.

  Matomo helps you get a better sense of how you spend your cents with Advertising Conversion Reports. Unlike other MarTech analytics tools, you don’t need to embed any third-party advertising network trackers into your website or compromise user privacy.

  Instead, you can easily export accurate conversion data from Matomo (either manually via a CSV file or automated with an HTTPS link) into your Google Ads, Microsoft Advertising or Yandex Ads for cross-validation. This way you can get an objective view of the performance of different campaigns and optimise your budget allocations accordingly. 

  Find out more about tracking ad campaigns with Matomo.

  Matomo Tag Manager

  The marketing technology landscape is close to crossing 10,000 different solutions. Cross-platform advertising trackers and all sorts of customer data management tools comprise the bulk of that growing stack. 

  Remember : Each new tool embed adds extra “weight” to your web page. More tracking scripts equal slower page loading speed — and more frustration for your users. Likewise, extra embeds often means dialling up the developer (which takes time). Or tinkering with the site code yourself (which can result in errors and still raise the need to call a developer). 

  With Tag Manager, you can easily generate tags for :

  • Custom analytics reports 
  • Newsletter signups
  • Affiliates 
  • Form submission tracking 
  • Exit popups and surveys
  • Ads and more

  With Matomo Tag Manager, you can monitor, update or delete everything from one convenient interface. Finally, you can programme custom triggers — conditions when the tag gets activated — and specify data points (variables) it should collect. The latter is a great choice for staying privacy-focused and excluding any sensitive user information from processing. 

  With our tag management system (TMS), no rogue tags will mess up your analytics or conversion tracking. 

  Session recordings

  User experience (UX) plays a pivotal role in your conversion rates. 

  A five-year McKinsey study of 300 publicly listed companies found that companies with strong design practices have 32 percentage points higher revenue growth than their peers. 

  But what makes up a great website design and browsing experience ? Veteran UX designers name seven qualities :

  

  To figure out if your website meets all these criteria, you can use Session Recording — a tool for recording how users interact with your website. 

  By observing clicks, mouse moves, scrolls and form interactions you can determine problematic website design areas such as poor header navigation, subpar button placements or “boring” blocks of text. 

  Such observational studies are a huge part of the UX research process because they provide unbiased data on interaction. Or as Nielsen Norman Group puts it :

  “The way to get user data boils down to the basic rules of usability :

  • Watch what people actually do.
  • Do not believe what people say they do.
  • Definitely don’t believe what people predict they may do in the future.” 

  Most user behaviour analytics tools sell such functionality for a fee. With Matomo Cloud, this feature is included in your subscription. 

  Heatmaps

  While Session Replays provide qualitative insights, Heatmaps supply you with first-hand qualitative insights. Instead of individual user browsing sessions, you get consolidated data on where they click and how they scroll through your website. 

  

  Heatmaps are another favourite among UX designers and their CRO peers because you can :

  • Validate earlier design decisions around information architecture, page layout, button placements and so on. 
  • Develop new design hypotheses based on stats and then translate them into website design improvements. 
  • Identify distractive no-click elements that confuse users and remove them to improve conversions. 
  • Locate problematic user interface (UI) areas on specific devices or operating systems and improve them for a seamless experience.

  To get even more granular results, you can apply up to 100 Matomo segments to drill down on specific user groups, geographies or devices. 

  This way you can make data-based decisions for A/B testing, updating or redesigning your website pages. 

  Custom Alerts

  When it comes to your website, you don’t want to miss anything big — be it your biggest sales day or a sudden nosedive in traffic. 

  That’s when Custom Alerts come in handy. 

  

  With a few clicks, you can set up email or text-based alerts about important website metrics. Once you hit that metric, Matomo will send a ping. 

  You can also set different types of Custom Alerts for your teams. For example, your website administrator can get alerted about critical technical performance issues such as a sudden spike in traffic. It can indicate a DDoS attack (in the worst case) — and timely resolution is crucial here. Or suggest that your website is going viral and you might need to provision extra computing resources to ensure optimal site performance.

  Your sales team, in turn, can get alerted about new form submissions, so that they can quickly move on to lead scoring and subsequent follow-ups. 

  Use cases are plentiful with this feature. 

  Custom Dashboards and Reports

  Did you know you can get a personalised view of the main Matomo dashboards ? 

  By design, we made different website stats available as separate widgets. Hence, you can cherry-pick which stats get a prominent spot. Moreover, you can create and embed custom widgets into your Matomo dashboard to display third-party insights (e.g., POS data).

  Set up custom dashboard views for different teams, business stakeholders or clients to keep them in the loop on relevant website metrics. 

  

  Custom Reports feature, in turn, lets you slice and dice your traffic analytics the way you please. You can combine up to three different data dimensions per report and then add any number of supported metrics to get a personalised analytics report.

  For example, to zoom in on your website performance in a specific target market you can apply “location” (e.g., Germany) and “action type” (e.g., app downloads) dimensions and then get segmented data on metrics such as total visits, conversion rates, revenue and more. 

  Get to know even more ways to customise Matomo deployment.

  Roll Up Report

  Need to get aggregated traffic analytics from multiple web properties, but not ready to pay $150K per year for Google Analytics 360 for that ?

  We’ve got you with Roll-Up Reporting. You can get a 360-degree view into important KPIs like global revenue, conversion rates or form performance across multiple websites, online stores, mobile apps and even Intranet properties.

  

  Setting up this feature takes minutes, but saves you hours on manually exporting and cross-mapping data from different web analytics tools. 

  Channel all those saved hours into more productive things like increasing your conversion rates or boosting user engagement. 

  Avoid Marketing Tool Sprawl with Matomo 

  With Matomo as your website analytics and conversion optimisation app, you don’t need to switch between different systems, interfaces or have multiple tracking codes embedded on your site.

  And you don’t need to cultivate a disparate (and expensive !) MarTech tool stack — and then figure out if each of your tools is compliant with global privacy laws.

  All the tools you need are conveniently housed under one roof. 

  Want to learn more about Matomo features ? Check out product training videos next ! 

  21 day free trial. No credit card required.

  Your email address
  

  Your website address
  

  Your Analytics subdomain will be .matomo.cloud (change)

  Choose your analytics subdomain
  

  .matomo.cloud

  I hereby accept the terms and conditions and the data processing agreement (DPA).

  
  Your information will be used to create an account on our cloud service. For more information please consult our privacy policy.
  
  

  » Start improving your websites now

  

• NodeJS HLS stall initial m3u8 for playback

  7 mars 2016, par shreddish

  I have a nodejs server running, when user enters the follow address

  http://localhost:7070/udp/239.1.1.1:1234/out.m3u8

  My server starts an ffmpeg child process that connects to that UDP stream and converts it to HLS segmented files.

  In order to give FFMPEG a chance to begin and start creating the first out.m3u8 file I call the FFMPEG process and then immediately set a timeout of about 8 seconds before the server responds to the request for the .m3u8 file.

  Eventually the video will start to play but only get through 2-3 .ts files before playback stops and the browser stops requesting additional .ts files.

  When it’s stalled, if I hit refresh (since FFMPEG is still running) it doesn’t try to start ffmpeg and delay the response. Instead it just immediately serves up the files being requested and playback works fine.

  So I am thinking that clearly something to do with delaying my response for that long is mucking up the playback of the stream. Is there a better way to wait for FFMPEG to start generating the HLS files and respond ?

  Here is the part of the server that is delaying the response.

  // Check if ffmpeg is running yet, also check to see if user has switched to a different udp address
  
          if (filename == "out.m3u8" && (!ffmpegRunning || udpAddress != runningUDPAddress)) 
  
              {
  
                  runFFMPEG(filename, udpAddress);
  
                  setTimeout(function() { streamFile(req, res, uri, filename); return; }, 8000);
  
              }
  
              else
  
              {
  
                  streamFile(req, res, uri, filename);
  
              }