Picking the Right Web Analytics Package: Getting Accurate Statistics

Is your site building a loyal customer base, or driving users away to your competitors? If an analytics package can’t deliver a reliable return visitor count, there is no way to tell. The accuracy of the return visitor count is vital to determining the effectiveness of customer loyalty programs and marketing incentives; accuracy requires accurate user tracking.

Tracking Users

Users may be tracked by a number of different methods. IP Addresses can be used to uniquely identify large corporations and other users with static addresses. However, home users on services such as cable or DSL usually receive a rotating IP address that changes at a regular interval, and dial-up users are assigned an IP address from a pool of free addresses at the time of their connection. Using IP addresses to identify large companies can also be problematic, as there may be many users masked behind the one public IP address. Because IP addresses can’t be relied upon to uniquely identify users, most analytics packages rely on a cookie to determine if a user has visited the site before.

Tracking Cookies

If the tracking cookie the analytics package uses comes from the domain owned by the analytics company, it will most likely be shared across all sites that use the same analytics package. There is nothing incorrect or unsafe about this practice. However, due to privacy concerns that have arisen in recent years, it has become common for antivirus and antispyware programs to delete what they consider to be “tracking cookies”. Depending on the analytics package, this may include the cookie used by the analytics software to track repeat visitors. The routine deletion of these tracking cookies can cause the system to report an artificially inflated number of unique visitors and an artificially decreased number of repeat visitors.

The tracking cookies used by Google Analytics are unique to each site with Google Analytics installed, as they are based on the domain of the site, not the Google Analytics domain. This makes Google Analytics cookies much less likely to be deleted in the course of normal computer maintenance. That leads to more accurate repeat visitor counts. Accurate return visitor counts allows for the tailoring of marketing materials to encourage repeat business.

To learn more about tracking cookies please see the Symantec document on tracking cookies.

To learn more about Google Analytics please see the Google Analytics homepage.