Google Analytics meets a healthy dollop of cynicism
The technical differences between the various analytics tools have always eluded me.
Francois Derbaix, chief technology officer of French travel site toprural.com, found that by default, Google Analytics makes search look good by attributing site visits to the latter for an unduly long period.
It turns out the default cookie window Google ascribes to visitors that arrive on a site via Google is six months. Six months!
…which, he seems to imply, is why GA is free. Perhaps Google isn’t so altruistic after all.
What it boils down to, Econsultancy says, is
If you make decisions based on data, then that data has to be reliable.
I love it when techies are able to explain things in layman speak. I love conspiracy theories even more (I trust nothing got lost in translation).
@longtale I’m glad you liked the analysis. Your summary is still much better than the original post: “Six month!”
PD: Toprural is a Spanish company, also active in France (and 9 European countries in total). Since I’m french-speaking person (from Belgium) Euroconsultancy post describes us as a french company but we are not.
Thanks for shedding light on this Francois. Would never have chanced upon it myself otherwise