Marketers need their key performance indicators (data analytics) to guide their efforts at producing the best promotional materials for their brands. As marketing and advertising efforts increase dramatically through the holiday season, so the metrics become even more important. However, there are a few glitches in the system, according to Marketing Land. Some of the metric data might cause the “bigger picture” to be slightly out of focus.
First, there are the bounce rates which show the number of viewers who visit one page on your website before they bounce (leave). A number of factors within each page and each viewing can influence the bounce rate, so there is no “standard” to compare it to.
The “average session duration” metric typically doesn’t log a reliable timestamp for a viewers exit for your website. As a result, the overall duration of their visit is not an accurate representation.
The “direct traffic” analytic can be deceptive because many people believe this counts the number of views from visitors who typed your website directly into their browser. Not true!Actually, these represent only a portion of all the “direct traffic” numbers. In some ways, this analytic is a catch-all for other factors that are not recorded elsewhere on Google Analytics, such as link-clicks in email clients.
Finally, the “site speed” metric is highly important for SEO and determining conversions, but the information also has a few holes in it. As with the other skewed data listed here, several factors can cause deviations in the recorded speeds. Experts suggest using analytics on Chrome Developer Console or another third-party source to get a more reliable metric reading.
