Exactly. Knowing its limitations, and being able to communicate them well to the people you need to convince to succeed in your job, is the right way to go.
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In a perfect world where everyone understands every single data point completely or you don't have to work with everyone else that's completely true. That kind of thinking is however extremely limiting to 9/10 organisations out there because team work and team buy-in is so important for how decisions are made. Believing that GA can do anything and everything, which is the belief of more managers than you'd like to think, is exactly the underlying issue.
Yeah that's exactly the kind of frustrations that I've experienced countless times and hope to get better at combatting by exploring how GA really works and how/where it's limited. Slowly getting there..
I think Google Analytics is much better than nothing, and until you reach a certain scale (I used the estimate of ~1 million monthly sessions) I think it's sufficient.
What I am mainly arguing is that relying completely on GA for reports and performance measurements is dangerous and frustrating.
I haven't explored the current functionality for mobile apps, but we're currently working multi-funnel analysis and it's a complete nightmare given that most purchases journeys happen across more than one device. And that's with GA Premium..
Yes, however the mechanics for SEM are a bit different because you still have the ability to track which keywords (ads) ended up creating the incremental revenue, an option that has been taken away from SEO's over the past year's roll out of GA's (not provided) data.
I love scaling and automating, so my current setup is an Excel keyword opportunity model with the various business metrics described (CR, AOV etc) along with my basic costs for optimizing each keyword or landing page (x dollars for writing, x dollars for link acquisition giveaways etc). The model returns an ROI for the first month right away, so I normally just pull 50-100 keywords through the model each time I have time to take on new optimization campaigns and pick the most obvious opportunities.
If you are feeling a bit more ambitious an idea could be to combine this with some sort of relative score of competitiveness of the current SERP for each keyword, which could make the decision process even easier. Nick Eubanks of www.seonick.com has written about this before, however with other metrics than I use myself.
Feel free to reach out on simontorring@gmail.com if you need any help or input.
We've been talking to both existing customer's and prospective SEO agencies around California. Many are asking for exactly what you're describing: 'to combine this with some sort of relative score of competitiveness of the current SERP for each keyword'.
I signed up for Spotify Malaysia when I lived there and continue to pay the lower subscription fee now that I am living in Singapore. The only differences are a minor difference in selection and the fact that, for some reason, all my iPhone push notifications from the Spotify app are in Bahasa Malay (Malaysia's primary language)
- Simon