Process does matter: Do not take outputs for granted
In the Digital Age (or Information Age), data is the key success factors and facilitate the creation of competitive advantage to both organisations and individuals. My friend once told me that Google has never deleted anything (or any data). That might be one of the reasons why Google is the giant in this Digital Age as it has been viewing data as its invaluable assets.
Ghost traffic in Google Analytics
I have embedded Google Analytics tool (explore the features) in my website five days after the launch on 21 Nov 2016. Few days ago, there were some users visiting my website from Russia. As a newbie to this, at first I was so excited that my tiny website has such a global visibility. However, after a few hours of excitement, my suspicion started to develop strongly. I have shared my website in my Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram accounts. I rarely have Russian friends or connections. Why so many users from Russia were on my newly-launched website? I started to dig down my Google analytic and found another point of suspicion that Reddit.com has been referring traffic to my website. That’s weird! I do not have the account with the site, nor visit the site recently. Then my research (Google-search really) about this suspicious traffic has started.
Finally, I have found out that these users are referral spam or ghost spam that try to create fake traffic to your website to call attention. Recently, Russian referrer spammer has caused these ghost visitors in Google Analytics [read more about this]. With my tiny website, the main effect of this spam is that it can mess up my analytics data. The total ghost spam on my site accounts for about 25% of the total users. This made me misunderstood about the number of users visiting my website and its visibility.
My point here is not to show and direct you how I filtered the spams out of my analytics data. However, I would like to highlight that when you use data analytic tools (such as Google Analystics), it is better if you know mechanism, assumptions or functions behind those outputs/final numbers. These outputs from analytic tools, in turn, will be the input for your decision making process. If you know and are aware of the functions, filtering, and segmentation in Google Analytics tool, you can make more accurate and relevant decisions.
Lesson learn from using Google Analytics
My experience on this makes me think about the questions I was asked by some of accounting and finance students (and the questions I used to ask as a student!) that…
“Why we need to understand how to debits and credits? Because if you put in transactions in accounting software, it will do the job; we will just wait for the report”
or
“Why we need to know CAPM equation in details? Because when we have the number we just let the computer program process it. We simply just need to know that it is a relationship of risk and return of a particular asset; and use the outcomes to make investment decision”
With those two cases, the outputs (reports and the decisions based on the numbers) are not absolute. Taking the case of the first case, there might be more than one way to do the debits and credits for particular/similar transactions that organisations can use such choices to manipulate financial reports. If we take the reported number as they are without questioning the suspicion accounts, the decisions based on that numbers might not be the best decision.
Thus, using Google Analytics (or data analytic tools) to aid your decision is essential for this digital era with overwhelming amount of data/data sources. However, we need to be aware that such tools are prone to spams and distracting data sources that could hinder analytic data sets that are useful and relevant to your decision. So do not take such tools and their products (e.g. numbers, and reports) for granted. But try to understand the mechanism and functions behind them to make the most out of them; and not be manipulated by false information!! Do not be so obsessed only with the outputs, PROCESS DOES MATTER!