If you have Google Analytics, do you still need FouAnalytics?

If you have Google Analytics on your site already, do you still need FouAnalytics? Yes, and here's why.

FouAnalytics helps you understand what you SEE in Google Analytics

In the example below, you see large spikes in volume in Google Analytics (light blue at the bottom). Google Analytics doesn't tell you what those traffic spikes are from -- bot or humans. Having FouAnalytics next to Google Analytics, you will see that the "red line" (bots) went up. The green volume bars of FouAnalytics also shows that the spikes occurred at the exact same hour (8pm) every night. Note that the large areas of orange in the FouAnalytics stacked percentage chart are not significant because those occurred during the hours of little to no volume (green bars near zero). Furthermore, Google Analytics has deprecated more and more data like ISP name, full HTTP_USER_AGENT, etc. All of these are shown in FouAnalytics.

FouAnalytics helps you see the bots that you DON'T SEE in Google Analytics

Google Analytics is required by industry standards to discard bot activity -- i.e. not show it in the dashboard. This might have been a good idea when the standards were being set, but not knowing how much traffic was from know bots, and not knowing what bots they were and where they came from, is causing more problems now for advertisers. In the example below, notice the surge in yellow, that lasted for 12 days or so and went away.

Supporting detail in FouAnalytics showed that this was Googlebot, coming from Google data centers. By knowing the details of the bot -- Googlebot -- and knowing where it came from -- Google data centers, the site owner can decide what action needs to be taken. In this case no action is needed. But when you see bad bots (dark red) and you see where they came from, you can take action, like block them at the network level or by IP address. Or revisit your paid media and block bad sites and apps, or remove them from your inclusion lists.

FouAnalytics helps you understand the relative quality of various traffic sources (paid vs organic)

For ecommerce sites and performance marketers, FouAnalytics helps them understand the quantity and the relative quality of the clicks arriving from various sources, paid or organic. In the example below, you will see that 28.8% of the site's traffic has UTM_SOURCE, which implies the traffic came from paid sources. Out of these sources, you can see that some are better than others, and some have a lot more dark red. These are the ones the site owner/advertiser needs to look into further. The others look fine (i.e. have a lot of humans (dark blue)). The advertiser can simply adjust budget allocation -- more budget to sources that are sending more clicks and more blue (humans), and less budget to those sources sending more red (bots).

In the 2 examples below, Advertiser 1 and Advertiser 2 are both using retargeting and remarketing (of different amounts). But note the color coding under each row. Both retargeting and remarketing have much higher dark red. In the case of retargeting, the clever bots visit the advertisers' site first to collect a cookie. The platforms then try to retarget that cookie with ads. The advertiser pays a higher CPM, but end up showing more ads to bots, pretending to be interested in the advertiser by visiting their site first.

FouAnalytics helps you understand whether HIGH bounce or LOW bounce users are valuable.

Many advertisers have observed in their own Google Analytics that visitors arriving from paid media are very high bounce -- i.e. they leave the site without doing anything. And some of them leave right away, like under 1 second. These are obviously low value visitors. But Google Analytics doesn't tell you why. Most of you have seen the following slide already where the vast majority of the clicks from utm_source=programmatic are orange and red (bots) and only 1 - 4% of the clicks are dark blue (humans). This helps to explain why you see the high bounce. Bots have no reason to stick around and do anything on your site, because they are not paid for that. So FouAnalytics helps you understand why high bounce visitors in Google Analytics are such.

What if you see LOW bounce and highly engaged users in Google Analytics? Does that mean they are human and valuable? Google Analytics doesn't tell you this, but FouAnalytics does. Most of you have seen the following example too. These are clicks from PMax (Performance Max) campaigns. Note that the majority of the visitor arriving are dark red (bots). Furthermore, note the click maps on the right side. 80 - 83% of the users also clicked something, to simulate "engagement." This easily tricks Google Analytics, and PMax conversion tracking, into thinking these are engaged users. These are also marked as low bounce or no bounce, because they "did" something on the site. But note the click patterns. Even laypersons can tell this is not a natural click pattern of humans using a normal site. So while these are all marked as low bounce visitors by Google Analytics, they are all still bots and all of them are faking the click/engagement. You can see that in FouAnalytics and take appropriate action.

There are dozens more examples of how to use FouAnalytics to troubleshoot or corroborate what you see in Google Analytics or Adobe Analytics. Too many to go into here. FouAnalytics is not meant to replace your site analytics. It is meant to work side by side with it.

I am launching FouAnalytics Self-Serve next week, so many more of you can create an account yourself and use FouAnalytics on your own site.

Happy Sunday Y'all.

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