Google Analytics vs Globules Analytics

2016-08-08

Google Analytics might just be the most popular analytics solution, but is it really the best? At Globules, we had been using Google’s analytics solutions for quite a while when we decides it was enough and it was time to build something that circumvent the ugly side of it.

Google have you add a little piece of JavaScript code into your page with a unique code. In short, when you visit a page with Google’s analytics on it, you basically download that JavaScript extension then load and pass it that code. This is how they mainly track the activity on your site but there is a huge drawback to this method.

If you have been a Google Analytics user for some time, you realized fast enough that your analytics data was always wrong. Your reports are bloated with bad or fake referrers and it is just impossible to really get a true glance at your real visits. Because of its JavaScript/front end architecture, it is very easy to mimic and fool, by pretending to download it from another domain passing the same login that can be read in clear from your web page, and force a referrer on your website. Google is very aware of this and thus deployed an interface to patch the issue, the referral exclusion screen. That screen basically gives you control over a ban list of undesirable referrers. The problem with this approach is that you only patch and never really solve the problem. Even worse, the analytics is not being adjusted once you add a bad referrer to the list. It will just ignore it from now on for the future visits but does not remove the fake visits in the past.

Referral scam is a very common issue and these people running these scams are very aware of the short life span of bad referrer, hence them adding other referrers to bounce you back to where they want it. It’s a cat and mouse game that you can never really win. So why isn’t Google doing anything about it? They could setup a database that stores and the bad referrers and do an automatic ban, but it wouldn’t be exact science. You could actually fake a bad referrer as a good referrer and have your competition blocked and since it would be impossible to have people background checking the referrers. So you end up with an analytics system that gives you very averagely the temperature of the day with a huge margin error.

[img:ganalytics.png,1188,703,rcp_image_resp]

[span:notice,Google and its useless referral control panel]

Globules analytics has a totally different approach. First of all, it is not something that can be mimicked because it is not front end embedded, but embedded in its core within the data center application layer and linked to existing access tokens, that are linked to applications and users. Globules also provides a control panel to automatically ban bad referrers, crawlers and robots trying to scam one way or another. Globules even delivers known IP addresses for all crawlers and robots that hit any of its systems, that can be added at any time into the deny list.

[img:analytics.png,1482,873,rcp_image_resp]

[span:notice,Globules IP gathering by robot]

As Globules grow, so will the database and so will be enhanced the security of all of our clients. Not only you get real analytics results, but you also prevent unnecessary crawls to your servers and even prevent intrusions and malware. Want to know more about our analytics solutions? [link:/inquire,inquire,Drop us a line!]