My debut contributing column at The Next Web is now live:
Ten Years Later, How Google Analytics Changed Marketing
The data that you see in Google Analytics is wrong.
As I explained in a recent presentation at MozCon in Seattle, Google Analytics code is a client-side JavaScript snippet that is inserted into the front-ends of websites. Whenever those code snippets are blocked or otherwise do not execute, Google does not obtain any information from the session that is occurring at that moment…
Yes, most websites are creating and executing marketing strategies based on the bad information in one single analytics tool. In the just over ten years since the release of GA in November 2005, the marketing world has changed for better and for worse — and much of the latter stems from Google Analytics itself.