Preventing Fake Traffic from Skewing your Google Analytics, with CHEQ’s GA4 Connector
Daniel Avital
|Data & Analytics | January 02, 2023
Google Analytics is the modern marketer’s central command post.
In today’s data-driven world, marketing and website analytics tools are ubiquitous. From SMEs to large enterprises, nobody goes to market without them. But above all tools, Google Analytics reigns supreme. Recent data shows that over 87% of the world’s 10,000 most visited websites use Google Analytics, 320 of the top 500 US retailers use it, and overall, GA holds an 82% share of the global analytics market. The meaning of these numbers is clear – Google Analytics is de-facto, the most used analytics tool in the world, and has solidified its position as the modern-day marketer’s central command post, helping drive tactical and strategic decisions.
But without visibility into fake traffic, analytics, and site metrics are badly skewed.
With the rapid rise of the Fake Web, website traffic is heavily polluted by bots, click farms, automation tools, malicious human users, and other forms of invalid traffic (IVT). Recent reports have shown that 40% of all eCommerce traffic is made up of bots, while CHEQ’s own data has shown that of organic and direct traffic alone, 27% is driven by bots and fake users. The implication for any team running Google Analytics is that the metrics they look at daily are heavily skewed by invalid traffic, putting the integrity of their data into question.
When key metrics are skewed, all decisions are made based on bad data.
When key metrics are skewed to the tune of 20-40%, marketers struggle to make decisions and optimize effectively. An influx of bot traffic will impact bounce rates, time on page, unique visits, and other key website metrics. Campaign click-through rates (CTR) are inflated by click fraud, and site forms are flooded with fake submissions. Without visibility into these issues, marketers are forced to operate in the dark. They end up duplicating content they deem successful because it drove large volumes of traffic, not knowing that traffic came from bots and that the content was underperforming. The replicate campaigns with inflated click rates are based on the assumption those clicks are real. They design landing pages and customer experiences based on visitor data like geo-location and devices, not knowing that these are very often spoofed and manipulated. Even macro decisions like annual budget planning and organic growth forecasting are thrown off by high rates of invalid traffic. The bottom line is everything is off when the data is off.
Turn the lights on with CHEQ’s GA 4 Connector, and un-skew the data.
To help marketers gain visibility into fake traffic impacting their funnels, data, and metrics, CHEQ has now launched the first-of-its-kind connector for Google Analytics 4. GA users can now turn the light on and un-skew their data from malicious bots, fake users, automation tools, click farms, and many other forms of unwanted traffic. Layered directly into the GA dashboards, understanding the impact of IVT on key metrics has never been easier, and marketers can finally restore trust in their reporting and measurement.
