Accurate data is a crucial keystone to web analytics. Whether you’re tracking pageviews, marketing ads, or custom events, knowing this specific data will help drive impactful decisions for your business.

How Google Analytics Tracks Data

When it comes to Google Analytics, it’s essential to understand how they report and track data. If you’re on any Google Analytics plan other than their Analytics 360, they use something called sampling. And just so you’re aware, their Analytics 360 cost about $150,000/year -- no, those zeros are not typos.

According to Google, “In data analysis, sampling is the practice of analyzing a subset of all data in order to uncover the meaningful information in the larger data set. For example, if you wanted to estimate the number of trees in a 100-acre area where the distribution of trees was fairly uniform, you could count the number of trees in 1 acre and multiply by 100, or count the trees in a half-acre and multiply by 200 to get an accurate representation of the entire 100 acres.”

In other words, if you’re in the business where accuracy matters, you may want to consider options other than Google Analytics. Maybe 1 acre of trees has 50, another has 1000. Depending on the sample data, this could lead to wildly inaccurate results when reporting on your data.

To really give roots to this tree analogy, Woopra is one alternative analytics tool where each tree matters. Not only does each tree matter, but each leaf on each tree is equally important.

In non-Google-tree related terms, Woopra never uses sampled data, so you can trust the accuracy of your data to make the best well-informed decisions.

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