Who is using Google Analytics?
Google Analytics, described by Google as delivering “Enterprise-class web analytics” is one of the most commonly used free web analytics tools and with a wide ranging user base in terms of organisation size and individual user experience.
Today’s post shares an infographic from Target Online Marketing. TOM wanted to see the extent of Google Analytics Adoption so asked W3Techs (who provide information about the usage of various types of technologies on the web) for Google Analytics usage statistics. The following data has been taken from these findings.
The first point to highlight is that Google Analytics is used by 81.4% of all the websites whose traffic analysis tool W3Techs know; that’s over 55% of all websites and this is around the world, not just one continent.
Google Analytics appears to have achieved some consistency across the continents with only Asia out of the six continents showing a usage under 50%. The consistency hasn’t yet reached across all domains with some like .travel showing a 74.6% usage and mobi not even reaching 30%.
What do you think, any missing information you would like to see in this infographic or do you have a question about the data shown?
Alistair Lattimore says
June 25, 2012 at 7:00 pmI think it would have been nice to represent how many domains they surveyed and break it down by how they graph is segmented, so you get an understanding of the confidence level behind a .mobi showing a significantly lower adoption rate for example.
Angela Wilkinson says
June 26, 2012 at 5:18 amHi Alistair, thanks for asking the question!
The team at TOM have came back with the following information from their technology partner W3techs
Our technology partner is w3techs, they explain on their website how they carry on their survey – http://w3techs.com/technologies:
We do crawl much more sites, but we use the Alexa top 1 million to select a representative sample of established sites. We found that including more sites in the sample (e.g. all the sites we know) may easily lead to a bias towards technologies typically used for “throw-away” sites or parked sites or other types of spam domains.
Unfortunately, we have to chose what set of data will be more appealing to the readers on an infographic so we can not visualize all data sets we have or the infographic would 1) not serve its purpose, 2) be endless.
TOM do have more .mobi data available and are happy for you to contact them directly if you have a specific requirement on this data.
Hope this is of help!
John says
June 26, 2012 at 7:27 amIt’d be interesting to see the revenue associated with sites that use GA and sites that do not. My bet would be that GA is dominant in the low/no-revenue market and then falls off substantially as revenue generation increases. Not to say that large companies don’t use GA. I see multi-tag implementations all of the time, but my experience is that GA is rarely more than a fail-safe for larger institutions, if it’s used at all.
Angela Wilkinson says
June 26, 2012 at 10:40 amThat’s a good point John, especially on multi-tag implementations.
As TOM advised, the survey is based on the “top 1 million” websites and if W3techs find the technology on any of the pages it is considered to be used by the website. So this may be GA being spotted even though it is being used as a fail-safe.
Christophe - Target Online Marketing says
June 27, 2012 at 4:33 am@ John. Thanks for the comment.
If you check, http://w3techs.com/technologies/details/ta-googleanalytics/all/all , you will see the likes of Goodaddy.com, Twitter.com, Pinterest.com, Dropbox.com, Tumblr.com, Imdb.com, etc all use GA.
Now, is it only a fail safe web analytics tool? Well, only them can tell i suppose.
One of the key interesting feature of GA, beside being free, is the easy integration with other Google services – adwords, adsense, etc…
Let’s not forget GA now offers an enterprise solution called ‘Premium’ that seems to be used by the likes of Traveolicity, a top 1000 website on Alexa.com.
Last but not least, i can not recommend enough a web browser extension called Ghostery.com that allows you to know which tracking & analytics tools and softwares are installed on a web page.