Of course. But I’d rather spend the time or money to correctly configure something than not have anything at all. Would I LIKE having to do that? No. But I’d do it if I viewed my website as an integral part of my business.

All good points and worthy of discussion…which is why I wrote the post. I will say this, though–for a small business with a tight budget, spending a “couple hundred dollars” on proper setup of a Google Analytics account vs spending it on lead generation that will actually bring business in the door is a tough sell. If you were in such a position, wouldn’t you prefer to have an Analytics product that worked correctly out-of-the-box and didn’t require you to go in and manually fix it, or pay someone else to do it?

But you’ve outlined much of what needs to be done here. And if they can’t spend a couple hundred for someone to do the basic setup for them, then they haven’t thought through the business value of their site. Setting up GA to get good data is fundamental to making sure the website is working for their business and if your website doesn’t contribute to your business why do they have one in the first place?

Skipping this setup because it costs a couple hundred dollars is just false economy. The real issue is this – why are they setting up a website? What are the reasons it is going to help their business? Will it generate leads? Sales? If they can’t answer that, they should do some discovery to figure out those reasons, then make sure their site helps those things.

That’s exactly why I wrote this article. I seriously doubt most “local SEOs” or big-box marketing companies who work with local business owners, and who provide them with Analytics reports about website traffic as part of their service, are applying all the necessary fixes to make those reports reflect actual human traffic. I also doubt that all the white-label SEO solutions that are so popular with local independent marketing people and website designers are applying all the necessary filters and fixes to their data. So, the result is that you have a lot of people at various places in the food chain who are making decisions based on flawed data. This is a problem.

I would have loved to have continued the post with recommendations about tools that are easier to use and more effective than Google Analytics. Trouble is, I don’t know if there are any. I hadn’t heard of the Piwik tool, so I will investigate that…and if you have any other recommendations, I’m all ears.

There is a fine line between writing compelling headlines that get a readers attention and what you call “clickbait”. Perhaps it would have been better to say that Google Analytics it is “nearly worthless” for “local small business owners”. I do stand by that statement because I work with these people every day, and I know for a fact that the vast majority of them don’t have the technical expertise to do everything necessary to get good data from Analytics, they don’t have the time to learn, and they don’t have the money to hire someone to help them with it.

I need to play with it more to answer your last question.

My objection to the post is that the headline (which perhaps isn’t yours) and the high level tone makes it easy to take away from this that ‘analytics are complicated and GA is worthless for you, small business person’.

Had the post continued with “but here are some tools that are easier to use and make good alternate choices” I’d have felt differently. I also think it would have been more valuable to note that GA isn’t a fire and forget tool, that it does need some setup and config… and then shown them how to do that.

It’s one thing to note that a small business won’t get value out of GA if they just add it and don’t set it up. It’s rather another to say “well, it’s worthless” and yes, that tone does come off as clickbait.

My point here is that without making it clear where the flaws are in the tools, methods and strategies that are available small business owners are even more blind to the truth.
My mantra has always been to make sure that my clients are aware of what solutions are the best fit for them, and what the flaws are in some of the tools are techniques available. I will be pointing them at this article as a reference, as I think it sums up a lot of “Well Known” flaws with the analytics platforms and makes them relevant for small businesses (who shouldn’t expect a boat load of traffic anyway!)

I didn’t say anywhere in my post that flying blind is better. My point is simply that there is a need in the marketplace for a better Analytics tool that is easier to use for local small business owners than Google Analytics. Since you actually recommend one such tool in your comment, it would seem that you agree with this. Does the Piwik tool do a better job at automatically filtering out spam traffic than Google Analytics does?

You’re right. I don’t offer any solution because right now I don’t think there is any better solution. My intent is simply to point out that if the same standards applied to any other small business solution were applied to Google Analytics, it would be viewed as a failure. And if a third party company that was NOT Google put a product with this many flaws on the market and tried to sell it, I don’t think small businesses would buy it. As you point out, and as I also point out in the post, there are fixes to the fake traffic issues. The problem is that the typical local small business owner with a website is not aware of them, even those using Google Analytics.

Yes, that’s sarcasm. This is nothing but clickbait and the final bit of irony is that the author’s site uses… Google Analytics.