Re: Confusing GA with advertising
So firstly: very few businesses have access to their servers, let alone the server logs.
IT staff don’t see that….because only a tiny proportion of the UK’s 5.6million businesses have any IT staff at all. 99% of businesses run on hosted web platform (Squarespace, Shopify, hosted WordPress), and use GA or HotJar.
Those businesses that do “have their own website server”….95% of them spent 5k on a one-off contract with a web-developer, and they pay someone to “renew the website” once every couple of years. They aren’t going through logs. Every morning, the completely non-technical marketing manager takes a squizz through the dashboard, to find out whats going on, that’s it.
Secondly: GA and HotJar *nominally* have access to less data than server logs. But in practice, they are honed by millions of hours of whingeing, sorry business customer requests, to be actually useful in visualisation and marketing strategy. And to the extent they *aren’t*, there’s a next layer of other marketing company offerings that integrate and do other stuff with it. Oribi et al.
Thirdly, many people confuse the fact that they read lots of news and blog websites which host advertising banners, with the idea that somehow most websites display advertising. In fact, *a teeny tiny minority* of websites have advertising. E-commerce and business websites sell their own stuff not somebody else’s. But people spend lots of time reading a very small number of free high-volume sites, that host advertising, and it skews their perception. The largest worldwide flinger of ads is Google Display Network, serving ads on 2 million websites….out of about 180 million active world websites. 1.1%. The largest platform for “native” advertising Outbrain…..just 100,000 websites display their banners. Just 0.05%.
It’s fairly obvious really, but sometimes the obvious is difficult to see. Total internet advertising spend in the U.K. is £16bn. Total e-commerce revenue was £693bn. Advertising is just 2.3% of total e-commerce. It’s a rounding error. But if you effectively ban internet advertising by making the terms too onerous, you don’t just lose the £16bn (which a lot of people would cheer), you also lose the £693bn.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
