Your analytics are lying to you

Alistair Davidson writes about migrating a form-heavy web application from a React SPA to a traditional server-rendered HTML-first website. The entire article is worth reading, but I want to draw attention to this bit about analytics (emphasis mine): The results? When we launched, the number of people completing the form doubled. The analytics people didn’t even know where these users were coming from. Of course, your javascript-based analytics package doesn’t see the users you are bouncing because of javascript failures. It was a flood! We also saw my “keep a backend session, never lose user data” approach pay off. In one case, someone completed a form a month after starting it. Web analytics are fragile. They fail in so many ways that making product decisions based wholly on your Google Analytics or Plausible data is folly of the highest degree.Here's a subset of all the reasons your analytics package undercounts or miscounts visitors:Network errors prevent your analytics script…