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John Mueller from Google responded to someone citing a third-party data tool in reference to the NY Times hit, that he wouldn't use third-party data in this way because "they're always skewed in unexpected ways." "Use your actual traffic data instead," he added.
Here is the tweet from John with who he responded to and the screenshots:
I generally wouldn't use 3rd party tools to track things like this, they're always skewed in unexpected ways -- use your actual traffic data instead.
— 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) November 14, 2019
With your own data, you can obviously dig in to the data in ways you cannot dig into with third-party metrics. But if this is all you have, this is all you have.
But yea, I have often seen third-party data metrics not match up with real-data and I think that is important for you to understand when looking at such metrics.
Forum discussion at Twitter.
