[HN Gopher] Google Analytics: Stop feeding the beast
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Google Analytics: Stop feeding the beast
Author : caspii
Score : 446 points
Date : 2021-02-25 14:36 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (casparwre.de)
(TXT) w3m dump (casparwre.de)
| z92 wrote:
| Parse your server's access log file. The way it had been done for
| decades. "Analog" was popular then, Should be better options now.
| Closi wrote:
| > Parse your server's access log file. The way it had been done
| for decades. "Analog" was popular then, Should be better
| options now.
|
| It depends how much data you want. Google Analytics can give
| you all sorts of juicy privacy-invading (but totally fine
| because its aggregated) data about your users which you won't
| get parsing the servers access log.
| maple3142 wrote:
| But this doesn't work for people hosting their static websites
| on GitHub Pages, Netlify...
| mschuster91 wrote:
| Access logs are almost useless for analytics these days... all
| they give you is the URL that was visited and some extremely
| rough idea what OS and browser the client is using (UA parsing
| is a _hellhole_ ).
|
| You don't get any more detailed information (e.g. device class,
| screen size/orientation) from analytics logs.
|
| Also, if you're using one of the free hosting providers (GH
| Pages and the likes) you're not even going to get access logs.
| bogwog wrote:
| I wonder if you could use CSS media queries to collect
| additional data about device characteristics, by linking to
| different URLs at different breakpoints?
|
| Like a breakpoint for portrait mode would set the background
| of something to an image that's just a 1x1 pixel. So when
| that resource is accessed, you know the request came from a
| device in portrait.
|
| I guess it depends on how different browsers decide to access
| resource urls in CSS files. If a browser just downloads
| everything first, and then processes the media queries, then
| it wouldn't work.
| jaywalk wrote:
| My server's access logs are almost useless when I've got an SPA
| with a significant amount of client-side functionality.
| sim_card_map wrote:
| Don't use SPAs, switch back to traditional server side
| rendering.
| jaywalk wrote:
| No.
| arcturus17 wrote:
| Succinct, but straight to the point.
| zserge wrote:
| I have been using this for a while, GoAccess is a wonderful
| little tool to automate the parsing. Highly recommend to those
| who prefer the old-school approach towards web analytics.
|
| https://goaccess.io/
| itwy wrote:
| Thank you for sharing this.
| jcrawfordor wrote:
| I started running goaccess on the reverse proxy in front of
| computer.rip and some other sites just a few weeks ago... it
| has answered basically every question I've wanted from simple
| website analytics and it was very fast to set up and very
| response. Just a great tool all around.
| dealforager wrote:
| The funny thing is that this is essentially a giant ad for this
| person's business. I've noticed this is an increasingly popular
| tactic on Reddit and HN. You clickbait people to an article
| backed with no data that you know will tickle people's emotions.
| Then at the end you include a call to action to use their service
| because it will save the world.
|
| I used to hate GA as well as ads in general when I had never
| tried to start my own business. I had the typical Reddit/HN anti-
| FB-and-Goog mindset. After trying to start one, I completely
| changed my mind. I couldn't find a reliable way to put my site in
| front of customers without ads. I guess if you're popular and
| have a huge social media reach that might be enough, but for
| someone with no social media presence it can be tough.
|
| Once you start spending in ads as a small business, it's useful
| to have some data to understand what the hell is happening to all
| that money. I spent thousands on FB, Google, and Reddit ads and
| it's extremely difficult to find out what is happening and which
| ones are working. How do you know which people are coming from
| which ad? Which ones are real people vs bots?
|
| I strongly recommend people try to make a website/app without
| being popular on social media and try to get people to use it
| without using ads. Places like Reddit are generally against self-
| promotion. If you Tweet/post into the ether of Twitter/FB no one
| is going to randomly see your post. After using ads, I've started
| to pay closer attention to ads instead of instantly ignoring
| them. It turns out that they are frequently useful. For example
| the other day I was searching for services for hiring a remote
| contractor and the ads were more relevant than the search
| results.
|
| As for this article, I don't really follow the logic. A lot of it
| seems to be backed by the knee-jerk emotional hate people have
| for powerful companies. For instance, when talking about how
| Google uses GA:
|
| > we don't even need to speculate. It seems pretty obvious to me
| that they're using it to guzzle up even more data and to crap out
| ever more gold ingots.
|
| Every time I see the word obvious, that is a sign that a big leap
| of non-obvious logic has been taken. It is not obvious that GA is
| being used for bad things, maybe Google just makes a ton of money
| because their products are useful. The rest of it also seems
| mostly backed by emotion. I guess these type of emotional anti-
| big-tech articles are quite popular here though. It seems like
| every day there is a new one.
| boffinism wrote:
| I really didn't want to use Google Analytics for a personal site
| (details in bio), but because it's a non-monetised personal site
| I really didn't want to spend money to know how many visitors I
| had, but because I'm trying to learn about content I really did
| want to know how many visitors I had, because that's a good way
| of discovering what content resonates etc.
|
| I tried PanelBear, but because I briefly hit the front page of HN
| I blew through their free tier in less than a day.
|
| I wish there was something very basic that had a more generous
| free tier. At the moment my site literally apologises for using
| GA.
| pletsch wrote:
| I use Matomo, it runs on my home server, its open-source.
| Pretty sure you could run it on a Pi. There's a docker
| container that you can spin up in a few minutes.
|
| https://matomo.org/
| asidiali wrote:
| Seconded - set up on a project instance last weekend in about
| 5 minutes, and it has been chugging along swimmingly since!
| And they've been doing it for a long time, Piwik was great
| even before the rebrand.
| ehnto wrote:
| +1, you own the experience and the data that way. Even if you
| don't use PHP in your projects, almost everywhere has PHP so
| it's not hard to host it.
| sumedh wrote:
| Statcounter is free and its pretty light weight
| nobodywasishere wrote:
| Check out GoatCounter (http://goatcounter.com/). It's what I
| use for my personal blog, and it also has a free tier for non-
| commercial users (though I'd still recommend donating so they
| can stick around). They even have a no JS way to integrate
| tracking, as all I really care about is how many ppl are
| reading my blog.
| zserge wrote:
| I am currently working on exactly this! I have always been
| dreaming of a low-cost, zero-effort web analytics.
|
| So far I have made an open source library/service, I've been
| using it for my blog and a few other sites for over two months.
| It is available at https://github.com/nullitics/nullitics. You
| can see the example dashboard (fed with real data) at
| https://nullitics.com/dashboard/zserge.com. I'm now collecting
| all sorts of feedback from the early adoperts.
|
| For the cloud version I decided to go with 1EUR/month, and I
| have often been criticised for choosing such a low price.
| However, I believe that I would rather be at a lower profit,
| but help bloggers, hackers and other who want such a tool.
| amzans wrote:
| Hey it's nice you're offering this!
|
| I'd just be careful with ultra-low prices, specially if you
| plan on having backups and multiple months/years of data
| retention.
|
| Infrastructure costs alone can add up really fast, and don't
| underestimate how many hours of support a single customer
| might require.
|
| Just friendly advice :)
| spinningslate wrote:
| Realise this is a blit blunt, but what you're saying is:
|
| - I have this site
|
| - I want analytics => they have some value to me
|
| - I'm not willing/able to pay for it with my money
|
| - I am willing to pay for it with my users' privacy.
|
| That's the GA value equation. You get analytics, you pay with
| your users' privacy to feed the google advertising machine.
|
| I'm not saying you're right or wrong, but we should be crystal
| clear on what's happening.
| zserge wrote:
| Seems like there's a bit of exaggeration here. "Not willing
| to pay" != "not willing to pay 10+EUR/month for 30 distinct
| semi-random numbers each month". There are plenty of people
| willing to pay low prices (comparable to a barely warm cup of
| some really bad coffee) for analytics to help them make
| decisions.
|
| Imagine, you write one blog post per month. How much would
| you pay if I told you which of your blog posts this year has
| been the most popular one, and on which social media it got
| the most attention? 120EUR? Unlikely. Then what do you think
| would be the fair price of this information?
| spinningslate wrote:
| It's not exaggeration but you make a valid point: I might
| revise the 3rd bullet to read "I'm not willing to pay the
| minimum price the market offers".
|
| But that's missing the point:
|
| >Then what do you think would be the fair price of this
| information?
|
| It's not _how much_ you pay, it 's _who_ pays. With GA, you
| 're deciding that your users will pay on your behalf.
| amzans wrote:
| Hey I'm happy you gave Panelbear a try! It's always nice to
| hear someone is using what I've built.
|
| Regarding the free tier, I decided to offer it after hearing
| many people saying "I wish there was a free alternative for a
| blog that gets less than <50k views per year" :)
|
| There's no strings attached. Only volume limits and shorter
| data retention (to prevent my AWS costs from blowing up).
|
| About traffic spikes (eg. reaching the front page of HN): even
| if you go over the limits, the system won't start rate limiting
| you for another 72 hours - that way you won't lose data during
| traffic spikes.
|
| Hope it helps!
| ehnto wrote:
| > even if you go over the limits, the system won't start rate
| limiting you for another 72 hours
|
| That is super cool of you, to protect your users interests
| first.
| bogwog wrote:
| Did you really look into this that much? Because there are a
| *lot* of free and self-hosted alternatives.
|
| Here's a list I found with a quick (DDG!) search:
| https://alternativeto.net/software/google-analytics/?platfor...
| [deleted]
| mellavora wrote:
| Interestingly, there was an article in the Swedish media this
| morning basically calling out a number of Swedish governmental
| ministries for violating Swedish privacy law. The violations were
| all the use of google analytics.
| msantos wrote:
| Something similar happened in the UK sometime ago, but it was
| mostly brushed off.
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/sep/10/no-10-request-...
| nexthash wrote:
| I've come to believe that it's very difficult to operate a
| business relying on paid access over the Internet. Since
| consumers are already paying Internet providers $60 / month for
| this privilege, your customers will balk unless you do something
| different and better. This explains the non-straightforward ways
| Internet companies operate and why some make such absurd amounts
| of money.
|
| Some are very niche paid businesses like SaaS or privacy-focused
| mail that provide very specific and uniquely tailored services to
| a small set of clients. These are probably the easiest to
| understand, as at their core is a simple, logical transaction.
| However, they don't defeat companies like Google at scale due to
| the fact that not many people want to pay for bits that they
| already pay their Internet provider to deliver, and the fact that
| accommodating everyone's needs in such a business is overly
| costly.
|
| All the gargantuan scalable platforms are not really selling a
| technology - technology is the vehicle connecting customers to
| their service. Their real money maker lies outside the Internet,
| whether it is shipping and merchandise (Amazon), or selling an
| audience (Google/Facebook). I find it to be a similar scenario to
| McDonalds's famous franchise business model of owning the land
| the burger is made on, while not selling the burger itself. If
| you want real customer service, you need to find the local
| restaurant in your area and pay more (Plausible/Fathom, Hey.com,
| Fastmail).
|
| A common trend in response to this kind of environment has been
| to offer some services for free and drive users to pay more for
| specific use cases if they need to (especially power users and
| enterprises). However, doing this kind of monetization wrong can
| easily lobotomize your business and push users away, as seen with
| the ongoing news media crisis and paywalls. And it also turns out
| that companies used to one kind of business model find it
| difficult to pivot to others, for example with Google's continual
| failure to make paid services.
|
| In all cases, when looking at the Internet you need to examine
| your customers (or your needs) and focus on accessing them, even
| if that means tearing down any conventions you already have. This
| can apply to anything from the news media looking to fully
| digitize, or independent bloggers looking for analytics that
| serves them.
| blainsmith wrote:
| I've been using https://www.goatcounter.com and it works great.
| Nice and simple and I can turn off some tracking features for
| things I don't care about.
| foofoo4u wrote:
| I've heard good things about goatcounter. https://umami.is/ is
| another popular alternative to Google Analytics that I happen
| to use. I've been happy with it.
| tristor wrote:
| After a recent story on HN about all the horrible tracking Disqus
| started to do after being acquired by an ad-tech company, I
| ditched it and Google Analytics on my semi-dormant personal
| website. The process of fixing it got me interested in working on
| my site again and I ended up upstreaming the patches into the
| Hugo theme I use[1], so now everyone with that theme can benefit
| easily. I ended up using GoatCounter[2] after examining several
| alternatives in the market, predominantly because it was free for
| personal sites, but also because it was very no-frills which is
| all I really needed. I also appreciated that I could control
| retention rate and other configuration that might affect my
| visitor's privacy to collect as minimal amount of information as
| possible.
|
| I don't think there's anything wrong with having basic site
| analytics, but I appreciate that there are now alternatives to
| Google Analytics that don't try to do the pervasive tracking
| that's become commonplace online.
|
| [1]: https://tristor.ro/blog/2021/02/05/ditching-google-
| analytics...
|
| [2]: https://www.goatcounter.com/
| dna_polymerase wrote:
| Congrats, now you give your visitor's data to goatcounter
| instead of Google. If that catches on we might see this article
| about them in the future.
|
| Remove stats altogether, pay for your website stats, or roll
| your own. Just exchanging the free script isn't doing anything.
| tristor wrote:
| Removing stats altogether is certainly an option, but one of
| my motivating factors for expanding and working on my
| personal site is to write articles that people find
| interesting or helpful. Stats are one of the best ways to
| identify what those things are.
|
| Rolling my own or self-hosting is also an option, but breaks
| my current flow which is based around using an SSG and
| hosting only static assets which can be CDNified. My
| intention with my site design is not to require any sort of
| dynamic structure or backend services, everything is just
| static HTML, CSS, and JS. As such, things like comments,
| analytics, etc are most easily integrated via a SaaS.
|
| Given that GoatCounter doesn't use cookies, doesn't do any
| cross-site tracking, and provides me controls to limit what
| data is collected and how long it's retained, it seems a fair
| option given my constraints. I'm open to other alternatives,
| but I don't think it's a reasonable or tenable position to
| say that people shouldn't have website stats. Fundamentally
| the stats I'm collecting are basically the same information
| which would be contained in a http server log, hardly
| egregious, and something any user should expect to be
| collected if you're connecting to a server on the open
| internet.
| LocalH wrote:
| It's open source and can be self-hosted. It doesn't require
| relying on their hosting.
| dna_polymerase wrote:
| Sure, but that's not what OP is using.
| notsobig wrote:
| have you heard of FOSS?
| dillondoyle wrote:
| Another example people might not know is/was ShareThis. They
| became a pretty big 3p data 'ad tech' provider
| heipei wrote:
| Here's a crazy idea: Don't use analytics at all but focus on your
| product. If your success relies solely on "improving conversions"
| by tracking your users and then changing the position and color
| of your "Checkout" button then maybe try setting yourself apart
| such that customers want to buy your product even despite an
| obnoxious purchasing flow. Only then start optimizing it.
|
| More serious thoughts: Google Analytics introduces performance
| overhead for your website and now you have to explain to your
| users which third party is responsible for processing their data
| on top of yourself. Why introduce those headaches? Are the
| insights from Analytics really valuable enough to justify the
| cost? I personally haven't seen it.
| jfdi wrote:
| Agreed. I'm building https://increment.me and we specifically
| avoid web analytics and 3rd party cookies entirely. We don't
| keep data that doesn't serve a purpose and don't sell our data
| to anyone. For feedback, we use Increment itself to gather
| feedback directly from customers.
|
| Having customers directly give feedback is one great signal
| that really works, particularly when you demonstrate your
| commitment to action it. When you combine this with a 1st party
| view of how the product is used like from ephemeral log data,
| you can get a great pulse on how well you're helping your
| customers get the most value from you - and how you can adapt
| to help them more.
|
| I wish every business I interacted with had the same philosophy
| in creating value for customers and building trust in every
| interaction.
| CarVac wrote:
| Also it makes you spend less time obsessing over the numbers
| when there are fewer numbers.
|
| It's refreshing that the only analytics I get for my open
| source project is github traffic, not website traffic or
| download counts.
| andrewstuart2 wrote:
| I'm totally on board with not _obsessing_ over user behavior or
| tweaking unrelated things in hopes of a revenue boost, but I
| prefer the scientific approach, which means I still want
| metrics. I 'd like to know when I make a product change whether
| that improves the number of people who see my product and stick
| around versus seeing and leaving.
|
| I don't have anything live that uses Google Analytics but I've
| used it once or twice in the past, and the primary thing they
| got right is that it's just so dang easy, and I'm almost
| guaranteed to have the data I want. I'd _so_ much rather
| support an open source product that does the same, though.
| crazygringo wrote:
| > _Don 't use analytics at all but focus on your product._
|
| Huh? Analytics is _how_ you focus on your product.
|
| By instrumenting your product with analytics, you can find out
| if customers are using your new useful feature or if they can't
| find it. If they're performing a task quickly because it's
| easy, or slowly because they're struggling with the UX. And you
| find out that customers on a certain mobile device are
| suffering huge performance issues, for example.
|
| You don't know these things until you measure them. That's
| analytics.
|
| Obviously analytics are only one piece of product improvement
| -- there's sitting down with users for 30 minutes to watch them
| use the product, interviews, surveys, etc.
|
| But analytics are a critical piece. You can't focus on the
| product without analytics.
|
| Analytics isn't just about conversion. Analytics is about the
| entire product experience.
| [deleted]
| boplicity wrote:
| > Huh? Analytics is how you focus on your product.
|
| For the first decade of my career, I really believed this,
| and spent a lot of time doing split tests, and studying
| analytics, and trying to "make things better" by
| understanding the numbers as they were given to me.
|
| This was a mistake.
|
| I've since learned that these numbers will rarely help me
| make meaningful improvements to my product, and my business.
| Sure, they can be useful so that I'm not "running blind," but
| they simply aren't going to show me how to create an
| ingenious idea that takes things to the next level.
|
| Analytics will help you optimize things to a "local maximum",
| but they'll blind you to the real possibilities of creating
| something new that can completely transform a business. As
| soon as I understood this distinction, I've been quite a lot
| more effective.
|
| There's a similar problem with things like "user interviews."
| A common pitfall is to ask people which features they want.
| That has limited use. The real work you need to do is the
| "creative thinking" that others haven't done. Figure out what
| people don't know they want; learn what the numbers _can 't_
| tell you. Then go and build it. Yes, understand the numbers,
| choose a good business model, and optimize based on those
| numbers, but don't let the numbers create the product. It's a
| dead end.
| chiefalchemist wrote:
| Absolutely. While analytics can tell you what, It can't
| tell you why (or why not). You need why. Why isn't
| knowledge. Why is understanding.
|
| Understanding > Knowledge
|
| Understanding builds better product. Full stop.
| crazygringo wrote:
| > _but they simply aren 't going to show me how to create
| an ingenious idea that takes things to the next level._
|
| Of course not. There's no substitute for straight-up
| creativity and deep thinking.
|
| But once you have your ingenious idea, you still have to
| design it, make sure it's clear to users, that they find it
| and can use it effectively. Your "ingenious idea" may turn
| out to be largely sabotaged if a button you thought had an
| intuitive label is misunderstood by 90% of users, or a link
| you thought was highly visible is being scrolled past by
| nearly everyone.
|
| Yes, analytics is all about optimizing things to a local
| maximum. But you might not be _anywhere near_ your local
| maximum. It 's astonishingly easy for the first version of
| your ingenious idea to only be achieving 5% or 10% of the
| actual local maximum potential. We shouldn't downplay the
| difficulty or achievement involved in getting even close to
| a local maxima.
|
| And you're correct that in user interviews, if you only ask
| what features they want, you're drastically limiting the
| value you might uncover. On the other hand, you'd better
| not ignore the features users are frequently requesting
| either. A lot of users are pretty smart and know exactly
| what they need, at least to get to that local maxima.
| pcstl wrote:
| You're essentially arguing for qualitative data instead of
| quantitative, but both together is usually where the money
| is. I agree that qualitative analytics are underestimatd
| because they're hard to do, but I also think that having
| quantitative analytics together with qualitative allows you
| to contextualize your numbers in ways that lead to insights
| you wouldn't have otherwise.
|
| Also, after you've already reached product-market fit, it's
| important to take your product to its "local maximum".
| boplicity wrote:
| I think you may be right; after all, thinking critically
| about my story above, I did spend quite a lot of time
| learning about analytics and quantitative numbers. It
| could be this gave me an intuitive sense of what works,
| which I could then apply to the more creative thinking. I
| don't know. Either way, I'm grateful to make a living the
| way I do.
| musicale wrote:
| Apple famously "ignores" its users, partly because users
| usually can't see far beyond what is in front of them,
| often because they don't know about impending advances in
| technology or clever new designs. They'll ask for faster,
| cheaper versions of what they already have (faster horses,
| cheaper buggy whips as they say) rather than the next big
| thing. Faster/cheaper weren't the primary draws of the Mac,
| iPod, iPhone, iPad, etc. (though price/performance is a big
| draw of the M1, the big breakthrough is performance/watt
| which leads to all-day battery life and better thermals.)
| Instead it was a quantum improvement in design, usability,
| and functionality combined.
|
| As another example, consider that in 2007 Apple developers
| were begging for an iPhone SDK, and Steve Jobs crushed
| their hopes by telling them to just make web apps. A year
| later Apple came out not just with an iPhone SDK, but with
| an entire App Store. (Though I suppose some developers
| [Epic] and users [HN] wish they had just come out with an
| SDK, and that the iPhone wasn't locked down.)
|
| That being said, they do a lot of user testing of the next
| big thing before it is revealed publicly.
| pcstl wrote:
| It's really not that useful for Apple to collect
| analytics because they make physical products, where the
| potential of analytics is limited. When it comes to a
| SaaS or a web page, the possibilities of analytics are
| much greater.
|
| And yet, Macs will still send usage and performance data
| to Apple so they can incorporate that information into
| future product versions and find out about system
| software issues.
| musicale wrote:
| And you can turn it off. ;-)
|
| I guess the point is not that crash reports and slowdown
| data aren't useful (they are), but that they tend to give
| you incremental improvements.
|
| That being said, incremental improvements over a decade
| can make a big difference, as Apple also demonstrates.
| pcstl wrote:
| I guess we can all agree that if someone wants to include
| analytics in their product, an opt-out would be nice.
| 6gvONxR4sf7o wrote:
| I'm with you in having come around on not trying to cram
| everything into that hole of testability. But I do think
| there's room, specifically when it comes to testing your
| ideas. It's rare to look at data and see what the problem
| is, but it's common to come up with a hypothesis for what
| the problem is and a way to experimentally measure whether
| you new solution has actually made a dent.
| ignostic wrote:
| Only on HN would you find people seriously arguing that
| focusing on product development is a good reason to remove
| analytics from a site. I've worked almost exclusively at
| companies where the product is the website, and initially
| this idea struck me as laughably naive. But let me be fair
| and think through this.
|
| Tech startups do definitely have this problem of focusing on
| website analytics where the product is NOT a website or app.
| If we're generous we can assume many people here develop for
| these kinds of companies. Some waste a lot of time looking
| for up-and-to-the-right arrows for investors or trying to be
| data-focused when data about the website isn't actually all
| that important. Many of these companies might actually be
| better off with no analytics to waste time on. I'd still
| argue it's better to check in every once in a while to look
| for problems and ask yourself some questions.
|
| The idea of removing analytics where the product is an app or
| a website is silly. This would be like arguing a grocery
| store shouldn't track what people are buying from their
| stores, and instead just source good products. You need to do
| both. What are you going to do when I ask what is or is not
| working? Tell me your feelings? Shake an 8-ball? Aside from
| detecting problems, analytics can be a jumping off point for
| innovation if you're smart about it. What can we do that's
| more like what's working? How can we improve this page type?
|
| There are for sure people who over-focus on analytics (often
| on the wrong data points) instead of creativity, but these
| are not mutually exclusive. If I were to list the millions of
| dollars I've earned and saved via analytics this would be a
| very long post. Sadly, most of those millions were for other
| people, but it's a very valuable tool for optimizing and
| creating if you use it correctly.
| crummybowley wrote:
| Yes, but analytics is also used to trick folks into buying a
| paper back full of shit.
|
| A good product, that does what it advertises, does not need
| analytics. But a bad product, that somebody desperately wants
| to make successful, or at least successful enough to sell to
| a PE and exit, needs analytics.
| andrewingram wrote:
| The problem is that when making a product you're often
| wrong, what you think is a good product is often a bad
| product, or it's a nearly good product with a couple of
| fatal flaws that can only be seen in hindsight. S
|
| While some people have an uncanny sense of vision, and seem
| hit on the right ingredients more often than seems fair,
| but most companies aren't led by this kind of person.
|
| You need things that tell you when and how to course-
| correct, this is what analytics gives you. Now, of course,
| this needs to be balanced against privacy concerns. I push
| back on things that track literally everything (the tools
| that record every click and cursor movement are
| fascinating, but undeniably creep), and I try to avoid
| sending any PII to 3rd-parties. The amount of stuff Google
| Analytics phones home about by default is also pretty
| troubling.
|
| I'm on board with basically every privacy-based criticism
| of tracking, but I don't buy this argument that only bad
| products benefit from it.
| bashinator wrote:
| Serious question - does Google Analytics tell you if I
| abruptly close your page only a few seconds after it's
| started loading?
| lmkg wrote:
| Out-of-the-box, no. With custom work, yes. The amount of
| effort is not large, and there are off-the-shelf solutions
| available. The name commonly used is "engagement timer."
|
| By default, GA only sends one hit on page load. If there's
| no second hit, there's no way to tell if someone was
| looking at the page for a second or a minute or an hour.
| nxpnsv wrote:
| You get an idea how long someone has the page open yes.
| bogus-official wrote:
| But only if the user goes on to visit another page. You
| don't see how much time they spent on last page they
| visited, even if they only visit one page, by default.
| enz wrote:
| This is not the same kind of analytics. You are talking about
| something like HotJar with heat maps to find out how
| customers use the product for example.
| crazygringo wrote:
| No, I'm talking about Google Analytics which is the topic
| of the article and parent comment.
|
| Heat maps are great too but Google Analytics is still used
| as the foundation for figuring out which types of users are
| clicking and not clicking on what, both in isolation and as
| part of a pathway between elements/pages/etc.
| hansel_der wrote:
| > Analytics is about the entire product experience
|
| i feel like there is a underapreciated difference in wether
| you are selling a physical product/service or a digital one.
|
| both benefit from focus on the product, but anlytics on the
| website is vastly more helpful if your product essentially
| _IS_ the web-ux.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| I worked for a tech company popular with enthusiasts when
| GDPR was first rolled out. We had a lot of requests from
| users who wanted us to provide their data per the GDPR
| allowance. We also had an influx of tech journalists filing
| GDPR requests in hopes of catching us doing something wrong
| or tracking too much personal data.
|
| When we sent users their "data", many of them were in
| disbelief at how little data they received. Many had come to
| believe that all tech companies are secretly building
| inventories of user data to sell to 3rd parties, when really
| most of us just want to know if our heavy users of Feature A
| are also heavy users of Feature B, or if Feature C is more
| popular with new users but not old users.
|
| The strange part is that tech companies are taking the brunt
| of the bad PR for things like gathering customer feedback and
| serving relevant ads, while traditional companies like cell
| phone providers and credit card companies _are_ actually
| selling customer data. The latter doesn 't get enough
| attention despite being a much more widespread issue.
|
| Facebook doesn't sell your data, but your phone provider and
| credit card company probably do. But ask the average person
| who's selling their data, and Facebook will get all the
| blame.
| godelski wrote:
| I think Facebook gets the blame because they are at the end
| of the chain. They don't sell your data but they do sell
| the access to your data (from themselves through the
| website or tracking and what they bought from said other
| companies). Being that major player in the service it makes
| sense that they get the heat, but at the same time most
| people are still tech illiterate. I mean look at how people
| think Amazon is only a retail company.
| mattnewton wrote:
| I have never been inside a newsroom, so I can't know for
| sure, but I suspect facebook also gets a fair amount of
| the blame from news media because of their fraught
| relationship as pseudo-competitors.
| reaperducer wrote:
| I have been inside a newsroom (for 20 years), and your
| assumptions are not correct.
|
| Very very very few journalists have time to grind axes
| for any reason. They're too busy feeding the beast.
| mattnewton wrote:
| Huh, thank you. Obviously the people on the ground don't,
| but there's no truth to the idea of what stories are
| greenlit by editors?
|
| Could be as simple as occasionally removing mentions of
| companies that advertise with the paper in peices about
| customer data creating the effect, not J. J. Jamison
| telling people to get him pictures of zuckerberg :D
| musicale wrote:
| I wonder how GDPR and CCPA apply to data brokers and credit
| bureaus?
| layoutIfNeeded wrote:
| >serving relevant ads
|
| _Relevant_ ads are the kind you get on DuckDuckGo:
| relevant to the content you 're looking at. E.g. if you
| look at a site about origami, you get ads from arts&crafts
| supply stores.
|
| What you've probably meant are called _predatory_ ads: they
| chase you around the Web wherever you go, like a predator
| chases its prey.
| DebtDeflation wrote:
| And continue chasing you around for months after you've
| made the actual purchase and are no longer interested in
| the product.
| marketingtech wrote:
| Statistically speaking, you're more likely to buy a
| second object right after you bought one than someone who
| has not shown interest in the product. Things break, you
| might want to return it for a slightly different version,
| you might buy one for a friend.
|
| For you, it might be wrong, but when the advertiser is
| buying millions of ad impressions and is looking for a
| 0.01% hit rate, the math shows that you're one of the
| more likely future customers.
| reaperducer wrote:
| Which makes at least a little sense when I'm on another
| site. But just this morning, Amazon started
| "recommending" a product to me that I'd actually bought
| from Amazon two months ago. How many printers does Amazon
| think I need?
| musicale wrote:
| > How many printers does Amazon think I need?
|
| I usually buy a new printer when it runs out of ink
| because it's cheaper than buying a new ink cartridge.
| haihaibye wrote:
| New printers usually come with less than full sized
| cartridges.
|
| Also look at third party solutions like external feeds.
|
| Even if it is cheaper, the externalities are not fully
| priced in, please think of the planet, thanks.
| musicale wrote:
| > You can't focus on the product without analytics
|
| This is provably false. You do not need intrusive analytics
| to develop fantastic products.
|
| Have people somehow forgotten about good old-fashioned user
| testing? It is expensive, time consuming, and amazingly
| effective. Most importantly you can actually talk to your
| users because they are people instead of data points.
|
| User feedback >>> analytics.
| pcstl wrote:
| And both > one of them.
| ThalesX wrote:
| But then surely, adding a prayer to St. Isidore of
| Seville [0] before every release will be better than just
| the both of them, so three > both > one.
|
| I've recently interacted with a startup where the amount
| of resources they spend on trying to get them both, is
| making them blind to the power of one. It's not a pretty
| sight when all the numbers are tracked, plotted and
| planned on, yet nothing seems to work.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isidore_of_Seville
| stiray wrote:
| > Analytics isn't just about conversion. Analytics is about
| the entire product experience.
|
| ... which you can entirely do by analyzing web server logs.
|
| You dont need google for this, pushing your users (with
| violation of GDPR consent) into google monstrosity. Dont do
| that, I block every freaking google domain from cdns, fonts
| to analytics.
|
| But I don't block 1st party analytics.
|
| I have no reason to. I have visited your site, I dont have
| anything against YOU following what I read. It is your site.
| But you will ask me for consent for giving those data to
| google. And I will say 'no'. And I am not the only one.
|
| Just to inform you, that the person/entity that allows Google
| to gain access to PII data is directly responsible for this -
| if google is fined due to GDPR violation, you can get fined
| to by providing it the way to get users data. They will
| survive. You might not.
|
| Have your analytics, but you will not sell my soul (which
| GDPR explicitly forbids you - you are handing over my PII
| data to 3rd party that is known for violating it and that
| makes you accomplice) for you having your graphs.
|
| You can get those data from web server logs. You will have
| all the data that you need. Actually more data, as no one
| will block them.
|
| Needing "google analytics" is just a huge, giant, hype
| driven, lie. You don't need them to analyze what you already
| have in YOUR logs.
|
| chaos_emergent: please do explain, what data google analytics
| is offering to you than what is already in your server logs?
| Without violating GDPR even more? Yes, you can surely track
| something more, again "on your side". Dont give it to google
| as it WILL get blocked and you will have a distorted picture
| of how your site is being used. If you want real data, skip
| 3rd party analytics. Found a way to require to be unblocked?
| I will skip your site, you have just lost a user. A paying
| user if the content is worth the money. And sites with
| selling my data for a graph or two are not worth it.
| chaos_emergent wrote:
| I agree that people shouldn't be using Google Analytics. I
| disagree that people should just rely on their web server
| logs. Products are more than the data that is being
| accessed on them - copy and design make a product usable
| and don't show up on web servers. Am I missing something?
| janpot wrote:
| > you can find out if customers are using your new useful
| feature or if they can't find it
|
| How do you find out if your "useful" feature isn't as useful
| as you thought it was? Or is it really always "the user can't
| find it"?
| sizzle wrote:
| You could talk to your users... (i.e. UX research), observe
| them using your website or product and ask them non leading
| probing questions to see what the intent is behind the
| behaviors affecting your bottom line. Qualitative research
| methods are a rich source of insight that is typically
| underinvested and underutilized.
|
| Analytics (quantitative data) can help you find areas of
| bottlenecks to explore further by doing qualitative user
| research and getting to the 'why' behind the people
| problems standing in the way of your metrics you are
| tracking (retention, adoption, etc.). This is called
| 'triangulation' using quant and qual research methods to
| understand your users more deeply than just looking at data
| can achieve.
| google234123 wrote:
| Users hate being bothered and hate taking surveys.
| Qualitative research isn't scientific anyway.
| warent wrote:
| Well this is just untrue in my experience. I run a SaaS
| business and my customers love it when you ask for their
| opinions and insight.
|
| Where are you getting your information from?
| haram_masala wrote:
| This is a very important point, thanks for saying this.
| It's amazing how many people think they can start an
| indie SaaS and think that all they have to do is build
| it, deploy it, and buy AdWords or whatever. Talking to
| your customers is more important than any of that, and
| it's fun.
| atq2119 wrote:
| Perhaps you're only hearing back from the ones who love
| it?
|
| Related, survey respondents are known to be weird.
| mattnewton wrote:
| UX research participants are usually compensated, and so
| it's usually done to drill down deeper into problems that
| analytics found and test possible explainations. I don't
| see what's unscientific about that.
| prox wrote:
| Could be that, it could be design, it could be how
| something is worded, it could be that what you want the
| client to see, isn't being seen. Analytics helps to
| identify this problem. For instance I noticed recently a
| huge drop-off in visitors from Ipads, and a redesign
| apparently made some parts of the site dysfunctional for
| some ipad users, something we didn't catch earlier.
| rsync wrote:
| "If they're performing a task quickly because it's easy, or
| slowly because they're struggling with the UX. And you find
| out that customers on a certain mobile device are suffering
| huge performance issues, for example."
|
| ...
|
| "You don't know these things until you measure them."
|
| If you don't build big, bloated tools using ultra-high-level
| frameworks _and_ if your product is a simple tool that
| performs a single, useful task ... then you do know these
| things and you don 't need analytics to tell you.
| splaytreemap wrote:
| You're essentially saying "don't use data to inform your
| decisions." This is trolling at best. No idea how this is the
| top comment here.
| koonsolo wrote:
| If you are running a successful product, I believe you. If not,
| I'll just ignore your advice. Seems fair?
| melomal wrote:
| One sentence has decimated my digital marketing career and I
| honestly couldn't agree more. I think this has something to do
| with more than just Google itself though and good old
| capitalism.
|
| There are heaps of SaaS platforms out there (from my last point
| of reference there were 2000+ MarTech companies, I would guess
| double that now) that focuses on; A/B testing, email marketing
| automation, customer success tools, heat mapping and much more.
| They have funders who want their returns, one way or another.
| Which then leads the marketing team of the SaaS to develop
| growth hacking articles which startups tend to absorb.
|
| As a marketer you are backed into a corner of having to test
| everything because there are so many articles out there showing
| us how A/B testing a button from 17px to 18px increased sales
| by 50%. Or this genius new AI content tool that can swap things
| around for each and every user to match up with their purchase
| intent. It's gambling. There is data and some poor calculations
| that lead you astray hoping for that quick win. You will also
| find that one 'unicorn' SaaS will also dictate the UI/UX for
| the vast majority of others out there, look at Intercom which
| basically has been cloned in design across the board.
| ehnto wrote:
| Focusing so hardcore on metrics can also lead to the loss of
| a curated product's edge. If you just keep following what the
| lemmings do you would end up falling off a cliff eventually,
| it often takes domain knowledge and experience to make
| educated opinions about how a product should move forward.
|
| Selfishly, I hope you do stay in digital marketing, and be
| the change I want to see. Ad-tech needs some sanity and
| reality checks, and I hear a rumbling in the deep around
| ethical advertising practices.
|
| Ad-tech is not just feeling more manipulative by the year,
| it's also feeling more and more like snake oil to your
| average business. I feel like there's a niche opening up for
| honest feeling, more simple online advertising networks.
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| When I first put my personal website up on Github Pages last
| summer, I didn't include any analytics. I figured it was
| unnecessary--why should I care who was looking?
|
| I quickly realized the obvious--without _any_ analytics, I had
| no idea whether or not I was just screaming into the ether.
| Even for a simple noncommercial site, it 's discomforting!
|
| I now have Cloudflare Analytics and I'm much more satisfied. I
| feel as though I'm respecting my users's privacy, while also
| getting a basic sense of traffic.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| I used to have GA on my Github documentation. Then I realized
| how much of it was garbage referer spam that Google wasn't
| doing anything to combat.
| onion2k wrote:
| I removed Google Analytics from https://ooer.com because it was
| taking my lighthouse performance score from 100 down to 99, and
| I wasn't using the data for anything anyway.
| marrone12 wrote:
| This is so reductionist I really can't believe this is the top
| comment. What if your "product" is a web or app service that
| depends on user interactions? How can you actually know what
| your users are doing or how they're using your product if you
| can't track it?
| hansel_der wrote:
| on the other hand: producers of physical products very often
| don't get to know what there customers are doing with it.
|
| just saying
| toss1 wrote:
| >>Here's a crazy idea: Don't use analytics at all but focus on
| your product. If your success relies solely on "improving
| conversions" by tracking your users and then changing the
| position and color of your "Checkout" button then maybe try
| setting yourself apart such that customers want to buy your
| product even despite an obnoxious purchasing flow. Only then
| start optimizing it.
|
| YUP!!
|
| Any company, especially startups, should treat analytics they
| way they should treat MBAs - as a plausibly useful sub-function
| *after everything else in the product/service is running well
| at scale*.
|
| Before that, the entire focus should be on the product and how
| it gets smoothly to the customer.
|
| Only when there is lots of extra sales and production capacity,
| and lots of extra cash piling up, THEN is the time to start
| adding financial guys to efficiently manage it, and analytics
| to optimize your channels, etc.
|
| Plus, NEVER let either of those tails wag the dog. Once a
| company's financial numbers start to rely on the finance
| department, or the sales numbers start to rely on channel
| optimization, the death spiral has started. It may take a while
| and look like an improvement at first (e.g., see GE), but it is
| still a death spiral.
|
| Focus on product and customers, period.
| hobs wrote:
| And if you are not the CEO the head of product comes to the CEO
| and says "my team needs this" and then you ship it.
|
| Spending political capital on something that "the entire
| industry uses!!" doesn't usually align with my incentives.
| heyn05tradamu5 wrote:
| 100% agree.
|
| I used to be a very "analytics focused" product manager until I
| joined an enterprise software company that hardly uses them and
| is wildly successful.
|
| We're succesful because we talk to our users about everything.
| I spend most of my time talking to customers and watching them
| use the software. We occasionally use analytics to help us
| validate hypotheses or assumptions, but that's always
| complimented with a full range of qualitative methods.
|
| Analytics can help with observation, but it'll never give you
| the "why". In my experience only observation and a lot of
| conversations will get you there.
| bshoemaker wrote:
| How in the world has this been upvoted lol
| hansel_der wrote:
| not everyone sells UX of a website?
| partiallypro wrote:
| > Are the insights from Analytics really valuable enough to
| justify the cost?
|
| Yes. It is especially important when you are running ads and
| want to make sure you are getting the most bang for your buck
| in ad spend.
| nineplay wrote:
| > If your success relies solely on "improving conversions" by
| tracking your users and then changing the position and color of
| your "Checkout" button
|
| The problem is typically that you don't know if the color of
| your checkout button is a problem. Without some level of
| analytics you are only guessing as to what is driving your
| customers away and if your customers aren't educated engineers
| with comfortable incomes, you are probably going to guess
| wrong.
|
| I've worked with analytics and I've often been surprised at
| where customers run into trouble.
| Moru wrote:
| I mostly run into problems in webstores because they just
| can't run without pulling javascripts and iframes from 50
| different domains. uMatrix blocks them all and I can't be
| bothered to figure out the absolute minimum to allow to get
| to order so I just leave. Do I even show up in your google
| analytics?
| mrskitch wrote:
| This is exactly the same thought I came to with browserless.io.
| There simply wasn't enough traffic to make informed decisions,
| and when there was it was really silly things (small copy
| changes and the like).
|
| Eventually we just tore it all out, and never looked back.
| Improving the product and blogging about our findings are a
| win-win for us and the ecosystem at large, versus agonizing
| over traffic and data
| mrtksn wrote:
| Let's think about it. Are games doing analytics? Games are
| essentially UIs that people pay for the privilege to use.
|
| Although I am sure that contemporary game makers use analytics
| to understand user behaviour and optimize for in game spending
| and engagement, at least in the bigger games probably the core
| experience comes from creative human processes.
|
| The more the analytics the further optimised the game would be
| towards KPI.
|
| Also, I suspect that Netflix is creating it's materials based
| on analytics rather than creative human input.
|
| Maybe the problem is not analytics but greed and ill chosen
| KPI? Pre-total-tracking world, creatives still needed to test
| ideas and to test ideas you need to be able to measure. They
| would pay attention to what sells, how people react to a
| specific line etc.
|
| Maybe it was more fun because it was less optimised for profit?
| daemin wrote:
| Yes games are doing analytics.
|
| What do you think half of the achievements are for in a game
| - a very primitive form of analytics. There is usually an
| achievement for making it past the first level or prologue,
| there's another one for finishing the game, and probably many
| more for passing stages of the game. These are all to see how
| many people progress that far in the game.
|
| Apart from that there's also crash telemetry and other event
| based tracking included in games.
| nitrogen wrote:
| I believe I read that some games even track what you look
| at and for how long.
| atombum wrote:
| I think for companies like Activision, EA, analytics drive a
| massive amount of their decision making.
|
| I would even go so far as to posit that Blizzard (a master of
| psychological manipulation), most decisions are driven by
| analytics based optimization for engagement FIRST, then
| mechanics and creative design get to come play.
|
| I have no evidence, nor am I an insider, just an observer and
| scholar of games.
| karpierz wrote:
| A prime example of analytics driving games is Slay the Spire,
| where they would record every decision you made and outcomes
| in the game to better balance the experience and give the
| player interesting decisions.
|
| https://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/314975/How_Slay_the_Spir.
| ..
| millstone wrote:
| Slay the Spire does not have subscriptions, loot boxes,
| etc. so it can optimize for balance, instead of engagement
| or play time. It's very much the exception.
|
| The risk of analytics is an erosion of your design and
| vision. You just do whatever makes the numbers go up in the
| short term.
| RapidFire wrote:
| Valve did this with Portal!
|
| Or at least I feel like they did after playing through the
| games XD
|
| The games theme felt like a giant analytics test where
| everything was noted!!
| Enginerrrd wrote:
| >Here's a crazy idea: Don't use analytics at all but focus on
| your product. If your success relies solely on "improving
| conversions" by tracking your users and then changing the
| position and color of your "Checkout" button then maybe try
| setting yourself apart such that customers want to buy your
| product even despite an obnoxious purchasing flow. Only then
| start optimizing it.
|
| This is part of why costco is so successful. When I buy a
| kirkland brand item, I know with like 95% confidence that I'm
| getting a quality product. Not only that, but they go through
| heroic lengths to vet the other products that they put out. If
| you buy extra virgin olive oil at costco, it's very likely that
| it's pure extra virgin olive oil.
|
| They turned retail on its head after 30 years of abuses by
| people focused on quarterly earnings and selling their brand
| into the ground. Instead of making the product as shitty as
| possible and charging as much as possible, costco hard caps
| their margins and will then invest money to optimize their
| suppliers manufacturing process to pass the savings along to
| their customers.
|
| The big thing with costco is trust. I trust them and their
| products because they've earned it. In the rare event something
| is wrong with their product, they'll make it right with
| basically no questions asked. They used to do this to an absurd
| degree until people started abusing it.
|
| Compare that to the amount of vetting I have to do for almost
| every amazon purchase now. It's a huge headache, and there's a
| lot of stuff I just won't buy off of amazon anymore.
| system16 wrote:
| Absolutely. Even though I find the Costco in-store experience
| stressful and the online experience lacklustre, I put them at
| the top of my list for all of my non-fashion shopping (unless
| I'm looking for dad clothes). I can always trust their
| products will be as high or better quality than anywhere
| else, and at the best or close to best price. And I have no
| worries about returns.
|
| Compare that to Amazon, which I have zero trust in. I
| absolutely can't trust the reviews, and I can't trust any
| products are genuine (even for minor things: my last purchase
| several months ago were steel wool dish scrubs - name
| branded, but I'm certain they were fake). I also don't trust
| them to do anything about it, because I've reported fake
| reviews, and fake products several times, and all of those
| sellers are still selling with thousands of 5 star reviews.
| The only thing it has going for it is price and convenience.
| marssaxman wrote:
| It would never occur to me to care, _at all_ , whether
| something as trivial as a dish scrubber was a genuine name-
| brand item. What difference does it make? I suppose this is
| why I have experienced none of the trust issues people have
| begun talking about with Amazon, recently.
| system16 wrote:
| I think you're missing the point. The brand is
| irrelevant. The point is if they are faking the brand,
| you can no longer trust the integrity of the product at
| all.
|
| In this case, it began deteriorating with steel 'hairs'
| coming undone immediately after first use. Should I be
| concerned about that? Is it even steel wool or another
| material? If the latter, is it safe and tested against
| items that humans will be consuming food from? Is it
| sterile? Were some other chemicals used to treat it for
| something as trivial as attempting to match the colour of
| the brand?
| mint2 wrote:
| The latest trend on Amazon seems to be selling items
| packaged for non-us markets and shipping them to us
| customers. I bought a two pack Duracell lr44 battery and I
| think the entire packaging is in Turkish? Or maybe some
| Eastern European language. Regardless, the battery is
| definitely not packaged in a way that's legal to sell in
| America and the Amazon page did not say it would be
| packaged for another country. Super shady. And I'm not even
| sure how to tell if it's not 100% fake and not just the
| packing for another country.
| rightbyte wrote:
| Amazon's killer app is being able to sell illegal
| merchandize. Be it counterfait or surplus from
| Yugoslavia.
| missedthecue wrote:
| You don't think Costco optimizes their checkout process using
| huge piles of analytics? You can focus on more than one thing
| at a time.
| misterbwong wrote:
| I echo your sentiments on Costco but this is an argument for
| different metrics, not an argument against analytics.
|
| There is no chance that Costco doesn't use analytics. They
| might not A/B test their online button colors for highest
| conversion rate, but I'd bet they have their own set of
| analytics to determine product quality, sales, returns,
| viability, etc.
| MattSayar wrote:
| They're even hiring an analytics manager!
|
| https://phf.tbe.taleo.net/phf02/ats/careers/v2/viewRequisit
| i...
| pcstl wrote:
| This, thank you. I feel like people are making big
| assumptions about what "analytics" are that don't even
| begin to cover the whole spectrum of analytics.
| samb1729 wrote:
| > Here's a crazy idea: Don't use analytics at all but focus on
| your product. If your success relies solely on "improving
| conversions" by tracking your users and then changing the
| position and color of your "Checkout" button then maybe try
| setting yourself apart
|
| I am very much onboard with this idea. The notion that it is a
| requirement that businesses track individual customers' actions
| in order to succeed is pervasive in this newly-connected world
| we inhabit. It feels too early in my life to be a grumpy old
| man but I do certainly feel like it sometimes. Brick and mortar
| retailers manage to reach an acceptable level of business
| without watching exactly how every customer looks at shelves by
| just selling things people want or need and I don't see why the
| internet should be much different. Surveillance just because we
| can is not something I like.
| snowwrestler wrote:
| > The notion that it is a requirement that businesses track
| individual customers' actions in order to succeed
|
| How would a business use Google Analytics to track individual
| customers? The last time I checked, it was against the GA
| terms of service to do that.
|
| I know Google does have services to do that; I'm asking about
| GA specifically.
| lmkg wrote:
| Tracking individual users is how Google Analytics works.
| Every hit has a "client ID" to tie together hits that came
| from the same browser. You can trace the actions of an
| individual in the "User Explorer Report." Although in
| practice, that's only useful for debugging.
|
| The terms of service prevent you from putting PII into
| Google Analytics data. It is perfectly acceptable (and even
| encouraged) to put in an opaque identifier, which connects
| to PII stored in a different system. That is, for example,
| how you implement the official integration between Google
| Analytics and Salesforce CRM.
| smt88 wrote:
| Disclaimer: I hate Google Analytics because I hate Google, I
| hate monopolies, and I hate excessive hoarding of user data.
| I think the necessary aspects of tracking can be maintained
| without having all the bad aspects, but we need to break up
| the ad companies first.
|
| > _without watching exactly how every customer looks at
| shelves_
|
| This is absolutely not true. Do you have experience with
| managing brick and mortar stores? Ever been to a grocery
| store with a "discount"/rewards program? That's their
| tracking of individual behavior.
|
| They also use credit card data for the same purpose, although
| CC data is less reliable than rewards cards.
|
| Coupons accomplish the same thing. You put out a specific
| coupon code for each newspaper/circular/TV ad, and then you
| see how they convert.
|
| Things like Google Analytics are just the web version of
| things that have been done for almost 100 years.
| nonameiguess wrote:
| Brick and mortar companies develop product placement and
| display strategies based on focus group research, not by
| spying on their actual customers.
| cgriswald wrote:
| Rewards programs are opt-in. Stores have even stopped
| harassing me to sign up.
|
| Analytics are the equivalent of a computer following you
| around the store, watching what you look at, how long you
| look at it, what you pick up, what you pull out of your
| cart and put back...
|
| I've never in my life gotten message from the grocery store
| saying, "Hey, we saw you were looking at grapefruit. Here
| are some other citrus fruits we think you might like."
|
| I've never in my life had a store send me a message
| offering to sell me all the items I abandon in my cart on
| my last trip.
|
| There is certainly data brick and mortar _are_ looking at
| and it is often intrusive and creepy. Still, they weren't
| doing this a few decades ago and they were fine. They're
| pointing at online stores and saying "But it's the only way
| we can survive!" It's almost bizarre to point back at the
| more expensive, often first-party controlled, less accurate
| solutions of brick and mortars and say, "But they're doing
| it too!"
|
| (This problem is compounded when this data is given freely
| to a third party who now has much more data than even the
| individual stores or websites.)
|
| All this adds no benefit to me as a customer. Lower prices
| are not a benefit if I'm also being psychologically
| influenced to spend those savings and more on something
| else.
|
| Online or offline, I don't care. Stop doing it. It's creepy
| and unethical. It's a waste of resources that could go
| towards giving me better products or a better experience.
| It's the equivalent of cops asking for back doors in
| encryption schemes because it makes their jobs easier. If
| businesses can't find a way to stop doing it themselves
| than I think maybe we need some regulation.
| marrone12 wrote:
| Brick and mortar ARE tracking you!
|
| https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how-
| targ...
| ska wrote:
| > Still, they weren't doing this a few decades ago and
| they were fine.
|
| This part at least isn't really true. Since grocery
| stores have been around, there have been people working
| full time in effectively analytics - observing customer
| behavior, modifying products/layouts/UX, doing a/b
| testings etc. Digitizing everything gives new tools and
| approaches but overall the game hasn't really changed.
|
| Every part of your experience in an grocery store has
| been analyzed and tweaked since at least the 60s.
| D-Coder wrote:
| They weren't watching _every_ customer _all the time_,
| were they?
| tristor wrote:
| > Analytics are the equivalent of a computer following
| you around the store, watching what you look at, how long
| you look at it, what you pick up, what you pull out of
| your cart and put back...
|
| I hate to break it to you, but that's already happening
| too. Many retailers are using NFC/RFID + door scanners
| combined with CCTV and computer vision to track exactly
| these sorts of things, as well as patterns of flow.
| Retail store layout is a critical part of product
| placement optimization and is used to create particular
| flows through the store. The most blatant example of
| store layout controlling flow is how an IKEA is designed,
| however these things are used very heavily in grocery and
| mixed retail spaces (Walmart, Target).
| samb1729 wrote:
| > This is absolutely not true.
|
| I disagree, and I would prefer the entirety of my phrasing
| be quoted:
|
| > Brick and mortar retailers manage to reach an acceptable
| level of business without watching exactly how every
| customer looks at shelves by just selling things people
| want or need [...]
|
| I am referring to the enormous number of independent
| retailers, not just the small number of ultra-wealthy
| retail giants. Note I was careful to say "acceptable level
| of business" rather than "absolutely maximised profits",
| because I don't necessarily agree that it is a requirement
| that all people make as much money as they can possibly
| manage.
|
| If you were to make the argument that monitoring customers'
| actions is a means to make more money, I wouldn't disagree.
| I just don't think that all businesses will fail miserably
| without it.
|
| > Do you have experience with managing brick and mortar
| stores?
|
| Yes. They're small shops that serve a well-understood need
| for the local population and produce a sustainable income
| for everyone involved. No need to do much more than that
| for me.
| seventh-chord wrote:
| Except the things you mention correspond to looking at
| sales data in your backend DB, not putting google analytics
| in your frontend, right?
| ksm1717 wrote:
| I think classifying grocery store operations as
| frontend/backend is too far from reality to be a useful
| analogy. That's not to say that I don't agree that google
| analytics is more insidious than just about anything
| grocery stores do.
| Mauricebranagh wrote:
| Erm heard of footfall monitoring and tracking customers
| by their phones.
| madeofpalk wrote:
| Depends whether you think a "loyalty" program, or
| customer tracking cameras is frontend or backend
| packetslave wrote:
| "about: smt88hn@gmail.com"
|
| You clearly don't "hate" Google enough to stop using their
| ad-supported free services. Try again.
| Mauricebranagh wrote:
| Google just need to offer an on-prem version of GA - that would
| sole so many of my problems.
|
| The problem with your view is you have X resources to get
| things done - how do you measure the ROI or even get an idea of
| possible strategies.
|
| Of course you can go back to the 1960's mad men era "its
| toasted" approach to marketing, but that's not the best use of
| resources.
| novok wrote:
| The choice isn't GA or no analytics. You can do local server
| side analytics yourself if you wanted to, and even buy an on-
| prem product from someone out there that does the same.
| arcturus17 wrote:
| They'd probably steal your data and peek into it regardless.
|
| My fatalistic outlook is justified by the amount of
| documented abuses they've committed over the years. Nothing
| is sacred to them, except the idea that "more data (in _our_
| servers) is good".
| ivanhoe wrote:
| > Here's a crazy idea: Don't use analytics at all but focus on
| your product.
|
| Here's even crazier one: Just do analytics on the backend
| instead?!
|
| You don't need GA, nor 3rd party tracking cookies, just a
| simple session ID and a proper web-server's log analyzer, and
| you can get almost all of the same metrics.
|
| You can nowadays even sniff on clients' screen resolutions and
| other browser details using just img srcset, css and log
| analyzers.
| walshemj wrote:
| And ho many developer hours are you spending doing this at
| scale? - I doing this in 95 doing this for BT worldwide's
| Intranet.
| kitsunesoba wrote:
| Another headache induced by analytics is how one will sometimes
| need to discard an efficient and effective feature design and
| build it differently in order to be able to track use of the
| feature properly. It wouldn't surprise me in the least if the
| amount of time and energy burned on implementing analytics
| equals or exceeds that of the work on the feature it's
| tracking.
| smt88 wrote:
| Tracking is not just about improving conversions. It's
| primarily about understanding if your ads worked. It doesn't
| matter how good your product is if you can't tell anyone about
| it, and you can't spend a bunch of money telling people about
| it if you don't know which ad networks are giving you bang for
| your buck.
| dbbk wrote:
| Yeah, as a bootstrapper on a shoestring budget I'm not gonna
| dump a load of money into eg LinkedIn ads and just hope and
| pray that something happened. I need to know if they worked.
| Dudeman112 wrote:
| I think you're being silly.
|
| As long as your product is good enough, no one needs a
| marketing budget or to measure if marketing is working.
|
| And everyone has the resources and time to make their own
| analytics tools, if they need it, instead of relying on
| existing solutions
| arcturus17 wrote:
| Are you being facetious?
|
| Everyone has the time to roll out their own analytics?
| Where do you work, Google?
| PeterisP wrote:
| While developing your own analytics seems like overkill,
| you definitely can _host_ your own analytics, using one
| of the many solutions where all the analytics data are
| kept on your own servers.
| Dudeman112 wrote:
| I see even HN needs '/s' .
|
| You'd think stating that marketing doesn't matter and
| everyone has time to develop analytics would trigger some
| sarcasm detection somewhere
| arcturus17 wrote:
| There are others in the thread repeating that sentiment
| in a much more serious tone, that's why I had to ask.
| ameister14 wrote:
| >As long as your product is good enough, no one needs a
| marketing budget or to measure if marketing is working.
|
| Let's say you make an incredible mousetrap, better than any
| before. Then you tell some people about it, they buy it,
| and stop thinking about it because it isn't central to
| their existence.
|
| You've now saturated your market and have no ability to
| expand easily without putting effort into marketing or
| advertising. How do you go from there to 10 million units
| sold without a marketing budget of any kind?
|
| What about if the package is extremely off-putting to
| people outside your culture or if the language on it is
| confusing. How do you know without measuring?
| Dudeman112 wrote:
| Should've added /s instead of relying on sarcasm
| detection.
| ameister14 wrote:
| Yeah, it's hard to detect when a large number of people
| within this community actually believe what you're being
| sarcastic about.
| marcinzm wrote:
| You do realize that SEO to rank in search results and
| posting on social media (or hacker news) about your product
| is marketing? Without marketing how do people find your
| product?
| nitrogen wrote:
| I used to think that way. My customers liked my products,
| but I didn't really get many new customers. I doubled down
| on improving the technology. Then I ran out of money.
|
| "If you build it, they will come" is only very rarely true,
| and chances are there was some kind of submarine marketing
| going on anyway that you just didn't know about.
| Dudeman112 wrote:
| I wonder what makes nerds like us end up with that
| opinion.
|
| Surely anyone that reaches adulthood ought to know that
| selling yourself well and having some damn good looks
| will bring your farther than just being the real deal?
|
| It takes some huge lack of awareness of one's surrounding
| not to notice it
| smt88 wrote:
| It's because we constantly spend time/effort on finding
| better solutions to things, but most people don't.
| justapassenger wrote:
| > Here's a crazy idea: Don't use analytics at all but focus on
| your product. If your success relies solely on "improving
| conversions" by tracking your users and then changing the
| position and color of your "Checkout" button then maybe try
| setting yourself apart such that customers want to buy your
| product even despite an obnoxious purchasing flow. Only then
| start optimizing it.
|
| Here's crazy idea for early humans - don't use fire to cook
| your food. If your health depends on cooking meat, instead of
| hunting only for the healthy, bacteria and parasite free ones,
| then you should first focus on getting only highest quality
| meat, and only then figure out what to do with it.
| craftinator wrote:
| Your analogy is not applicable. A better example would be...
| Well better. Perhaps: "Here's a crazy idea for early humans -
| don't map out the location and habits of all the food that
| you hunt to maximize the number you kill, instead focus on
| improving the tools that you hunt with so you can reliably
| kill what you need. Only focus on maximizing kills when you
| start needing more food than you can find."
| dheera wrote:
| PSA: Add this to /etc/hosts if you don't want other sites
| collecting info from you via Google Analytics/Ads
| 0.0.0.0 googleanalytics.com 0.0.0.0
| googlesyndication.com
|
| A more complete list of things worth adding to /etc/hosts here
| (I'm not affiliated with this):
|
| https://github.com/StevenBlack/hosts
| dna_polymerase wrote:
| Caspii, you should disclose that some of the links in your
| article are actually affiliate links. Actually I think in Germany
| you are required to do so.
| cybert00th wrote:
| Ditched GA about two years ago now and haven't looked back. And
| haven't missed those upsell emails every time they released a new
| feature either.
|
| Instead we employ a QA to check everything from spelling and
| grammar, to page links and downloads and everything else in
| between and they've been worth every penny.
|
| Customer satisfaction and retention is up and I'm even getting
| better night's sleep! (I kid you not)
| alexashka wrote:
| Ah yes, let me go live like a hunter gatherer because modern
| society is full of sin and evil.
|
| That's the logical conclusion of 'don't use goods and services
| that have 'evil' behind them'.
| PixelPaul wrote:
| What is the best self hosted alternative that I can import google
| analytics data to?
| softwaredoug wrote:
| My personal site I don't use any analytics. My metric I care
| about is whether I'm having an impact on my colleagues and
| domain. I generally don't try to mode that quantitatively, I care
| more about whether it seems people around me are influenced or
| helped by what I write. If it's useful to some colleagues, that's
| enough for me.
| zserge wrote:
| If the content of your blog is not too niche - one can easily
| live without analytics by just looking at the numbers of
| upvotes on HN/Reddit etc. However, for starters and for very
| narrow topics some kind of analytics would still be useful to
| help them grow the audience.
| weinzierl wrote:
| I appreciate this attitude. What do you do to know if you have
| an impact instead of analytics?
| softwaredoug wrote:
| One thing I could look at is Moz's approximation for page
| authority and look at inbound links. But I don't care that
| much about it right now.
| throw_awy_1 wrote:
| Another idea: also stop using Google to show ads on your web site
| (adsense).
|
| As the article states, you get to decide how much tracking your
| visitors are subjected to.
| partiallypro wrote:
| Google owns the digital ad market with no real competitors, you
| would have to move to a subscription model to make money. Good
| luck with that, unless you feed another beast like Substack.
| throw_awy_1 wrote:
| Would agree Google Adsense is the giant but they still have
| competition. A quick search on duckduckgo revealed at least
| some to investigate.
|
| Note - many of these are probably just as scummy or moreso
| than adsense but they, at a minimum, are not part of Google.
| Media.net PropellerAds Amazon Native Shopping
| Ads Adversal Sovrn //Commerce (Formerly
| VigLink) Skimlinks Monumetric
| InfoLinks ylliX Evadav PopCash
| PopAds RevContent Adsterra SHE Media
| AdRecover MadAds Media Bidvertiser
| Adbuff BuySellAds AdClickMedia
| partiallypro wrote:
| Most of those in your list have very low payouts and have
| incredibly spammy links
| carapace wrote:
| On a tangent, but related IMO: the whole WWW seems gross now.
|
| The other day on that Mold linker project:
|
| > I wanted to use the linker to link a Chromium executable with
| full debug info (~2 GiB in size) just in 1 second. LLVM's lld,
| the fastest open-source linker which I originally created a few
| years ago, takes about 12 seconds to link Chromium on my machine.
|
| As much as I like that linker project, I can't help but feel it's
| like a pothead buying a bigger pipe: you're just going to smoke
| more weed.
|
| How can it make sense in a sane world for a _web browser_ to take
| up more space than entire operating systems? Red (
| https://www.red-lang.org/ ) and Factor ( https://factorcode.org/
| ) among many others deliver comparable capabilities in ~1M.
|
| - - - -
|
| The Gemini project is one interesting alternative. Every once in
| awhile I wonder what the folks using Urbit are up to in there.
|
| But for the masses of unwashed users out there I think they're
| stuck with it. I feel like we are seeing the genesis of cyborg
| AIs with humans for neural nodes.
| jahewson wrote:
| Why compare a web browser with a programming language? An
| equivalently rich OS would be a meaningful comparison, built
| with full debug symbols.
| carapace wrote:
| > Why compare a web browser with a programming language?
|
| Javascript?
|
| - - - -
|
| RED and Factor both provide single binaries of about 1M that
| have all the capabilities that a browser has, including a
| built-in programming language.
| ayewo wrote:
| You ask: "How can it make sense in a sane world for a web
| browser to take up more space than entire operating systems?"
|
| The last 30 years of the web has slowly evolved the web browser
| into its own operating system. Google Chrome is now a pretty
| hefty code base that depends on distributed builds [1] for
| compilation to complete in a timely manner.
|
| The fact that Microsoft threw in the towel [2] and decided to
| build on top of Chrome is testament to the enormous man-years
| that has been put into Chrome.
|
| 1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14734171
|
| 2:
| https://blogs.windows.com/windowsexperience/2018/12/06/micro...
| arcturus17 wrote:
| Is there a paid service that's any good and easy to use?
|
| I don't buy the "don't use any analytics, period" sentiment
| that's being repeated in this thread, but I am currently building
| a project that would definitely benefit from telemetry, and I
| would consider a paying alternative.
| marvinblum wrote:
| I'm building https://pirsch.io/. Take a look and let me know
| what you think :)
| newbie578 wrote:
| I just want to know how Google's success is not good for our
| society?
|
| Google is successful because people find it useful, ergo it is
| good for society. How am I to take seriously an article like this
| which is purely written based on emotions with almsot 0 regards
| for facts?
|
| I do wonder if the author thinks that Apple is useful for
| society? I for one find Google way more useful to society than a
| glorified fashion brand..
|
| Compared to Facebook's ads and rest of the industry, Google's are
| actually on point. They do not spam my screen, and most of the
| time are actually useful links.
|
| And the fact that they are now a huge corporation does have it's
| negative sides like stated in the article, but it also does have
| some nice benefits. Google Maps, GBoard, Gmail and to me
| personally the biggest play right now, Firebase, which empowers
| small time devs who want a quick and scalable backend with all
| the good offerings...
| tobiaslins wrote:
| For those who are searching for a GA alternative that can also be
| used as app analytics tool be sure to check out
| https://splitbee.io
|
| It also allows cookie-free tracking :)
| ehnto wrote:
| Self-hosted Matomo is a good alternative in PHP land. Being PHP
| it makes it pretty easy to deploy on a VPS and use it as
| analytics for all your projects. That also puts you in control
| of it's performance and impact on your users.
|
| You can also use a server-log only mode which uses zero client-
| side snippets/pixels to do the tracking work.
|
| https://matomo.org/matomo-on-premise/
| Pawka wrote:
| Or even run it in a container anywhere. A while ago (when
| Matomo was named "Piwik") I had it running in a stateless
| containers (db was provided as a service).
| soheil wrote:
| What's a quick straightforward alternative that supports more
| than a few websites without having to pay?
| jamesdhutton wrote:
| The author blames Google for the fact that recipe sites force you
| to wade through a long preamble before you get to the recipe. But
| if internet advertising didn't exist, then the recipe site would
| be charging him for the recipe. Recipe authors have to make a
| living somehow. If he doesn't want ads in his recipes, then he
| could always go out and buy a recipe book.
| qPM9l3XJrF wrote:
| I also find the claim itself rather implausible and it makes me
| think the author just has a generic anti-tech bias. (Know what
| else Google is responsible for? Forwards from Grandma! And
| reposts on your favorite subreddit! And people ghosting you on
| Tinder!)
| walshemj wrote:
| I don't understand all this whining about recipes sites. I have
| never had a problem with them and I am using an 8 year old
| creaky laptop.
|
| And Nigellas' or the Hairybikers sites are not encumbered with
| adds.
| dazc wrote:
| If internet advertising didn't exist then there would be only
| half a dozen recipes for scrambled eggs to be found, not the
| thousands there are now.
| jamesdhutton wrote:
| ... and probably not much else. I love the way I can type in
| whatever combination of ingredients I happen to have in my
| pantry, and get a bunch of free recipes with those
| ingredients. I doubt that would have happened without
| internet advertising.
| robholmes wrote:
| Or, try switching to a privacy focused analytics solution that
| values your users privacy, and provides the simple metrics that
| you need.
|
| Fathom Analytics: https://usefathom.com/ref/IKHKIT
| sova wrote:
| On-premise Matomo is free. https://matomo.org/matomo-on-premise/
| clairity wrote:
| note that matomo makes it very hard (impossible?) to automate
| updates when self-hosted, which is the reason i abandoned them
| on my personal projects in favor of goatcounter (for the time
| being until i find a simple, self-hostable option).
| chubot wrote:
| When I started https://www.oilshell.org/ I added Google Analytics
| because it was easy, and because it was something I'd seen a lot
| of other people do.
|
| After actually using the web interface, I found it almost useless
| for getting feedback about my site.
|
| So I switched it off and haven't missed it at all. Instead I
| simply analyze my own logs with a Python program. (There a bunch
| of lightweight alternative services that I could have considered,
| but my scheme works and is customizable)
|
| I was lazy about this and should have done it much earlier, so I
| encourage others to do the same.
|
| -----
|
| It should also save energy because your user's phone doesn't have
| to make a connection to another server. The original hit to
| http://www.oilshell.org/ has all that's necessary for logging.
| (no cookies in this case, but there could be if you want)
|
| Google analytics were so prevalent that the NSA used the cookies
| to track (or attempt to track) the entire population:
|
| https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2013/12/10...
|
| If you simply don't include the analytics, then your users won't
| be subject to such threats. (this threat may be mitigated by now,
| but who knows if there's a similar one. If you don't need it, the
| easiest way is to not use the service)
| Jerard_Victor wrote:
| Next stop is to remove Disqus
| caspii wrote:
| Correct . I will move to https://talk.hyvor.com soon.
| caspii wrote:
| Update: I just did!
| m1117 wrote:
| Google analytics is great. It has its issues, but overall 1.
| They've built a working product that is easy to connect and use
| 2. It fits to a lot of use cases and barely has issues 3. Easy to
| start using, no engineering overhead 4. I don't understand what
| the author trying to say. Should google be a charity? Or should
| they stop making good product? Or does the author want to cover
| the cost of all the other product that is built by google? Google
| is more broad. They think of all the users, not just
| corporations.
| seaman1921 wrote:
| HN brain in a nutshell: big tech == evil
| hansel_der wrote:
| monopoly == evil
| m1117 wrote:
| There's a lot of alternatives to google analytics that
| people are free to use, or build their own systems. Corps
| are a little evil but the consumers are also evil. Everyone
| is evil.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| I don't think anyone is disputing the greatness of Google
| Analytics on a functional level.
|
| The problem is that indeed Google isn't a charity and will not
| give away such a powerful tool for free without getting
| something in return.
|
| That return is the privilege of stalking all your website's
| visitors, which are often not aware of the tracking and have no
| say in the matter. Furthermore it would be against the GDPR if
| it was actually enforced properly.
| m1117 wrote:
| That's a great way to monetize. I have my website, it runs on
| GA and I'm happy to share the data instead of paying cash. I
| have under 1000 visits a day. I agreed on the agreement.
| spinningslate wrote:
| Just no. Ignore the hyperbole in the article and the crux boils
| down to this:
|
| - Using GA means you're paying for your analytics with your
| users' privacy.
|
| The product is 'good' iff (if and only if) you're willing to
| accept those economics and ethics. You want analytics; that
| suggests they has some value to you. You don't want to pay cash
| money for it. That's your choice.
|
| But it's not free. Your users are paying for your analytics
| with their data.
|
| GA is far from a charity. It's a key part of the surveillance
| machine at the front end of the advertising pipeline.
|
| >They think of all the users, not just corporations.
|
| Yes. They mine users to sell ads to corporations. If you use
| GA, you are deciding that you're willing to support that.
| Google gives you analytics, you give them your users' data.
| Simple as that.
| m1117 wrote:
| Exactly, paying with data for most people is cheaper than
| paying with money. I'd say that's a great compromise.
| purpmint008 wrote:
| Sure. But, let's also stop feeding the Apple App Store beast.
| 15-30% cut for little-to-no value added. Complete monopolization.
| Can't side-load apps without paying an yearly-fee.
| nerdjon wrote:
| Not sure what the relevance too this article is.
|
| There is a major difference between someone actively choosing
| to use an iPhone vs a web developer choosing for you to send
| your data too Google because they included some script.
|
| (Also I would argue the number of security issues that there
| have been in apps on Android sure helps warrant that cut)
| b3lvedere wrote:
| Is there a nice list somewhere that can tell me which beast i
| should or should not feed?
| marvinblum wrote:
| I'd like to add https://pirsch.io/ as an alternative. The main
| differentiation from Plausible and Fathom is, that it can be used
| from your backend, so that adblockers can't block the script and
| you still get GDPR compliant statistics for your websites.
| dbbk wrote:
| I'm sure Plausible also lets you set a custom domain for the
| script?
| marvinblum wrote:
| Yes, you can use a custom subdomain to serve the script, but
| browsers/plugins are working on blocking them too (Brave has
| implemented this already, I think). You won't get around
| tracking from the backend if you want accurate data.
| heipei wrote:
| How is it GDPR compliant if you're sending the IP address of
| the visitor to that service? Not saying that it can't be used,
| and not saying that they would use / store the IP in a non-
| hashed way, but at the very least I will still have to disclose
| (and possibly opt-in approve) the use of that third-party
| service to my own users.
| Symbiote wrote:
| I think you agree with [1], which says the German data
| protection regulator doesn't think even "Cookieless pings" to
| an external service are allowed.
|
| It could still be GDPR compliant if you ask permission, but
| that's clearly not the intention -- the Pirsch homepage says
| "no cookie banner".
|
| [1] https://usercentrics.com/knowledge-hub/google-consent-
| mode/#... (See "Can I use...").
| marvinblum wrote:
| The IP is hashed and deleted after a day:
| https://docs.pirsch.io/privacy/ If you embed a script into
| your website, the IP of your visitors will also get sent to
| that service.
| system16 wrote:
| I've had so many clients from small companies to hobbyists
| convinced it's critical that Google Analytics be installed on
| their websites. Some even horrified when suggesting they don't
| need it.
|
| In most cases, the results aren't even looked at or acted upon,
| so this bloat is just sitting there and feeding Google data with
| little in return.
| tobiaslins wrote:
| you could use analytics such as https://splitbee.io :) ux is
| great and you can use it without being a data scientist
| system16 wrote:
| When suggesting a product, I think it's typically best
| practice to disclose when you are the founder.
| devops000 wrote:
| Google analytics is just a vanity metric, you learn a lot more
| with FullStory/Hotjar or with chat support (Intercom, Drift etc.)
| tlarkworthy wrote:
| How do people to Google Ad conversion metrics without the GA tie
| in?
| marvinblum wrote:
| You can still track campaigns using utm query parameters.
| tlarkworthy wrote:
| And Google ads ui updates?
| ig1 wrote:
| The challenge is that there aren't really any good alternatives.
|
| The alternatives suggested (Plausible, Fathom, etc.) are fine for
| hobby projects, blogs, etc. but they don't support any of the
| modern analytics required for commercial usage.
|
| If you're running a business then you need an analytics solution
| that supports attribution modelling, cohorts, funnels, etc. and
| there's just no great competitors.
|
| (I'd happily invest if someone's building one!)
| Lammy wrote:
| Personally I never stopped using AWStats to process my nginx
| access logs. Its appearance is "rustic" for sure, but it provides
| every statistic I care about: https://www.awstats.org/
| bobitsaboy wrote:
| Came here to essentially post the same thing. If you're on some
| form of basic hosting with a Cpanel, you probably already have
| it installed or a click away.
|
| Google can't entice me enough to bother adding load to my
| sites.
| donohoe wrote:
| Lets examine these "claims" a bit more closely...
| It's a bloated script that affects your site speed
|
| Everything affects sites-peed. However its 19KB, thats not awful.
| It's overkill for the majority of site owners
|
| Yes, agreed. But so what. It's a privacy
| liability and requires an extensive privacy policy
|
| Would be nice if if it offered specifics on the "liability" but
| it does not. And for the weight of an "extensive privacy policy",
| I'm not buying this as a great reason. It worsens
| the user experience due to the necessity of annoying prompts.
|
| Again, what!? I'm not seeing these prompts. It's
| blocked by many browsers (e.g. Firefox) so the data is not very
| accurate.
|
| And its blocked by ad-blockers and so much more. The point is to
| know what your users do. Its good to know you got 1M unique
| visitors last month, but I don't need to know I got 1,214,551
| unique visitors. All analytic packages have problems like this.
|
| And by the way: I don't like Google Analytics, I think Plausible
| is a great step in the right direction, but this post is a poorly
| researched rant and should not be on HN.
| harry8 wrote:
| Come on dude, you gotta read like, the next sentence where it
| says these points are a summary of the details here:
|
| https://plausible.io/blog/remove-google-analytics#its-owned-...
|
| eg "It uses cookies so you must obtain consent to store
| cookies" GDPR prompts.
|
| and
|
| "According to Google: "you must ensure that certain disclosures
| are given to, and consents obtained from, end users in the
| European Economic Area along with the UK. If you fail to comply
| with this policy, we may limit or suspend your use of the
| Google product and/or terminate your agreement"."
|
| Hyperlinking to more detail is a great thing to do when making
| an argument. If you're skeptical, follow the link and decide if
| it's really supporting evidence or you disagree. It's one way
| opinion writing can be vastly better in the age of hypertext
| than it was in the days of newsprint editorial.
|
| I'm absolutely in favour of this kind of thing!
|
| (Not a web guy, suspicious of goog, facebrick, but don't know
| enough to have a fully formed opinion on web analytics yet.
| Hyperlinked supported opinion is good.)
| notretarded wrote:
| Nice try Google employee
| temp8964 wrote:
| > Again, what!? I'm not seeing these prompts.
|
| Apparently it means prompts for privacy stuff.
| hinkley wrote:
| Google analytics code is 19k, then it still has to do all the
| analytics.
| raspyberr wrote:
| It's really tough to read this with any sense of sincerity when
| it uses Google fonts and "feeds the beast" that is Cloudflare.
| iamacyborg wrote:
| And Disqus.
|
| It does serve to highlight just how ubiquitous these platforms
| are though.
| layoutIfNeeded wrote:
| Well, what did you expect them to use? The built-in system
| fonts of the user??? :S
| caspii wrote:
| Touche. You are absolutely right. I will remove these too, but
| haven't gotten round it to it yet.
| raspyberr wrote:
| In which case, I do agree with a lot of what you say. There
| are many alternatives to what Google offers for website
| builders nowadays. It's just most people aren't aware of
| them. Many guides will just say use Google fonts and use
| Google analytics.
| ehnto wrote:
| I found third party CDNs were almost always the cause when
| my personal site felt slow. My personal server responds
| quickly every time, because it's not subject to the same
| heavy traffic fluctuations that CDNs are.
|
| To that end, I serve all the font files from the server and
| run a self-hosted analytics tool. Most Google fonts are
| just conveniently hosted fonts from third-party foundries,
| so it's not like you are supporting Google by downloading
| them.
| caspii wrote:
| Disqus has just been switched off!
| rambambram wrote:
| For my website system [Hello Website][hw], I built a non-
| tracking visitor statistics part. I also got rid of Google
| Fonts in the process. So no cookie-wall, no tracking, and I can
| honestly say the stats are accurate with 15000 page views a
| month. I even wrote a [blog post][blogpost] about it; as a
| webdev you have the responsibility to use Google Analytics or
| not. It's poison. Hello Website is for end-users who can easily
| design and fill their site with it, but if you are a developer
| I suggest using GoatCounter or Simple Analytics. [hw]:
| https://www.hellowebsite.online [blogpost]:
| https://www.hellowebsite.online/?module=blog&link=1&post=4
| j_barbossa wrote:
| I think the biggest problem about Google is not privacy. It's
| their way of ruining all sorts of businesses by offering services
| for free which only works because they cross-subsidize everything
| through their advertising business.
|
| Consumers are not willing to pay for navigation system anymore
| because Google Maps is for free. People don't hire translators
| because Google Translate is for free. Office suites, eMail,
| mobile games, storage... all free just because companies blow
| billions of ad money into this corporation.
| godshatter wrote:
| Another way to not feed the beast is to use NoScript or something
| similar and not let google-analytics.com through.
| pwg wrote:
| google analytics, and doubleclick, are two locations that have
| permanent, global, block rules in uBlock Origin on my browser.
| [deleted]
| philistine wrote:
| I never installed Analytics on my personal website, and I instead
| get data out of the Google chimera instead of putting data into
| it. How? I look at my Google Search Console numbers to give me
| just enough data to figure out what works or not on my website.
| williesleg wrote:
| Time to reboot the internet
| lmkg wrote:
| I have high confidence that Google does _not_ dip into Analytics
| data for its own uses without permission. I am an analytics
| consultant by profession, so this opinion is colored by the old
| adage about not understanding something that prevents your
| paycheck. But it is also colored by a decade of experience with
| the technical and organizational capabilities and limitations of
| the tool. Let me lay out my reasoning.
|
| 1. Legal and contractual liability.
|
| For the Analytics service, Google is a Processor under GDPR and a
| Service Provider under CCPA. This means that legally, the only
| thing they are allowed to do with the data is provide the service
| requested by their customers.
|
| Many enterprise-level customers require this as a condition of
| using Google Analytics. If they were to breach this confidence,
| it would probably result in them losing the enterprise space as a
| whole.
|
| 2. Google Analytics data is first-party data.
|
| There are no means for Google to stitch together panopticon view
| of a user from the GA data from different companies. The user
| identifier is a first-party cookie, which is not shared between
| sites. There are no side-channels. Believe me, I literally spend
| at least five hours every week staring at hits in the Network
| tab, and I know where every piece of data comes from and how it
| gets processed. Cookies are not shared between sites except
| manually, and then only between sites operated by the same
| company.
|
| 3. Low signal-to-noise ratio.
|
| The median Google Analytics implementation is a dumpster fire.
| When I engage with a new website, it's actually more common than
| not that they have double-tracking (or triple or more) on at
| least some pages, which completely kills the accuracy of bounce
| rate and time-on-page metrics. Even "good" implementations have a
| _huge_ amount of variability between the data.
|
| 4. They can probably get the data elsewhere.
|
| Google acts as a Controller for several of its other products
| (notably, Google Ads aka AdWords), meaning that it explicitly
| acknowledges it _does_ use the data for its own purposes. And
| Chrome syncs your browsing history to your Google account. While
| Google Analytics would get them extra coverage, the cost-benefit
| doesn 't seem worthwhile to me, especially consider the GDPR
| angle.
|
| 5. That's not why it's free
|
| There's a common theme in posts like these about "why do you
| think Google gives GA away for free?" implying that they do it
| for the data.
|
| Website analytics is a strategic compliment to website
| advertising. If people can see how much money they make from ads
| (and moreso, optimize how much money they make from ads), then
| they will buy more ads. Google makes money from Analytics as a
| strategic compliment. They do not need to acquire your data for
| it to be profitable.
|
| Nowadays it's also an integration point with other services in
| the marketing cloud. See "caveats" below.
|
| CAVEATS
|
| Everything above is about the "default" Google Analytics
| installation, how it works out of the box. Google Analytics
| _allows_ you to share data with Google in a variety of way, and
| actively _encourages_ you to do so for several of those. I 'll
| enumerate the specific points where a particular configuration of
| Google Analytics has significant privacy impacts.
|
| 1. Advertising Features.
|
| This establishes a "cookie match" between the first-party GA
| cookie and the third-party DoubleClick cookie. Meaning it
| connects your GA data to Google's own data.
|
| 2. Google Ads integrations
|
| This establishes several data connections to the Google Ads
| dataset, in both directions. Google explicitly acknowledges they
| act as a Controller for this integration, i.e. it's their data
| know and they can use it.
|
| 3. Google Signals
|
| Hoooooo boy.
|
| This is the setting that explicitly connects data to a user's
| Google Account. If a user is logged in to Google in Chrome
| (meaning logged in to the browser), then Google Analytics can use
| their account as the identity signal instead of a cookie. So the
| data from this one actually _could_ be aggregated across
| different GA properties. The Google Account can also be used as
| the basis for targeting advertising.
|
| Concluding Thoughts
|
| Using Google Analytics "feeds the beast" insofar as it continues
| to cement Google's hegemony on the Internet. If you want to ditch
| GA for that reason, I completely sympathize. But saying it "feeds
| the beast" in that Google actually acquires that data and uses
| it, borders on a conspiracy theory. There are plenty of good and
| valid reasons to ditch GA based on principles, and on statements
| that can be backed up on evidence. There's no need to overreach.
|
| GA is overkill for most small websites. Its main value is to
| integrate with Google advertising products (to re-iterate: the
| buttons that do that are off by default but very easy to press).
| I _don 't_ think that logfile parsing is as accessible as many
| people seem to believe, but there's now a strong landscape of
| privacy-conscious analytics tools that didn't exist five years
| ago, which will provide at least the simple metrics that personal
| websites actually need.
|
| The web would probably be better if Google Analytics stopped
| being the "default." But that's more about the monoculture of
| available tools, rather than extending Google's ubiquitous
| surveillance apparatus.
| Guidii wrote:
| Thanks for posting a thoughtful reply. It's great to see
| reasoned discussion on this site. Like most tech issues,
| there's a lot of nuance in this, and it's helpful to be able to
| hear the benefits on all sides of an issue.
|
| Disclaimer: I'm a googler, but not in the analytics space. I
| don't have the background to meaningfully contribute to this,
| and will bow to lkmg's expertise. I also really like my job;)
| Nextgrid wrote:
| > Legal and contractual liability
|
| I disagree. The GDPR consent prompt Google has implemented on
| their websites is not compliant with the regulation, and Google
| have a history of dark patterns elsewhere when it comes to
| privacy that may also run afoul of the regulation.
|
| Contractual obligations was supposed to prevent Facebook from
| breaking their promise of not using 2FA phone numbers for
| advertising purposes, and we all know how that ended up.
|
| Ad targeting involves so many factors that Google can very well
| use the analytics data for it and still maintain plausible
| deniability as it would be impossible to prove this from the
| outside, so the risk is limited compared to the potential
| rewards.
|
| > There are no means for Google to stitch together panopticon
| view of a user from the GA data from different companies
|
| Having a view over the entire web would allow you to track user
| sessions across websites with just IP addresses, browser
| fingerprinting and heuristics. Cookies are not necessary for
| this.
|
| > Low signal-to-noise ratio.
|
| I don't think Google dips into individual analytics events;
| that would indeed be vulnerable to noise plus would require
| understanding how every site uses analytics and what events
| represent what. I think they just get a general metric such as
| "user X is interested in the general category of your website"
| or "user X is active during these times of day" or "user X is
| often connecting from this IP, from which user Y is also
| frequently seen, thus they probably live nearby or together".
|
| > They can probably get the data elsewhere.
|
| They do, which makes this so much worse because it gives them
| plausible deniability. There's no way to prove with any
| certainty that they are/aren't doing this because the data
| could come from multiple different sources instead, but there's
| also no reason to believe GA is not one of these sources (even
| if it's only used to merely _confirm_ the accuracy of other
| sources ' data).
|
| > That's not why it's free
|
| If analytics was a loss leader for their advertising product,
| they could very well include it as part of advertising -
| setting up an ad account (and maybe depositing some $$$) gives
| you access to analytics. At this point they also have a lot of
| "freeloaders" who don't use/need advertising and use GA which
| it would make sense to kick out now that it's clear they will
| never convert to an advertising customer. They don't do neither
| of these things, and are happy to crunch gigantic amounts of
| data for absolutely zero revenue. This doesn't make sense
| unless they gain something from it internally, and their
| business model incentivizes them to do so.
| caspii wrote:
| Well, it's all speculation in the end, because Google is silent
| about it.
|
| BUT: the costs of running and maintaining Google Analytics must
| be significant. There must be some strategic reason for Google
| to continue to do so (look at the way they deal with products
| that are not working for them, remember Google Reader?).
|
| So what is that strategic reason?
| lmkg wrote:
| I address that in point 5. Analytics is a strategic
| compliment to advertising. When people can measure the
| revenue resulting from online ads, they buy more online ads.
| And at the margin, when people can _optimize_ the return on
| online channels to make them more efficient, they spend even
| more on online ads.
| iujjkfjdkkdkf wrote:
| I'm coming around to the idea that Google (and Facebook etc) need
| to be called out and held accountable for the "negative
| externalities" that come with their business model, the same as
| if a company was polluting the physical environment.
|
| Google has turned much of the internet into a wasteland (there
| are examples as it related to news in the article but this is
| true for most content). They don't have to pay for this
| pollution, but it literally affects everyone in the world. The
| internet at this point is a vital part of people's lives, and
| when we see companies doing the equivalent of dumping chemical
| waste into it, we should more actively rebuke them.
| jcampbell1 wrote:
| Don't forget the extortion racket Google runs by advertising
| competitors on navigational queries. If you are a small
| business you are familiar with their mafiosa sales practices.
| They give new employees "google supremacy" training so their
| employees can engage in abusive practices without thinking
| twice. I have never met people as brainwashed as an Adwords
| account manager.
|
| I have one friend who started calling her husband a Gouche
| after he got a job at google. Much better term than Noogler.
| AnotherTechie wrote:
| >Google has turned much of the internet into a wasteland
|
| I think I understand what you mean but would benefit from an
| explanation of that point
| shash7 wrote:
| Search results show listicle articles, low value blog spam,
| etc. Youtube videos are unnecessarily long. Etc, etc.
| dhimes wrote:
| I _really hate_ the long videos. Facebook tells you that
| you 'll get better results if you make them long
| (seriously?). So people make these unnaturally long videos
| with lots of vapid footage, generating needless entropy.
| Simplicitas wrote:
| Thanks for succinctly recapping the core issue here.
|
| Another externality from all this is the growth of
| misinformation, which our species seems so unaware and
| defenseless against.
| missedthecue wrote:
| I seem to recall conspiracy theories abounding in the days of
| Usenet
| harry8 wrote:
| Yeah and most of our families were into usenet. Usenet also
| pioneered tailoring what to show to maximize "engagement"
| so the number of people taken in by conspiracies has
| actually decreased now. Thanks google. Thanks facebook. You
| always know what's best for us!
| stevenhubertron wrote:
| I use https://www.goatcounter.com/ on my personal site. No where
| near the feature set of GA but more than enough for my needs and
| super lightweight.
| aembleton wrote:
| This ends with the author promoting his new 'bootstrapped app':
| https://keepthescore.co/
|
| That website uses Google Analytics!
| chiefalchemist wrote:
| > "Google is a giant advertising platform."
|
| That is a polite and public facing way to put it. But it's highly
| misleading. Google is in the behavior harvesting and archiving
| forever business. _One_ of the ways that intrusions manifests
| itself is advertising.
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