[HN Gopher] Google penalizes you for using Google Analytics
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Google penalizes you for using Google Analytics
Author : twapi
Score : 203 points
Date : 2021-05-03 08:09 UTC (14 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.simpleanalytics.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.simpleanalytics.com)
| processing wrote:
| I tried both Simple Analytics & Plausible but both are blocked by
| Adblockers which made then useless to us.
|
| In the end - ditched Google Analytics and just use log files &
| sales data.
| mtalhaashraf wrote:
| I'm using Google Analytics to track pageview count on a website
| and it does appear to add around 0.4sec to Time-To-Interactive of
| the PageSpeed score.
|
| And the GA script size is about 40KB.
| earthboundkid wrote:
| That's why I use https://github.com/jehna/ga-lite/. It saves a
| roundtrip and is quite small.
| xnx wrote:
| Looks like they're deploying the Simple Analytics script directly
| in the page source and the Google Analytics script via Google Tag
| Manager. Though Google Analytics through Google Tag Manager might
| be the Google-recommended way to deploy Google Analytics, this
| isn't exactly an apples-to-apples comparison. Would be
| interesting to see if Google Analytics directly in the page had a
| different score than through Google Tag Manager. That said, I
| would almost always trade the miniscule score penalty for serving
| something through Google Tag Manager (including Simple Analytics)
| for ease of maintenance.
| hrdwdmrbl wrote:
| You should see how much Facebook's tracker impacts performance!
| GA does a relatively good job at not impacting performance
| compared with others. Not defending GA though, just whining about
| FB. :)
| masswerk wrote:
| BTW, the same is true for Google Fonts. These prove to be the
| major bottleneck on my sites. (Since I'm hosting fonts locally,
| these are at 100% performance or close. We may argue that in
| practice these fonts would probably have been available in cache,
| but this tends to be less a thing, compare Firefox privacy
| policies.) This is actually a testament to the neutrality of
| Lighthouse.
| robinj6 wrote:
| This has frustrated me so much, as I spend a lot of time
| optimizing web performance. Gtag.js is pushed by analytics,
| however after loading it then async loads analytics.js. It is
| very inefficient, especially for sites that do not much more than
| track page views. It is the worst scoring factor on sites I
| optimize because there's very little you can do about it without
| hacks.
| SquareWheel wrote:
| If you don't need any of the other features of GTag or GTM, you
| can omit them and just load analytics.js directly. It'll work
| fine and save you some data.
|
| https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection...
|
| I don't think this option exists with GA4, unfortunately.
| JohnTHaller wrote:
| I like the idea of Simple Analytics but that pricing model is out
| of reach open source projects like PortableApps.com. Separating
| out by page views is tough when I only need a single user and
| don't care about support. $600 a year for up to a million page
| views per month and "contact us" for more means it'd probably be
| at least a couple thousand dollars a year.
| mcao wrote:
| You can use an open-source alternative like https://umami.is/
| neltnerb wrote:
| Honest question -- why do you need analytics on an open source
| project like the one referenced? What information could they
| possibly get from it that matters to what they're doing?
|
| I've used GA once on an open source focused blog, and the
| information was entirely "interesting" but I didn't get
| anything useful out of it other than a vague "hey people are
| visiting" picture that really changed nothing about what I was
| doing.
|
| Has analytics changed to be more useful? Who cares what
| countries people are visiting from? I feel like people don't
| question their need for analytics as much as they should and
| just automatically do it.
| josefresco wrote:
| I really wish Google would split Analytics into two products. One
| for "advanced" website operators and one for "simple" users, aka
| business owners aka _real_ people, not professional data
| analysts.
|
| The problem is that most of my clients don't care enough about
| their stats to pay $19/month. So they opt for the "free" option
| (Google Analytics) which is now being positioned for the high-end
| market.
| mywittyname wrote:
| GA offers GA360 for "advanced" users who need integration with
| Ads, Videos, GCP, Salesforce, etc.
| devmunchies wrote:
| TLDR; Google Analytics penalizes you for using Google Analytics
| (slower page speed), not Google.
| bhartzer wrote:
| Official statement from Google's John Mueller regarding this:
| https://twitter.com/JohnMu/status/1389322980547833856
|
| "No, it's not the case that we penalize for Google Analytics. We
| don't special-case Google products in Search, but that goes both
| ways. The LH score is not what we use in Search, but my ancient
| WP + GA site is 100 there." John Mueller
| bhartzer wrote:
| Google doesn't penalize sites in any way if you're using their
| products (like GA or embedding a YouTube video). This is just
| silly and flat out wrong to say that Google penalizes you for
| using Google Analytics. It's flat-out wrong and untrue.
|
| It's kind of like saying that buying Google Ads will boost your
| website's organic search engine rankings.
|
| I really suggest that SimpleAnalytics.com update the title tag on
| this, as it's just wrong. Period.
|
| That doesn't mean that using Google Analytics doesn't slow down
| your site (a bit) and Google should speed it up. I've had that
| complaint for years now, and Google just hasn't done anything
| about it that we can noticeably see.
| ihaveajob wrote:
| Wait until you measure of showing Google Ads!
| digitcatphd wrote:
| Anyone who takes this article seriously has (A) not read how to
| lie with statistics (B) does not analyze bias in articles based
| on the person writing it and (C) is directly contributing to a
| society of misinformation.
| mdoms wrote:
| This is an ad.
| cddotdotslash wrote:
| Isn't this a good thing? One part of Google made a tool that
| evaluates performance and they're not giving any preference to
| their other tools, despite also being made by Google.
|
| If they hadn't objectively penalized you, everyone would be
| complaining that Google gave preferential treatment to their own
| products.
| tyingq wrote:
| It is funny that AMP pages could have GA without being
| penalized.
| onion2k wrote:
| It's a good thing that Google don't give preferential treatment
| to their own products.
|
| It's a bad thing that Google's own analytics product isn't good
| enough to still get 4x100 in Google's own perf tool. It means
| that people will give up and accept lower scores because it's
| "impossible" to be perfect. That harms everyone who uses the
| web.
| jefftk wrote:
| Why will people think it's impossible and give up, when
| competitors like Simple Analytics demonstrate that better
| performance is possible?
|
| (Disclosure: I work for Google, speaking only for myself)
| tyingq wrote:
| I know there's a case for these additional stats being less
| than useful, but SimpleAnalytics doesn't appear to provide
| the same statistics that GA does. It's a pretty big hurdle
| for some people to give up on funnels, time on page, bounce
| rates etc.
|
| If there's an analytics platform with a closer feature
| match to GA, but with good page speed scores, that might be
| more convincing to them.
| cknoxrun wrote:
| There is a common fear (and I have to admit I irrationally
| feel this fear) that your ranking will be impacted
| negatively by not using Google Analytics. Maybe not
| intentionally, but perhaps because Google knows less about
| your site.
| onion2k wrote:
| It's very unlikely that swapping Google Analytics for an
| alternative will be an acceptable solution to a performance
| issue. Clients like GA. It's "industry standard", it plays
| well with other marketing tools, and people know it.
| Performance is understood to be important but not at the
| expense of understanding what users are doing. Website
| owners will readily drop a bit of perf in order to keep GA.
| jmcan wrote:
| Maybe small business owners doing this themselves will give
| up because they don't know about these other analytics
| services. But I agree I don't think a marketer would give
| up and settle for a lower score, but I definitely can see a
| marketer being frustrated with the lack of feedback in
| order to get a perfect score.
| lallysingh wrote:
| They could... Google it.
| salawat wrote:
| Not everyone has the time, desire, inclination, or
| capability to articulate the questions required to chart
| out the "analytics package" space.
|
| Nor does everyone have the luxury of hiring a PM to do it
| for them.
| chris_wot wrote:
| If the marketer doesn't have the time, desire, or
| inclination to work this out I'm not sure it is a problem
| for anyone but the marketer.
| jscheel wrote:
| My biggest complaint is that Lighthouse has a longstanding open
| bug where out-of-process iframes are counted in the main thread,
| thus causing third party embeds to wildly degrade the LH score,
| even when real performance is not affected much. This even
| happens to Google's own YouTube embed. Add one YT video to a page
| and see how destructive it is to a LH score. It's really
| difficult to explain to customers when they track their LH score
| like a professional bodybuilder tracks fat percentages.
| whatever_dude wrote:
| Tangent: I find GA to be mostly useless nowadays for any website
| used by a more tech savvy community. When comparing the GA
| results to server logs and a separate JS logging script, and
| already discounting for bots, it's clear GA is only counting
| about 10% of my visits.
|
| Too many people blocking that script. I have about 20 different
| sites using it that I manage in some form bit cannot couch for it
| anymore.
| throwaway3699 wrote:
| This is why I proxy GA visits directly through my server. Full
| accuracy but less privacy issues as my clients don't require
| JavaScript and I can anon the IP myself. I'm surprised more
| people aren't doing this.
| ezekg wrote:
| I'd rather use something like Plausible Analytics behind my
| own domain than go to extra effort just to use Google.
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| And as a user I appreciate your efforts to do this in an
| ethical and privacy preserving manner.
| throwaway3699 wrote:
| This is also blocked by many lists. All I want is accurate
| reporting, so there's no incentive to go with that over
| Google, especially if Google can keep our data safer than
| Plausible can.
| layoutIfNeeded wrote:
| You already have that in /var/log.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| > All I want is accurate reporting
|
| That's the problem, accurate visitor tracking wasn't on
| the web design goals.
|
| But if you want an independent track to verify your JS
| report, the server logs have almost an almost completely
| disjunct set of problems.
| lowpro wrote:
| Have you written on how to do this/followed a guide
| somewhere?
| throwaway3699 wrote:
| The Google Analytics Measurement Protocol documentation was
| used. We created a middleware which sends data to GA as a
| POST request (much like our regular logs middleware)
| dudus wrote:
| Newer version off ga tracking doesn't use that protocol.
| It uses an undocumented one
| lmkg wrote:
| It's documented now.
|
| https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collect
| ion...
| a13n wrote:
| Ublock still blocks this
| jsmith99 wrote:
| Only if it's DNS level (just a CNAME). Ublock can't detect
| it if it's really proxied through the server itself.
| a13n wrote:
| Yes it can. It blocks the request to your first-party
| domain based on path/query.
| throwaway3699 wrote:
| ... and there are half a dozen ways to get around that
| too. You could proxy everything through a function that
| base64 encodes everything. It's an arms race.
|
| Besides, I was talking about my server directly sending
| data to Google Analytics without JavaScript on the client
| side. GA has strong adherence to GDPR so there's no legal
| or privacy issues I can see with that.
| jayd16 wrote:
| This isn't detected automatically though, right? Someone
| would have to reverse engineer your setup and add it to
| the lists?
| rendall wrote:
| I think OP meant that the info coming to the server gets
| sent directly to GA. IP Address, etc.
| lostcolony wrote:
| I'm sure OP meant that. Proxy through a server != return
| a redirect to the client. And as mentioned elsewhere,
| they're writing directly to GA using a documented API;
| unless they are sending data from the client to the
| backend using a query and path that look exactly like
| GA's (which, why?), there is no way to know what client
| requests are logging data (and that's assuming they're
| specific client requests, rather than being logged as
| part of the actual functional interactions, using a
| session store, which if Ublock tried to heuristically
| detect and block, would block actual user facing
| functionality)
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| Good riddance. There are many ethical ways to get the stats you
| need.
|
| I go out of my way to not use any Google services and I don't
| like when websites negate that choice by using Google
| analytics, Facebook pixels etc.
| tnolet wrote:
| This is on point. I run a dev focused SaaS and it has become
| clear that any metric we get from the frontend are severely
| skewed. Probably due to add blockers etc. Heck, I even use them
| myself.
|
| We now record key metrics just through our backend. No
| tracking, no cookies, just aggregate numbers.
| marcus_holmes wrote:
| The scary thing about this is that marketing folks still seem
| to consider the results from GA as somehow valid. With the
| result that non-techy demographics get counted more, and
| therefore marketers assume that non-techy people are more
| interested in their stuff. It becomes a self-fulfilling
| prophecy.
|
| Fighting this fight at the moment:
|
| marketing folk - "we're seeing more responses from old people
| than young people, we should focus on that market"
|
| technical folk - "Are we allowing for the fact that older
| people are less likely to be blocking GA and therefore most of
| those untracked clicks are likely to be younger?"
|
| marketing folk - "well, no, but we don't have any information
| on those, so we can't make any decisions about them."
|
| technical folk - "but we know GA is blocked by ad-blockers. And
| we know that ad-blockers are used more by younger, more tech-
| savvy people. And we know that approx 60% of the visits to our
| site are not registering on GA. So... can we include that in
| our analysis?"
|
| marketing folk - "...."
|
| technical folk - "...."
|
| marketing folk - "I don't know how to change the pretty graph
| that GA produces to include that."
| stainforth wrote:
| This is exactly that image of the World War 2 plane hit by
| bullets isn't it
| [deleted]
| taurath wrote:
| If the marketing people are only running online ad campaigns,
| then they often believe they can disregard people running
| adblockers. For non-online campaigns they use bigger product
| metrics, I've seen. GA is not always the end-all be-all, but
| for online ad tracking they use that.
|
| I'm also personally shocked at how FEW people relatively end
| up using ad blockers. Its a night and day difference
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| It's about 40-50% now depending on country so it's pretty
| substantial!
| [deleted]
| querez wrote:
| What's the source for that number?
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| Here: https://www.forbes.com/sites/tjmccue/2019/03/19/47-
| percent-o...
|
| And this is 2 years ago so I assume it's even higher now.
| It's a lot more than I expected for sure. They only count
| consumers though.. Perhaps companies don't always allow
| it, but I always use uBlock at work.
| hluska wrote:
| And don't forget what I call 'the hell path':
|
| Marketing folk - "Wait...if we're getting more responses from
| old people than young people and old people are more likely
| to run adblockers than young people, let's increase our spend
| on Google Ads because only people without adblockers will see
| them."
|
| Technical folk - _Get into woodworking._
|
| Edit - If the technical folk push back, that's when marketing
| folk will say that 'the law of really big numbers' means that
| 40% of a big market is still worth a lot. Trust me,
| woodworking....:)
| mtmail wrote:
| Once had to argue with a company that on Firefox the website
| is just blank (white), a Javascript error prevented any
| content to be shown. Response was that based on their
| analytics Firefox isn't used by anybody and thus not a
| priority to be fixed.
| Tsiklon wrote:
| Ohh that's a "computer says no" level of awful. As an
| aside, I've forgotten the name for this sort of anti-
| pattern.
| yaml-ops-guy wrote:
| Willful ignorance?
| 101008 wrote:
| Hi. I have a few content websites that may not be used by a
| tech savvy community, but by young people. Is it there a way to
| implement a GA alternative in a few minutes to compare by how
| much the stats differ? I suspect GA is not counting all my
| visitors.
| a1369209993 wrote:
| Yes: https://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.4/logs.html#accesslog
| (for apache, obviously) or the equivalent for whichever
| flavor of httpd you're using.
|
| Consult `man 1 grep` for information on how to query it.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| > Consult `man 1 grep` for information on how to query it.
|
| Or something like goaccess to get nice charts.
| swiley wrote:
| Someone needs to remind Mozilla that most of their users are
| likely blocking telemetry.
| elicash wrote:
| Worth noting that Google doesn't appear to use Google
| Analytics, either.
| varispeed wrote:
| The amount of data Google gets off of people using GA is
| incredible and they don't pay for it. Google should be paying
| people for using their GA.
| coldpie wrote:
| GA's users are being paid with access to a product they find
| useful.
| mobilio wrote:
| Using GA isn't bad because there are two ways to run it.
|
| First is when GA script is on <head> section. This is mostly
| popular, but making CWV scores little bit low.
|
| Second is when GA script is anywhere on page, but not on <head>.
| Like before </body> or in <body>. This doesn't hurt your CWV
| scores.
| spicybright wrote:
| that's kind of weird, I would think you'd want to measure
| things like time to dom load, if someone clicks off before
| that, etc.
|
| Maybe for performance reasons?
| mobilio wrote:
| Yes - putting on head can measure DOM loading and
| interactions as quick as they happens. But have performance
| hit - Webkit (Safari, Chrome, etc) doesn't show even single
| pixel on screen until they load all resources in head. And
| another bad news - HTTP partition cache for Safari and
| Chrome.
|
| Putting in body - you can not catch all interactions, but
| won't stop rendering.
|
| Everything is an compromise...
| Gustomaximus wrote:
| Also you can run from cache and it also solves this performance
| score issue E.g.
|
| https://docs.wp-rocket.me/article/1103-google-tracking-add-o...
| mobilio wrote:
| Or use lightweight alternative: https://github.com/jehna/ga-
| lite
| tyingq wrote:
| They are using your latter example, here's the page:
| https://blog.simpleanalytics.com/with-ga-script
|
| It is hurting the score. The GA script is NOT in the <head>.
| mobilio wrote:
| Yes - 91 on mobile.
|
| Because fonts, not because GTM.
| youngtaff wrote:
| Lighthouse / PSI scores are irrelevant to search ranking.
|
| Data from the Chrome UX Report (CrUX) is going to be used in
| results ranking as part of the page experience update - this
| comes from real-world usage of Chrome
|
| GA affecting Lighthouse scores may be a good storyline for Simple
| Analytics (and there are plenty of reasons not to use GA) but you
| can still use GA and pass all the core web vitals
| tnolet wrote:
| This is kind of a snake pit. Google now has three different but
| related page performance initiatives.
|
| 1. Pagespeed insights 2. Web vitals, further sub divided into
| Core Web Vitals and just Web Vitals. 3. Lighthouse
|
| They all work together or are sub components of the other. Even
| more, two of three Core Web Vitals (Cumulative Layout Shift and
| First Input Delay) are not really reliably measures in a
| typical lab environment like PSI and Lighthouse: they require
| actual user interaction with a page. They are essentially RUM
| (Real User Monitoring) metrics.
|
| Other Web Vitals like Time to First Byte are much more
| deterministic.
| shadowfaxRodeo wrote:
| Google may not be using Lighthouse to perform the tests, but it
| is understood that Google use performance metrics as an SEO
| factor.
|
| It's understandable that Simple Analytics would use Lighthouse
| to measure performance and extrapolate from there. I'm not sure
| how else they could do the test -- as presumably they don't
| have access to Google's data.
| wereHamster wrote:
| I don't think it's too far fetched to think that Google will
| somehow tweak CrUX numbers to counteract the performance drop
| caused by GA. For example, on a small percentage of users
| block GA and send the collected CrUX numbers with a special
| tag to the mothership, and then using only those when ranking
| sites.
| londons_explore wrote:
| Possibly, but what they care about really is "What
| experience will users have when they visit a site". The GA
| script loading time is totally part of that, so why
| discount it from the measurements?
| eli wrote:
| Experience of _Chrome_ users when they visit a site.
| wereHamster wrote:
| Hahahaha.... _takes deep breath_... <<... they care about
| users>>? ROFL... Google doesn 't, never has, never will.
| Google cares about money. Period. It's in their interest
| to rank sites which use GA above sites which use
| competing products.
| toast0 wrote:
| Kind of depends on how compelling GA is to the overall
| organization.
|
| GA makes some money, and maybe helps global tracking.
|
| Otoh, if it's an easy way to get ranking, that's going to
| be abused. And parts of the org do seem to want fast
| pages to win, so if GA means slow pages, there's a
| conflict.
| nindalf wrote:
| > this comes from real-world usage of Chrome
|
| Measured by what metric(s)? Core Web Vitals.
| prophesi wrote:
| The Chrome UX Report itself uses PSI, and all of its metrics
| are based on page performance, so I wouldn't say it's
| irrelevant.
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(page generated 2021-05-03 23:01 UTC)