In the case of things like page views, this is something addressable by just gathering the data yourself. If you put in the effort up front, it'll be more accurate than Google (as you don't miss anyone who Google misses).
No Google Analytics, no CDN, no nothing.
Just like they shouldn't have presence in Private Social Media Networks. But that's my opinion.
Then the website would have burned to the ground during this announcement.
For example: https://www.gov.uk/info/find-coronavirus-local-restrictions
You could, for example, determine which areas are more likely to access HIV information on the NHS website. Insurance companies would like that but would it benefit the public or be in line with people's basic privacy expectations for government services?
(I'm sure Google claim that they won't add a user looking at cancer information on the NHS site to their data profile but I wonder what other insights could be generated.)
I don't know if the data is from GA or a custom made solution
Congratulations on riding out the thundering herd.
I will shit on gov IT any day of the week but I'm not blaming GDS for that particular fire.
(Worse of all, Auntie Beeb (aka the BBC) has operated a similar tool without issue.)
The gov.uk "Brexit checker" is full of out-of-date information and plain broken links.
A better speechwriter could have saved a huge amount of bandwidth
Some people will always go "yes, but..." and look for ways around the rules, as we've painfully seen in the UK since March.
In fairness, some people have very good reasons not not stay home and the PM did also mention these reasons.
Overall I found the message and level of details well calibrated for a short, straight to the point, speech. Going into an exhaustive list of all the rules and exceptions would have clouded the message and would not have been a good use of the format and of time.
I'm not taking anything away from the engineers behind GOV.UK though. They do an excellent job.
Some quick questions
Did they actually pay for analytics 360?
If not, did they do 10 million hits in a month for a property? if so - they may be over the limit of 10 million / month.
More on differences here: https://blog.littledata.io/2018/02/28/google-analytics-360-v...
Analytics 360 runs 12K+/month from memory, but someone probably has more recent info.
Gov.uk site did not break google analytics. This is standard click-bait / shock value type headlines.
[1]: https://twitter.com/therealnooshu/status/1346419468151488512
He said they got around 88k RPS.
I did a quick benchmark another day, I'm hosting my blog at the Digital Ocean App Plataform, in the free tier, used Locust with some VMs in Azure to stress test it, managed to hit 20k RPS and the only issue I had was that the my VMs at Azure were hitting memory limits...
Doesn't look impressive at all, weird that GA broke.
