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.
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.
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.
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.
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"?
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.
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.
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.
Apple is the only company that still occasionally does this, though even they have driven off into the realm of every application having its own entirely novel interface. Go back in time to MacOS or Windows in the 1990s and you'll find an entirely different paradigm: every application has the same interface... or at least the same interface paradigms. Learn the computer once and you've learned the computer.
Features were remarkably discoverable. They were organized logically in menus. Keyboard shortcuts were always available and usually intuitive. I remember opening a new app I'd never used before on Windows 95 and just unthinkingly hitting a keyboard combo and it doing the general thing I expected, or mousing to where I expected to find a feature I imagined should be there only to find that it actually was there. I never used Mac Classic much but I heard it was similar.
The web is what really broke this. Web UIs overtook desktop UIs due to the difficulty of installing local software and the power of trendiness. Web UIs were never uniform and couldn't be since the web was anarchistic and wild and often driven by designers who wanted to make their product look a specific distinct way.
I remember in the days immediately before the web there being talk of algorithmic generation of UIs from data schema. If the UI is thoroughly standardized then it becomes at least thinkable to examine data structures and generate user interfaces from them, even UIs that aren't horribly ugly or hard to use. This was building on a previous generation of incredible WYSIWYG UI design tools. Then the web came and all that stuff was completely abandoned.
Today's UI design tools in things like Xcode and Android Studio are horrible by comparison to what people were using in 1995. Go back and try Visual Basic on Windows 95. The VB language sucked but the UI designer was aeons ahead of anything we use today.
... 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.
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.
...
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
- if it is immediately and directly useful to my primary goals (the goals come before the data), and,
- if I'm confident in advance that the results will have some statistical power (so, A/B testing colour schemes is out), and,
- if I have planned in advance what the business consequence of the data analysis is.
Having any more numbers than that just creates obsession. Aren't we all posting comments here, looking for validation from the upvote counter?
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
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.
I used to run an online Japanese-English dictionary. It was geared towards people learning Japanese. I built it when I was studying Japanese and thought it would be useful for other students.
Turns out the overwhelming majority of the traffic to that site was from... Japan! I had it completely backwards! People weren't using it to aid their Japanese studies; they were using it to aid their English studies. (You might be tempted to suggest that it was in fact being used by people learning Japanese, and that those people were taking part in exchange/immersion programs, but there were other data that disproved this hypothesis.)
I never would've realized that if I hadn't had analytics on there.
It's refreshing that the only analytics I get for my open source project is github traffic, not website traffic or download counts.
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.
Spending political capital on something that "the entire industry uses!!" doesn't usually align with my incentives.
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.
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.
0.0.0.0 googleanalytics.com
0.0.0.0 googlesyndication.com
0.0.0.0 google-analytics.com
0.0.0.0 www.google-analytics.com
0.0.0.0 ssl.google-analytics.com
No doubt your use of the plug in is logged somewhere.
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
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?
https://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/314975/How_Slay_the_Spir...
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.
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.
I could use the access logs from the webserver. Can anyone recommend a tool that post-processes those logs in a "analytics" like way?
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.
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.
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.
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”.
just saying
People really appreciate not being tracked, or having to agree to cookies.
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.
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.
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.
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!
That is super cool of you, to protect your users interests first.
- 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.
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? 120€? Unlikely. Then what do you think would be the fair price of this information?
You can get rough user stats from the logs with grep, wc, sort and uniq, no need to burden the page with tracking.
Here's a list I found with a quick (DDG!) search: https://alternativeto.net/software/google-analytics/?platfor...
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 1€/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.
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 :)
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.
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.
Most of the other metrics are noise and don't impact business decisions.
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.
It does serve to highlight just how ubiquitous these platforms are though.
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.
I think I understand what you mean but would benefit from an explanation of that point
Another externality from all this is the growth of misinformation, which our species seems so unaware and defenseless against.
Ask yourself the following questions, and interesting conclusions can be drawn:
Why don’t we have more alternatives to Google?
What is holding back the competition, and how do we fix that?
Should search even be a commercial activity? (Public libraries aren’t.)
I have one friend who started calling her husband a Gouche after he got a job at google. Much better term than Noogler.
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...
Remove stats altogether, pay for your website stats, or roll your own. Just exchanging the free script isn‘t doing anything.
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.
That website uses Google Analytics!
Well, I got bad news for you, buddy, it isn't a new thing and it isn't just the internet.. http://paulgraham.com/submarine.html
It’s a bloated script that affects your site speed
It’s overkill for the majority of site owners
It’s a privacy liability and requires an extensive privacy policy
It worsens the user experience due to the necessity of annoying prompts.
It’s blocked by many browsers (e.g. Firefox) so the data is not very accurate.
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.
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.)
its 19KB, thats not awful.
If you use Global Site Tag (as Google recommends) then it's more than twice as much code (and twice the GETs).
But so what.
Would be nice if if it offered specifics on the "liability" but it does not.
And that's just one issue -- you're also, of course, dumping all possible info about your users into Google's servers as well, and you're not even getting paid for it.
And for the weight of an "extensive privacy policy", I'm not buying this as a great reason.
Again, what!? I'm not seeing these prompts.
I think your comment is the poorly researched rant. "What?" and "I'm not buying this" aren't sound arguments. You cherry-picked some bullet points, but ignored the citation provided, which expanded on every single one of them.
The numbers vary depending on the technical prowess of your audience. Probably at least half the visitors to my site would be using ad blockers. If one were to use server-side logging (at the HTTP request level), it would not be blockable, and your numbers would be accurate save for any bot spam inflating it.
Apparently it means prompts for privacy stuff.
And Nigellas' or the Hairybikers sites are not encumbered with adds.
It is a little short sighted to then conclude that only ad-supported websites share recipes.
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.
I don't think there's a problem with posting not-very-substantive articles like this on HN - it's a forum, not just a link aggregator. They often serve as good jumping off points for discussion, especially opinions to the contrary like yours (which I am glad to have read).
- 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.
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.
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.
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;)
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?
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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...
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)
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/sep/10/no-10-request-...
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!)
And even though I don't use any analytics on my websites (heck, some of them don't even run a line of JS), I still get plenty of valuable (and privacy-aware) insights about user experience.
Web server logs are a source of user activity that has been almost forgotten. You can infer a lot of information (from what page a user came, to which page they navigated next etc.) from the logs alone. All you have is the IP address of a browser, which might as well be spoofed/proxied, but do you really need anything else than an ephemeral and loose user identifier if your goal is just to make sure that users spend time on your website? Why would we delegate such a simple task to a company that pollutes and slows down our web pages with their bloated analytics and isn't transparent with us about what they do with that data?
Here's Cloudflare's page on why there is a discrepancy between their numbers and GA-type services: https://support.cloudflare.com/hc/en-us/articles/36003768411...
And here's a blog post by a self-hosted-analytics provider who shows exact numbers from his personal blog: https://markosaric.com/cloudflare-analytics-review/
He has a stake in the matter, but it's also such a huge discrepancy that I'm guessing is hard to fake. Anecdotally, friends I have with small blogs mirror this experience.
As the article states, you get to decide how much tracking your visitors are subjected to.
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.
Google can't entice me enough to bother adding load to my sites.
It also allows cookie-free tracking :)
You can also use a server-log only mode which uses zero client-side snippets/pixels to do the tracking work.
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.
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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)
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.
But again, I don't want to pay for analytics. It's not a core necessity for my sites. Are there Sitemeter-like simple ads-monetized sites still?
I don't like Mixpanel and the other big ones.
Google is not an ad company only, right? I don’t want to go on each item this company is doing, I’m sure there are a ton lot but they made $13 billions on the Cloud division alone last year. This is a super young service and it will explode in the next decades. They are also selling a ton lot of smartphones and I’m pretty sure they don’t do that at loss only to get some more ad revenues?
Even YouTube, which is definitely a platform to run ad at first, will surely generate a ton of pure non-ad profit when millions of people will get YouTube premium.
More generally, is it just me or this kind of anti big Corp speech is becoming more and more boring? Or maybe it’s because I’m too old and I want to defend the little search engine that has transformed into a monster?
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...
Does Google make money to make the world a better place, or does Google make the world a better place in order to make loadsa money?
By what evidence do we distinguish the two? Is Google majority controlled by its idealist founders still, or is it a money spinning machine for the pension funds which own it?
Even the blog hosting this article uses Google Fonts. So what, you didn't give Google Analytics your users info. SURPRISE! You actually did anyway. You didn't keep Google from getting your users info. You just sandbagged your own analytics.
Sidebar: I used to use https://wp-statistics.com/ because it is a self-hosted analytic plugin for WordPress.
But the amount of negative campaigning (remember Scroogled campaign?) and BS that goes with it here makes me cringe each time I see one of these posts.
Fathom Analytics: https://usefathom.com/ref/IKHKIT
It's your own analytics, of your own site, seriously people.
That's the logical conclusion of 'don't use goods and services that have 'evil' behind them'.
it looks very slick.
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.
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)
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.
All these articles about surveillance capitalism promises me very precise targeted ads (quote from this article: "Google uses its extensive knowledge of you to show you advertising that fits you like a tailor-made suit.").
But I didn't get that at all. All I get is generic advertisements, often for services or goods which are not available in my region (!).
Examples:
(1) I've made my first Instagram post when I've been traveling in Myanmar. I had account for several months already, and I was subscribed for my friends & family and several thematic accounts, but my first post was some travel photo from Myanmar. After that year and a half (!!!) I was feed only by Myanmar ads in Instagram. I was in Myanmar for a 3 weeks, but still! Yes, it is not Google, it is FB.
(2) I'm seeing only two types of ads on Youtube: generic ads of food delivery services in my country (I never use them) and a lot of ads for UK bank and cell services. And also UK Amazon and UK Youtube Premium ads (with prices in pounds). Yes, I have IPv6 tunnel to UK, it is right. But I don't think that IP-based ads is "Google knows anything about me".
Banners are not better: generic AliExpress and some strange mixed offers which looks like same AliExpressdrop-shipping at best and scam at worst.
Google (and FB) could know, that I like DIY, electronics and motorcycles. I can not hide that. But I don't see ANY relevant ads on ANY global platform.
Where are there "tailored ads"? Did you see them?
Country-local advertisement network shows me goods which I searched for on local marketplace (after I bought one, of course), it is somewhat relevant (but, again, mostly useless), but global Ads giants who "knows everything about me" shows only generic or complete irrelevant crap.
I'm using GMail a lot, my primary search engine is Google, I have huge youtube subscription list (so, my interests must be obvious), but no, not a single piece of relevant ad from Google or FB.
Well... it also happens to create a better (if not great) user experience along the way. I definitely prefer targeted advertisements to random ones. And I have relied on Google's ability to suggest things to me based on a complex context many times.
Simple things, like giving me directions when I ask about a place, letting me see show times around me when I search for a movie, showing me the menu when I search for a restaurant etc.
Do they use all the data they collect about me? Sure as hell they do. But their effort at being more accurate in their predictions also results in me having a more fluid and intuitive experience with their services.
I don't like their monopolistic ambition and I don't like the way they have treated their customers and clients on many occasions. But there is no comparable user experience to switch to and I am not even sure such experience can be created without having another Google.