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We ditched Google Analytics

spideroak.com

31–40 of 273 posts

Re: We ditched Google Analytics

#31
post #23

Kudos for this!! it's interesting that still there's meta, probably leftover EDIT: wow, thanks for your answers guys!! so nice to see Cunningham's law in action ;)

This could just be for Google Webmasters which gives them information on their search presence.

Re: We ditched Google Analytics

#32

Yet they are still listed on Google search [ http://bit.ly/1ICwud0 ]. I guess it's easy to have principles when it doesn't cost you money.

How exactly would they stop themselves from being listed on Google? A right to be forgotten request? Their decision was to ditch Google Analytics, not to disappear from the web.

Robots.txt. I think it's interesting that you say that removing yourself from Google is the same as "disappearing from the web" implying that the web is Google. It's not. Perhaps they should use alternative forms of outreach, something I am considering with my company.

Re: We ditched Google Analytics

#33

It took us only a few weeks to write our home-brew analytics package. Nothing super fancy yet now we have an internal dashboard that shows the entire company much of what we used analytics for anyway - and with some nice integration with some of our other systems too. I never quite grasp how the above isn't just a matter of intuition to anyone working in the tech sector. Google Analytics thrives on developers' lazine…

Aren't there self-hosted analytics anyway? Piwik[1] comes to mind first, but I'm sure there are many.

1. https://piwik.org/

Re: We ditched Google Analytics

#34

Yet they are still listed on Google search [ http://bit.ly/1ICwud0 ]. I guess it's easy to have principles when it doesn't cost you money.

How exactly would they stop themselves from being listed on Google? A right to be forgotten request? Their decision was to ditch Google Analytics, not to disappear from the web.

robots.txt. Still, I see no reason to remove the site from Google search.

Re: We ditched Google Analytics

#36
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People don't care about the cookie or any of the details of the implementation. They care about being tracked across the whole internet. If you are still contributing to that then you are disrespecting your customers. I hope that I am not one of them.

Did you read my comment? You will have no GA cookie from any of my sites, I am not recording client identifying things or capabilities. It is a server-side push of GA and avoids all client-side interactions. It is merely, "A page has been viewed, this one: /foo/bar?bash". There's nothing in there that is tracking you. I'm not even embracing the session management aspect. I get to use the tool that is best-in-class, i…

Without any "client identifying things" how would GA be able to chain several page hits into a session then? That is, do basic visits vs. hits split.

If you are in fact anonymizing everything about a client as you claim you do, then it won't be able to. Unless, of course, you are feeding GA some opaque client ID that you then internally map to and from actual clients that hit your server. However something tells me that you aren't doing that, or you would've mentioned it already.

(edit) I re-read your comment. You aren't apparently interested in session counts. But what's good the GA summary then if you can't tell 10 bounced visitors from one visitor with 10 hits? This makes no sense. If you want to look at just page hit numbers, there are dramatically simpler ways to do that.

Re: We ditched Google Analytics

#37
post #6

Why not move to push GA data server-side? Trivial to set-up, immune to adblockers affecting the completeness of data, prevents the write of tracking cookies, leaves data and utility of the GA dashboard mostly complete (loss of user client capabilities and some session-based metrics). This is the route I'm preferring to take (being applied this Christmas via https://pypi.python.org/pypi/pyga ). One may argue that Goog…

I agree. Server-side analytics were actually fairly mature before Google came alone. It's just more complicated in some cases, but manageable. The biggest downside these days would be SPA apps since they are not necessarily touching the server in any regular way.

Re: We ditched Google Analytics

#38

It took us only a few weeks to write our home-brew analytics package. Nothing super fancy yet now we have an internal dashboard that shows the entire company much of what we used analytics for anyway - and with some nice integration with some of our other systems too. I never quite grasp how the above isn't just a matter of intuition to anyone working in the tech sector. Google Analytics thrives on developers' lazine…

> Google Analytics thrives on developers' laziness in my opinion.

It's almost never "developers" who are deciding to use GA; it's middle managers or marketing departments.

Re: We ditched Google Analytics

#39

It took us only a few weeks to write our home-brew analytics package. Nothing super fancy yet now we have an internal dashboard that shows the entire company much of what we used analytics for anyway - and with some nice integration with some of our other systems too. I never quite grasp how the above isn't just a matter of intuition to anyone working in the tech sector. Google Analytics thrives on developers' lazine…

And GA is inscrutable. I don't use it very much because it's got way too many layers of abstraction. It was fine before as Urchin. Maybe this is a category like email clients — there should be a sustainable paid product that doesn't suck.

Re: We ditched Google Analytics

#40

An open-source, self-hostable solution providing 80% of common Google Analytics functionality seems doable to me. Is there anything out there in this realm? If not, why not?

Self hosted analytics is still centralizing behavioral data on the users. It's not really any better from a privacy standpoint than GA.

Not at all. The entire point is that Google is able to track one person across many, many sites. That is simply not possible if each site had its own self-hosted analytics.
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