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We ditched Google Analytics

spideroak.com

201–210 of 273 posts

Re: We ditched Google Analytics

#202

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…

>>> 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' laziness in my opinion.

Ah, the "not invented here" syndrome!

There are tons of things that you could do "in a couple of weeks" that more or less work. However, it doesn't mean you have to or even that it would be a good idea.

If all developers adopted the attitude that you have expressed, there would be thousands of sad sad developers who need to maintain shitty in-house analytics system because someone once said "I could do it in a week". There are tons of awful CMSes already because someone once said "I could do better than wordpress" / "I could create a better framework" / etc.

In a lot of the cases, GA is just good enough. Sure, you might need to spend some time to explore its features (custom dimensions, etc), there's more to GA than a number of pageviews for a given day. There are cases when GA is not enough. Fair enough. But it's definitely not the majority of the cases.

Sure, it makes sense for SpiderOak given it's target audience. However, there's no need to make such a generic statement about 'anyone working in the tech'.

Re: We ditched Google Analytics

#203
post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The EasyPrivacy block list contains an entry that will block the piwik.js file. Of course, when you're self-hosting, it's trivial to serve that file with a non-default name.

That's an interesting choice. I mean, it's not like you can hide from the web server that you are making the request. But then again, I'm assuming -- by the sheer necessity of having a JS file -- that they are collecting some additional metrics not available to the server in the request.

Those filters could be in place to block the Piwik cloud service: https://piwik.pro/cloud/?pk_source=Piwik.org&pk_medium=Cloud...

Re: We ditched Google Analytics

#204

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…

> 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' laziness in my opinion. Unless I'm mistaken, one big difference is that not using Google Analytics means you don't know which Google search pages people used to access your website. That can be a really important difference for some websites.

I think you can get that info with webmaster tools without using analytics.

Re: We ditched Google Analytics

#205
post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unsurprisingly, Wikipedia has a list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_web_analytics_software

Wikipedia's love of lists is absolutely amazing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_lists_of_lists

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_list_of_lists_of_lists

Re: We ditched Google Analytics

#206
post #145
post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Piwik relies on client-side JavaScript for tracking, not log analysis.

http://piwik.org/log-analytics/

They have both, most users use the client side javascript. I'm not familiar with how well the log analysis works.

Re: We ditched Google Analytics

#207
post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I would expect that because I am paying for the storage, they would be happy to let me write data to their machines as fast as I like. I don't understand why you'd think this. You're paying for storage, not an SLA as to how fast you can fill it. > I'm paying a premium for gigabit fiber to the home and you really can tell who over-promises and under-delivers quickly. Fortunately my 'roll your own' backup + sync work…

He thinks this because it's in Amazon's interest to let him dump as much data as possible. It's not a matter of an agreement, it's a matter of aligned incentives.

Thanks, I had not thought of that.

Re: We ditched Google Analytics

#208
post #43

Not strictly on topic so I apologise if this is unwanted but I thought I'd share my experience with SpiderOak in case anyone here was thinking of purchasing one of their plans. In February SpiderOak dropped its pricing to $12/month for 1TB of data. Having several hundred gigabytes of photos to backup I took advantage and bought a year long subscription ($129). I had access to a symmetric gigabit fibre connection so I…

Could the issue be caused by bad peering between your ISPs?

Re: We ditched Google Analytics

#209
For anyone here looking for a really good, free,self-hosted, hackable, open source alternative to Google Analytics that's been around for a long time, please consider Piwik.org.

I've been using it for prob 8-10 years and it has never missed a beat. I use it on all my personal / business sites as well as some client websites that are super high traffic.

Re: We ditched Google Analytics

#210
post #202

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…

>>> 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' laziness in my opinion. Ah, the "not invented here" syndrome! There are tons of things that you could do "in a couple of weeks" that more or less work. However, it doesn't mean you have to or even that it would be a good idea. If all developers adopted the attitude that…

The answer is open source. Where is the wordpress to google's analytics product?
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