Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

We ditched Google Analytics

spideroak.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

231–240 of 273 posts

Re: We ditched Google Analytics

#231

Post by rbinv »

ssharp wrote: post #217
rbinv wrote: post #103

> It took us only a few weeks to write our home-brew analytics package. Unfortunately, there's no way to replicate what Google Analytics currently offers (for free!) within a couple of weeks (or even months). Not with big data sets. Yes, GA does enforce sampling if you don't pay for GA Premium, but the free edition is still one of hell of a deal (if you don't care about privacy). If you only use Google Analytics as a…

I suspect most of the people saying "you don't need Google Analytics! Do it yourself!" have never used GA for anything that meaningful. As you begin to really familiarize yourself with your website traffic and understand how to look at your clickstream data in a more investigative an analytical way, you'll start to see how nice GA is and how easy it is to answer your questions. You also underestimate how ubiquitous G…

I agree completely.

GA has become very, very capable in the last five years or so. Combined with their current APIs, you can do pretty much anything you want.

Re: We ditched Google Analytics

#232

Post by eevilspock »

gedrap wrote: post #216
EGreg wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Piwik, Snowplow, etc. They do exist. Then the question is do you really want to maintain the infrastructure required to run the analytics smoothly? Especially if your company has dozens of millions of pageviews a month and depends on the real time needs (extra infrastructure to support that). Are you familiar enough with the stack so you could have a high degree of confidence that you can fix productions issues which…

Processing logs is a lot cheaper than the javascript download and other additional http requests needed for google analytics, not to mention the privacy costs. Cheaper for the website, the user, and the web in general.

Not to mention you get perfectly accurate analytics, with no loss due to request blockers or disabled javascript.

The code for this is generic. An open source solution costs nothing beyond some CPU to process the logs and a database to store the analytics.

Re: We ditched Google Analytics

#233

Post by aargh_aargh »

chimeracoder wrote: post #199
eponeponepon wrote: post #29

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.

Can't you find out from the Referer header anymore? It's been years since I tried, so it may have changed.

Re: We ditched Google Analytics

#234

Post by binaryapparatus »

Analytics, fonts, css. We include it everywhere by default. Then I realized hey we are all giving away too much. My sites now happily run self-hosted piwik, for the last six or so months.

I won't be surprised if in the coming years we hear much more about using google fonts being base to count site access, if there is no analytics in place.

Re: We ditched Google Analytics

#235

Post by Moru »

angersock wrote: post #125
MichaelGG wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you can reimplement GA in a few weeks, you need to do this over December, then enjoy your FU money. GA is rather deep, with tons of integration and ways to slice and segment data. Yeah, maybe in a few weeks you can get _something_ that'll give you something that'll make some manager not too unhappy. Seems like a terrible value prop for almost all companies since, unfortunately, approximately no one cares (or they…

If it takes you more than a few days to put together a basic analytics platform and reporting system, you're a script kiddie. Not hard to track page hits, time on, time off, and arbitrary events. EDIT: Seriously? Folks, it's a table for analytics events, a few SQL queries to do basic reporting (at least in Postgres), a little bit of client-side JS to post the events, and a bit of server-side code to create the routes…

It is quite costly to write to the database for each hit, I guess most downvotes is because of this. If you limit writes by keeping them in some memory cache it's doable for slightly higher loads.

Re: We ditched Google Analytics

#236

Post by Moru »

ubersync wrote: post #222
eponeponepon wrote: post #29

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…

Don't the ad blockers disable Google Analytics by default? If I am not wrong, I think uBlock Origin does. So, I think, as more and more people will start using ad blockers, site owners will start getting less and less accurate stats from Google Analytics, forcing them to implement their own solutions. Hopefully, open source solutions will start providing the best features that Google does.

Anything that is widely used (open source or not) will be blocked because of common names or other patterns that can be recognized and blocked. If you need exact statistics you need to roll your own sooner or later. Or at least heavily customize some other product.

Re: We ditched Google Analytics

#237

Post by __jal »

eevilspock wrote: post #232
gedrap wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Piwik, Snowplow, etc. They do exist. Then the question is do you really want to maintain the infrastructure required to run the analytics smoothly? Especially if your company has dozens of millions of pageviews a month and depends on the real time needs (extra infrastructure to support that). Are you familiar enough with the stack so you could have a high degree of confidence that you can fix productions issues which…

Processing logs is a lot cheaper than the javascript download and other additional http requests needed for google analytics, not to mention the privacy costs. Cheaper for the website, the user, and the web in general. Not to mention you get perfectly accurate analytics, with no loss due to request blockers or disabled javascript. The code for this is generic. An open source solution costs nothing beyond some CPU to…

If you make decisions with money riding on the answers, it costs a lot more than CPU and DB.

Perhaps systems administration is somehow very cheap for you, but I'm willing to bet it is still not "nothing" - even if the cost is you personally not watching a TV show you like because you're patching the web server on your analytics box for your personal vanity domain, that's still a cost.

For most operations, sysadmins are somewhat expensive, and because of that, busy. This is why Urchin was such a good idea, and why Google bought them - the proposition is to trade your users' privacy for the admin time it takes to support another internal app. There's an absolute no-brainer, assuming you don't care about your users' privacy (IIRC, they were going to sell the service before Google ate them, but that's ancient and trivial history).

Re: We ditched Google Analytics

#238

Post by eevilspock »

__jal wrote: post #237
eevilspock wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Processing logs is a lot cheaper than the javascript download and other additional http requests needed for google analytics, not to mention the privacy costs. Cheaper for the website, the user, and the web in general. Not to mention you get perfectly accurate analytics, with no loss due to request blockers or disabled javascript. The code for this is generic. An open source solution costs nothing beyond some CPU to…

If you make decisions with money riding on the answers, it costs a lot more than CPU and DB. Perhaps systems administration is somehow very cheap for you, but I'm willing to bet it is still not "nothing" - even if the cost is you personally not watching a TV show you like because you're patching the web server on your analytics box for your personal vanity domain, that's still a cost. For most operations, sysadmins a…

>because you're patching the web server on your analytics box

If you're business is so small that an additional low-volume web server just to display your analytics (you don't need one for the actual tracking) is a big deal, then the same web server that serves your product can serve your analytics. Not a big deal.

Re: We ditched Google Analytics

#239

Post by cpncrunch »

adrianlmm wrote: post #229
cpncrunch wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their other purpose is "dont be evil". There may be some debate about that at times, but they certainly aren't going to screw their customers. They know that their customer base would evaporate pretty quickly if they tried to screw them.

> Their other purpose is "dont be evil". I feel so tempted to laught at your face right now. >screw their customers Google's customers are advertizers, not common people.

>I feel so tempted to laught at your face right now.

I wouldn't recommend it.

>Google's customers are advertizers, not common people.

Their users are also their customers. Without users there are no advertisers.

Post reply on HN