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We ditched Google Analytics

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Re: We ditched Google Analytics

#241

Post by billmalarky »

bjelkeman-again wrote: post #153
billmalarky wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Piwik is incredible. But it should be noted that it does provide a scaling challenge for high traffic use cases (> hundred million actions per month), and hosting your own analytics is expensive. I bring this up because people had been slamming moot for using GA on 4chan instead of piwik without understanding why.

We have much lower traffic than that and our Piwik servers, with paid support from the Piwik team, often struggles to generate reports etc. Not convinced Piwik is that easy to scale.

People have scaled it to over a billion actions per month. No clue how much of that includes customizations though... It sounds way past the out of box limit.

Look at the comments from sandfox and afterlastangel in this thread. afterlastangel is pushing a billion, sandfox is around 300 MM per month.

http://forum.piwik.org/t/high-traffic-piwik-servers-database...

Re: We ditched Google Analytics

#242

Post by billmalarky »

wishinghand wrote: post #102
billmalarky wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Piwik is incredible. But it should be noted that it does provide a scaling challenge for high traffic use cases (> hundred million actions per month), and hosting your own analytics is expensive. I bring this up because people had been slamming moot for using GA on 4chan instead of piwik without understanding why.

Do any of the Google Analytics alternatives scale to that size?

People have taken piwik to 300MM up to over 1 billion actions per month. But it certainly isn't "set it and forget it."

http://forum.piwik.org/t/high-traffic-piwik-servers-database...

Re: We ditched Google Analytics

#243

Post by iheartmemcache »

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…

It's been a while since I've used GA but being able to segment into age, gender, and interests(1) are things that you can't do without paying a marketing aggregator hundreds of thousands of dollars a month or using GA. You can do some geolocation classification and things like campaign effectiveness, bounce rate, etc, but since Google has so much aggregate data off-hand the value of being able to classify user-x as "Male, 40s, Interests-similar-to-demographic-we-sell-to"(2) is invaluable whether you're selling seats of enterprise software, high-fashion luxury items, or cheapo stoner knick-knacks. You can't really market segment with your own software.

(1) https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/3125360?hl=en&re... (2) https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/2819948

Re: We ditched Google Analytics

#244

Post by adrianlmm »

cpncrunch wrote: post #239
adrianlmm wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

>Their users are also their customers

We dissagree.

Re: We ditched Google Analytics

#245

Post by __jal »

eevilspock wrote: post #238
__jal wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm glad we both agree that analytics for a vanity domain is not a big deal. It also was a bounding example for my argument, not my argument.

Re: We ditched Google Analytics

#246

Post by X-Istence »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #122
Someone1234 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many of these types of services seem to intentionally cap upload speeds to reduce their potential storage liability (since they're likely over-selling storage to be able to offer 1 TB for $12 with the level of redundancy, staffing costs, etc, needed). I wonder if that is happening in this specific case? Although if it were the case the vendor should still be honest about it. Just saying they limit uploads to 2 Mbps i…

> reduce their potential storage liability Its to reduce their maximum bandwidth capacity required. I don't see it as a problem, considering their price points. They're selling you storage, not "slam 1TB of your data into our storage system in a day". If you're looking for that, ship a hard drive to Iron Mountain. EDIT: Even AWS limits how fast you can upload to S3, and built an appliance for you to rent and ship bac…

The appliance is so that you don't need to send terabytes of data over a 10 Gbit/sec connection for example to their datacenter.

The limitation is actually the pipe that connects you to Amazon, not an inherent limitation within S3 or other services within Amazon on connection speed. If you have a good enough connection, or peering with Amazon things go amazingly fast.

When I worked at an ISP, we slammed about 20 Gbit/sec into S3 without issues, but even then data we were backing up -- about 300 TB of data a day -- at that rate took 1.4 days to upload to the cloud, so we ended up backing it up in-house instead. (we needed to store the data for 7 days, after that it went bye bye).

Re: We ditched Google Analytics

#248

Post by kalleboo »

aargh_aargh wrote: post #233
chimeracoder wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Only if your site is HTTPS

Re: We ditched Google Analytics

#249

Post by toomuchtodo »

X-Istence wrote: post #246
toomuchtodo wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> reduce their potential storage liability Its to reduce their maximum bandwidth capacity required. I don't see it as a problem, considering their price points. They're selling you storage, not "slam 1TB of your data into our storage system in a day". If you're looking for that, ship a hard drive to Iron Mountain. EDIT: Even AWS limits how fast you can upload to S3, and built an appliance for you to rent and ship bac…

The appliance is so that you don't need to send terabytes of data over a 10 Gbit/sec connection for example to their datacenter. The limitation is actually the pipe that connects you to Amazon, not an inherent limitation within S3 or other services within Amazon on connection speed. If you have a good enough connection, or peering with Amazon things go amazingly fast. When I worked at an ISP, we slammed about 20 Gbit…

> When I worked at an ISP, we slammed about 20 Gbit/sec into S3 without issues, but even then data we were backing up -- about 300 TB of data a day -- at that rate took 1.4 days to upload to the cloud, so we ended up backing it up in-house instead. (we needed to store the data for 7 days, after that it went bye bye).

Seems like the perfect usecase for S3; inbound transfer is free, and you're only paying for a rolling 7 day window of storage with lifecycle rules :/

Re: We ditched Google Analytics

#250

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

I haven't checked my GA in months since it became clear that Google won't bother doing anything to fix the referer spam problem that makes the stats useless if you don't have a high-volume site. It's not like these abusers are hard to track down but I'll be damned if I'm going to manually add filters to get rid of them every time they come in from a new domain.
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