Usually I start with Google Analytics but continue to add to our own in-house analytics solution targeting the specific metrics we're interested in tracking. GA often doesn't provide us with the real insights we're looking for, but it's good for the vanity stats.
We ditched Google Analytics
251–260 of 273 posts
Re: We ditched Google Analytics
#252Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
If you're Google, sure. Most of the startups here aren't Google.
People are prematurely optimizing if they fear is "but but but mah datamoose".
Also, it's not prohibitively costly if you do even slight batching of the events, say batch load between every five minutes or an hour.
I'd love to hear somebody with war stories chime in though!
Re: We ditched Google Analytics
#253Earlier 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…
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 "…
Sure. So now the question is, why would Google offer all of this for "free"? Is it really free? Who pays, and in what ways?
Re: We ditched Google Analytics
#254It 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.
There's also http://get.gaug.es/, which seems great.
I have gone through their trial, but now I think I will register for the Solo account ($6/mo).
Re: We ditched Google Analytics
#255At Cloudron, our vision is to allow companies to host their own apps easily. We dogfood and don't use Google. We don't use analytics on our website (a conscious decision). Our emails are based on IMAP servers and we use thunderbird. We selfhost everything other than email (which is on gandi). We just entered private beta yesterday - https://cloudron.io/blog/2015-12-07-private-beta.html
How's this compare to Sandstorm[0]? It seems like a Closed/SaaS equivalent. [0] https://sandstorm.io/
Cloudron and sandstorm are similar projects. I think the main difference is the user experience (also how we handle domains, how apps are packaged etc). You can see a demo of the cloudron here - https://my-demo.cloudron.me/ (username: cloudron password: cloudron). All apps use same credentials (because of single sign on)
Re: We ditched Google Analytics
#256Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 "…
Sure. So now the question is, why would Google offer all of this for "free"? Is it really free? Who pays, and in what ways?
Obviously, they're using the same information that's helping you calibrate your campaigns to add to the hive-mind, so they can further data-mine. You're sacrificing the anonymity of your end-users in doing so. Obviously they're offering it so that they can refine their profile of you more accurately to sell ads / direct more relevant traffic to you better. I'm not an industrial engineer but I've been reading about it for the last few weeks. I turned off Adblock for a while and even with my Opt-out plugins(a,b) I started getting ads for $4,500 Fluke multimeters. The combination of one's search history plus a fairly comprehensive history of the sites you visit(b) to a terrifying degree, but at the same time, the average business with only a few million dollars a year going towards both sales and marketing can't really approach Quantcast and ask for access to their API.
a: https://tools.google.com/dlpage/gaoptout b:https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/do-not-track/ckdcp... b: I don't have the study off-hand, but IIRC some guy after finishing his masters from Stanford wanted to assess how much information Google had re: an average users browser history. The findings, based off Common Crawl data of the top 100k sites + presence of GA.js yielded something like ~> 75% of the web was tracked (not to be confused with how much of an end-user's traffic is tracked, that number will be far higher) based on sites with a GA.js history factoring in Referer tags. Those were unweighed numbers, i.e., I bet more than one out of two 45 year old woman's traffic can be analyzed to a 95% degree of completely entirely based off of Pinterest, Facebook, search history and the outbound links from her e-mail.
Re: We ditched Google Analytics
#257Earlier quoted context omitted.
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...
I'm looking into replacing GA Premium ever since Easylist blocked GA tracking for Adblocked users and self-hosted Piwik seems like the best solution. I'd be well into the billions.
Re: We ditched Google Analytics
#258Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sure. So now the question is, why would Google offer all of this for "free"? Is it really free? Who pays, and in what ways?
Obviously, they're using the same information that's helping you calibrate your campaigns to add to the hive-mind, so they can further data-mine. You're sacrificing the anonymity of your end-users in doing so. Obviously they're offering it so that they can refine their profile of you more accurately to sell ads / direct more relevant traffic to you better. I'm not an industrial engineer but I've been reading about it…
Interesting points. I think there are many ways to use Google Analytics that go beyond what many people want from "visitor data". [Some of t]he kind of questions GA can answer is only possible if one is willing to collude in destroying (meaningful) privacy.
I've had "simple foss analytics" on my todo-list for quite some time. I'm hoping one can build on what piwik have collected wrt bot agent strings, ips etc - and combine with a simpler collector (adding php to the stack just for analytics isn't very appealing, never mind a php codebase of somewhat questionable quality).
Snowplow looks good, but I'm not sure if they have a supported "self-host" stack yet (they started out very awz/s3 centric).
I actually think there's room for a new product, that puts a little bit more thought into what questions it makes sense to ask, and how best to answer them (eg: does collecting metrics on every visitor even make sense if you can answer the same wuestions just as well by doing random sampling? You might want to quantify where your bandwith goes - but simple log analysis might do that easily enough - and it might have very little to do with your human visitors etc).
Re: We ditched Google Analytics
#259Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
If you're Google, sure. Most of the startups here aren't Google. People are prematurely optimizing if they fear is "but but but mah datamoose". Also, it's not prohibitively costly if you do even slight batching of the events, say batch load between every five minutes or an hour. I'd love to hear somebody with war stories chime in though!
You criticize people for _premature optimization_ while in the same breath advocating rolling your own, shitting implementation for page views? Right...
Re: We ditched Google Analytics
#260To me, it is the cost that matters. Most other Analytics cost $30 - $50 / 1 Million Pageview / Datapoint. To me this expensive. Even when you scale to 100M it will still cost ~$20/Million.
Piwik doesn't scale. At least it doesn't scale unless you spend lots of resources to tinker with it. Its Cloud Edition is even more expensive then GoSquared which i consider to be a much better product.
What we basically need is a simple, effective, and cheap enough alternative to GA. And so far there are simply none.