Do not use it?
More seriously, what Google Analytics does that you can't do yourself when you have complete access to the logs of your web site?
What to do when your site is "too large" for Google Analytics?
21–30 of 34 posts
Re: What to do when your site is "too large" for Google Analytics?
#22I designed and built high-end web analytics software for years. Sampling your data by visitor/cookie (not by page view) is the number one thing to do that that no one does. Just sample your data down by a factor of 10 or 100. The costs drop by a factor of 10 or 100, query speeds improve, and the business value of the data drops by very, very little. The only unfortunate prerequisite for this approach is that you need…
Yep. For queries with large volumes of data, Analytics does do sampling and gives you error margins (+/- x%) next to each number. I found that having these margins helps convince higher ups that it's OK, and also tells me when it's not OK and have to dig a bit more.
Re: What to do when your site is "too large" for Google Analytics?
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think it is a bit weird (and points to a fairly serious lack of 'Chinese walls') that google would change the behavior of their analytics package based on your account for a completely unrelated offering. I see adwords, adsense and analytics (as well as search) as unrelated offerings by google.
Analytics has always been tied to AdWords. There used to be a page-view-per-month hard cap that could be removed by linking to an active (spending $) AdWords account. AdWords integration is also pushed pretty heavily in the GA training material, and even in the certification exam. In the real world, there are quite a lot of people whose only experience with GA is optimizing CPC campaigns. Personally, I've never used…
That's curious, because I was just at a talk by Alma Whitten who said that Google didn't use any of the GA data for profiling or ad-related stuff, and simply provided it as a service. Did I misunderstand her, or, possibly, you?
Re: What to do when your site is "too large" for Google Analytics?
#24Do not use it? More seriously, what Google Analytics does that you can't do yourself when you have complete access to the logs of your web site?
My question is serious and genuine. I expected answers, not votes.
Now I recognize that it is a complex question: If Google Analytics has some advantages that you can't reproduce even when you fully control your web server, I would like to know what it is. If it does not, then we may want to stop sending all our logs to Google right now.
Re: What to do when your site is "too large" for Google Analytics?
#25Earlier quoted context omitted.
Analytics has always been tied to AdWords. There used to be a page-view-per-month hard cap that could be removed by linking to an active (spending $) AdWords account. AdWords integration is also pushed pretty heavily in the GA training material, and even in the certification exam. In the real world, there are quite a lot of people whose only experience with GA is optimizing CPC campaigns. Personally, I've never used…
That's curious, because I was just at a talk by Alma Whitten who said that Google didn't use any of the GA data for profiling or ad-related stuff, and simply provided it as a service. Did I misunderstand her, or, possibly, you?
Even if they don't use it from their side to maximize the efficiency of displaying ads, they want you to use it to maximize your AdWords performance and/or AdSense revenue. They make it easy to link your account to your AdWords/AdSense account so that you can run tests and reports.
Re: What to do when your site is "too large" for Google Analytics?
#26Do not use it? More seriously, what Google Analytics does that you can't do yourself when you have complete access to the logs of your web site?
The reason that Google is choking on this 30M pageview/month site is because analytics for a 30M pageview/month site is hard.
Things like unique visitor, unique referer, unique whatever tracking just explode when you have to compare each IP address you get with 20M-entry list.
If you try to do it on your webserver, you'll have a 3 hour window each day where a significant portion of your CPU and Memory is not available for serving web traffic. If you try to do it elsewhere, you get to ship 20gb daily logfiles around.
It's just not any fun. Which is why even Google has difficulty with it.
Running your own analytics is great for relatively small sites. For big ones it starts to bog down once you hit a certain size.
Re: What to do when your site is "too large" for Google Analytics?
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
Analytics has always been tied to AdWords. There used to be a page-view-per-month hard cap that could be removed by linking to an active (spending $) AdWords account. AdWords integration is also pushed pretty heavily in the GA training material, and even in the certification exam. In the real world, there are quite a lot of people whose only experience with GA is optimizing CPC campaigns. Personally, I've never used…
That's curious, because I was just at a talk by Alma Whitten who said that Google didn't use any of the GA data for profiling or ad-related stuff, and simply provided it as a service. Did I misunderstand her, or, possibly, you?
Alma Whitten might be uninformed. (Was this talk recorded? Do you have a link to it?) There are some options in the account UI that, if enabled, allow Google to do some analysis of your data.
Link directly to their help center: http://www.google.com/support/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&...
Re: What to do when your site is "too large" for Google Analytics?
#28I got the exact same email today, and had to read their terms of service to know for sure I wasn't being had. Apparently you need an adwords account 'in good standing', I'm not sure what they mean by that because we do have an adwords account, and as far as I know and can see it is in 'good standing', only we're not advertising any more using google because we found that it isn't making enough money in return. See: h…
> I'd pay for analytics...
You could just take how much you'd pay for analytics and buy some ads. :-)
Re: What to do when your site is "too large" for Google Analytics?
#29Do not use it? More seriously, what Google Analytics does that you can't do yourself when you have complete access to the logs of your web site?
The reason that Google is choking on this 30M pageview/month site is because analytics for a 30M pageview/month site is hard . Things like unique visitor, unique referer, unique whatever tracking just explode when you have to compare each IP address you get with 20M-entry list. If you try to do it on your webserver, you'll have a 3 hour window each day where a significant portion of your CPU and Memory is not availab…
Most stats providers compute unique visitors using client-side cookies; not entirely accurate, but quite cheap. You're right though, it's a lot easier to use an existing (and free or nearly free) tool than to build your own.
Re: What to do when your site is "too large" for Google Analytics?
#30I designed and built high-end web analytics software for years. Sampling your data by visitor/cookie (not by page view) is the number one thing to do that that no one does. Just sample your data down by a factor of 10 or 100. The costs drop by a factor of 10 or 100, query speeds improve, and the business value of the data drops by very, very little. The only unfortunate prerequisite for this approach is that you need…
Yep. For queries with large volumes of data, Analytics does do sampling and gives you error margins (+/- x%) next to each number. I found that having these margins helps convince higher ups that it's OK, and also tells me when it's not OK and have to dig a bit more.
I think drosenthal is talking about sampling the number of hits you send to analytics. GA's tracking api supports this:
http://code.google.com/apis/analytics/docs/gaJS/gaJSApiBasic...