All the effort to avoid Google Analytics, only to turn around and use Google Sheets?
Roll Your Own Analytics
11–20 of 105 posts
Re: Roll Your Own Analytics
#12Your site has no visible scroll bar. What was your design reason for hiding it? It's probably one of the most useful controls to use on a site. You should track its usage with your own analytics. Or for now, track how many people moved their mouse to where they expected to see and use a scroll bar, noticed there was none and then closed the page.
>You should track its usage with your own analytics.
I appreciate the joke, but don't give them ideas. Since one can't normally track interactions with the scrollbar, I wouldn't be surprised if they were to implement their own "scrollbar" from DIVs to be able to track if the user had dragged it.
Just put back the built-in scrollbar. Period.
Re: Roll Your Own Analytics
#13Your site has no visible scroll bar. What was your design reason for hiding it? It's probably one of the most useful controls to use on a site. You should track its usage with your own analytics. Or for now, track how many people moved their mouse to where they expected to see and use a scroll bar, noticed there was none and then closed the page.
Likely also the same reason he disabled outlines on all input. Because people think they are ugly without any thought devoted to accessibility.
Re: Roll Your Own Analytics
#14Your site has no visible scroll bar. What was your design reason for hiding it? It's probably one of the most useful controls to use on a site. You should track its usage with your own analytics. Or for now, track how many people moved their mouse to where they expected to see and use a scroll bar, noticed there was none and then closed the page.
I see a scroll bar there, on Firefox.
Re: Roll Your Own Analytics
#15Your site has no visible scroll bar. What was your design reason for hiding it? It's probably one of the most useful controls to use on a site. You should track its usage with your own analytics. Or for now, track how many people moved their mouse to where they expected to see and use a scroll bar, noticed there was none and then closed the page.
Woops, not intentional, scrollbar is back.
Re: Roll Your Own Analytics
#16Another option is to use a cloudfront hosted pixel, and have a cloudwatch job to schedule processing of that data every X minutes. This gives you ultra fast edge response time on your tracker, instead of slow lambda + api gateway, but you have to back-process the data. This should also cost less if you have a lot of traffic.
Instead of Google sheets, throw it to bigquery. Or reprocess hourly/daily into parquet then scan with athena.
Re: Roll Your Own Analytics
#17Another option is to use a cloudfront hosted pixel, and have a cloudwatch job to schedule processing of that data every X minutes. This gives you ultra fast edge response time on your tracker, instead of slow lambda + api gateway, but you have to back-process the data. This should also cost less if you have a lot of traffic. Instead of Google sheets, throw it to bigquery. Or reprocess hourly/daily into parquet then s…
I can't POST with a pixel though, and I care about event logging.
For sure, Google Sheets is just a free, easy and temp stand-in for a real data store.
Re: Roll Your Own Analytics
#18I like the idea.... but this doesn't make sense.
I'm all for not using Google Analytics- I don't use it on my site. But why would you then use Google Sheets to hold the info? That's ridiculous. That's like telling people how to make an apple pie without sugar, and the last step before baking is dumping in a pound of sugar!
If you want an easy data store, use something like SQLite. There are plenty of options that are easy to self host, and a lot of libraries have been written to make it easier for you.
Re: Roll Your Own Analytics
#19I like the idea.... but this doesn't make sense. I'm all for not using Google Analytics- I don't use it on my site. But why would you then use Google Sheets to hold the info? That's ridiculous. That's like telling people how to make an apple pie without sugar, and the last step before baking is dumping in a pound of sugar! If you want an easy data store, use something like SQLite. There are plenty of options that are…
The article isn't about removing all traces of Google from your site/stack. It's about removing 3rd party tracking from your site. Specifically, it focuses on removing Google Analytics.
Using Google Sheets doesn't add 3rd party tracking back in. Even if you don't trust Google to not take a look at your spreadsheet, it's unlikely anybody or anything at Google would treat your spreadsheet like analytics data.
All that being said, it is a little funny seeing them funnel the data right back into Google. Personally, I would also prefer a different storage method.
Re: Roll Your Own Analytics
#20Same DIY analytics with Google Storage + BigQuery: https://github.com/fedia/bigpapa
Still googly, but less scalability issues.