141–150 of 311 posts
If you're going to tear down a competitor's product and shill your own you should probably be up front about it.
I know a lot of people agree with the premise of ditching Google Analytics but don't necessarily want to read a biased pitch piece about it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> "[GA]...doesn't have creepy features that let you spy on individual users" google reserves that for itself so as not to lose it's dominance of online advertising and targeting. why would they share their bread and butter with the little guys?
No idea if that's true or not regarding Google Analytics, but you can opt out of all data sharing and I imagine Google would be in a lot of trouble if they didn't honour that.
I have a hobby blog that I'm trying to run for Browser (~3 lines of JS) -> API Gateway -> SQS Queue -> Lambda (ETLs queue into) -> Athena. I was originally just going to use Postgres, but RDS/Aurora are expensive and running Postgres in EC2 is going to be at least as much work (configuring SSH, process management, backups, monitoring, logging, image building, networking, etc). My custom plan is ~$3/month all-in provi…
Your choice is, of course, your choice, but I'd strongly suggest GA for this use case. I understand and agree that Google is in fact evil and we should avoid feeding the beast, but a hobby website using GA is too minor to care about for any of the privacy reasons the author states and if it's fully static pages then ideally the performance will already be light enough that the bloat of GA isn't going to make a differ…
while it's a whole lot less signal per site, long-tail websites can provide more signal per visit than large ones. knowing you like kazakh folk music more uniquely identifies you for targeting than knowing you read cnn.
and for small sites, you don't often need a lot of data. just knowing number of visits and some basic visitor characteristics (country, time, etc.) on a per-page basis is usually as much as you need to make use of. depending on the business, a large site can and possibly should build custom analytics as a competitive advantage that doesn't have google (and facebook, amazon, etc.) looking over their shoulder.
nobody really needs GA. many don't even need realitme analytics afforded by a js library loaded on every page. you can just do log analysis, à la the original urchin analytics that google bought long ago.
Is this an ad?
The correct proposition instead would be to stop analytics on your website, period. There's many sites that benefit greatly from the insight, but I'd argue they're a minority. Your personal blog doesn't need analytics. Let's be honest, for many people, analytics is just a way to feed their ego — my ramblings reached 100 people, so you could say I'm kind of a big deal. Google is, obviously, very well aware of this tar…
With any website it's important to know how many visitors it is receiving. In the context of a blog knowing you're getting a lot of traffic can motivate you to publish more content and knowing more about your visitors can also feed into what sort of content you publish. You could look at your server logs, of course, but analytics is easier to set up and gives you higher quality data than something like AWStats. Since…
No, and trying to make your content more appealing based on analytics is often a great way to tend towards SEO optimized blogspam.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
don't run google ads either
That is not an option if you are a profit driven enterprise. There is no alternative that is as good/optimized as Google Ads is. You are literally bidding on search intent.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
According to google, it is: “Google uses the information shared by sites and apps to deliver our services, maintain and improve them, develop new services, measure the effectiveness of advertising, protect against fraud and abuse, and personalize content and ads you see on Google and on our partners’ sites and apps”.
Disclosure: Google Analytics consultant. Not a Google employee, but my bread is very clearly buttered on one side here. The article's use of that verbiage is deceptive. I think it's not actually a lie, but it's misleading. When you use the Google Analytics product, Google is a Processor under GDPR and a Service Provider under CCPA. They are contractually bound not to process that data beyond providing the service to…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Disclosure: Google Analytics consultant. Not a Google employee, but my bread is very clearly buttered on one side here. The article's use of that verbiage is deceptive. I think it's not actually a lie, but it's misleading. When you use the Google Analytics product, Google is a Processor under GDPR and a Service Provider under CCPA. They are contractually bound not to process that data beyond providing the service to…
This is a really good point. It's very disingenuous of the parent article to not mention that. Google being a Processor of data removes their ability to use this data for targeting and profiling.
I have a hobby blog that I'm trying to run for Browser (~3 lines of JS) -> API Gateway -> SQS Queue -> Lambda (ETLs queue into) -> Athena. I was originally just going to use Postgres, but RDS/Aurora are expensive and running Postgres in EC2 is going to be at least as much work (configuring SSH, process management, backups, monitoring, logging, image building, networking, etc). My custom plan is ~$3/month all-in provi…
I've done something similar to this that has worked for me without a lot of effort besides the first time setup. I use Fathom which is open-source and available to use on any hosting service. I use it with DigitalOcean so it's $5/mo and I get to run it on as many websites I have. Might not be very helpful in your case but I'd recommend thinking about using a simpler setup than SQS Queue + Lambda, if that works for yo…
I did try to find something simpler, and I remember looking at Fathom but I don't recall off the top of my head what my qualm was. Basically anything that involves a VM is more complex than the system I described and anything that involves Docker is considerably more expensive (Fargate/ECS/EKS pricing models).