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Google Analytics: Stop feeding the beast

casparwre.de

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Re: Google Analytics: Stop feeding the beast

#81

Post by mint2 »

system16 wrote: post #19
Enginerrrd wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Here's a crazy idea: Don't use analytics at all but focus on your product. If your success relies solely on "improving conversions" by tracking your users and then changing the position and color of your "Checkout" button then maybe try setting yourself apart such that customers want to buy your product even despite an obnoxious purchasing flow. Only then start optimizing it. This is part of why costco is so success…

Absolutely. Even though I find the Costco in-store experience stressful and the online experience lacklustre, I put them at the top of my list for all of my non-fashion shopping (unless I'm looking for dad clothes). I can always trust their products will be as high or better quality than anywhere else, and at the best or close to best price. And I have no worries about returns. Compare that to Amazon, which I have ze…

The latest trend on Amazon seems to be selling items packaged for non-us markets and shipping them to us customers. I bought a two pack Duracell lr44 battery and I think the entire packaging is in Turkish? Or maybe some Eastern European language. Regardless, the battery is definitely not packaged in a way that’s legal to sell in America and the Amazon page did not say it would be packaged for another country. Super shady. And I’m not even sure how to tell if it’s not 100% fake and not just the packing for another country.

Re: Google Analytics: Stop feeding the beast

#83

Post by bogwog »

boffinism wrote: post #24

I really didn't want to use Google Analytics for a personal site (details in bio), but because it's a non-monetised personal site I really didn't want to spend money to know how many visitors I had, but because I'm trying to learn about content I really did want to know how many visitors I had, because that's a good way of discovering what content resonates etc. I tried PanelBear, but because I briefly hit the front…

Did you really look into this that much? Because there are a *lot* of free and self-hosted alternatives.

Here's a list I found with a quick (DDG!) search: https://alternativeto.net/software/google-analytics/?platfor...

Re: Google Analytics: Stop feeding the beast

#84

Post by ehnto »

raspyberr wrote: post #21
caspii wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Touche. You are absolutely right. I will remove these too, but haven't gotten round it to it yet.

In which case, I do agree with a lot of what you say. There are many alternatives to what Google offers for website builders nowadays. It's just most people aren't aware of them. Many guides will just say use Google fonts and use Google analytics.

I found third party CDNs were almost always the cause when my personal site felt slow. My personal server responds quickly every time, because it's not subject to the same heavy traffic fluctuations that CDNs are.

To that end, I serve all the font files from the server and run a self-hosted analytics tool. Most Google fonts are just conveniently hosted fonts from third-party foundries, so it's not like you are supporting Google by downloading them.

Re: Google Analytics: Stop feeding the beast

#85

Post by amzans »

zserge wrote: post #52
boffinism wrote: post #24

I really didn't want to use Google Analytics for a personal site (details in bio), but because it's a non-monetised personal site I really didn't want to spend money to know how many visitors I had, but because I'm trying to learn about content I really did want to know how many visitors I had, because that's a good way of discovering what content resonates etc. I tried PanelBear, but because I briefly hit the front…

I am currently working on exactly this! I have always been dreaming of a low-cost, zero-effort web analytics. So far I have made an open source library/service, I've been using it for my blog and a few other sites for over two months. It is available at https://github.com/nullitics/nullitics . You can see the example dashboard (fed with real data) at https://nullitics.com/dashboard/zserge.com . I'm now collecting all…

Hey it's nice you're offering this!

I'd just be careful with ultra-low prices, specially if you plan on having backups and multiple months/years of data retention.

Infrastructure costs alone can add up really fast, and don't underestimate how many hours of support a single customer might require.

Just friendly advice :)

Re: Google Analytics: Stop feeding the beast

#86

Post by prox »

janpot wrote: post #80
crazygringo wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Don't use analytics at all but focus on your product. Huh? Analytics is how you focus on your product. By instrumenting your product with analytics, you can find out if customers are using your new useful feature or if they can't find it. If they're performing a task quickly because it's easy, or slowly because they're struggling with the UX. And you find out that customers on a certain mobile device are suffering…

> you can find out if customers are using your new useful feature or if they can't find it How do you find out if your "useful" feature isn't as useful as you thought it was? Or is it really always "the user can't find it"?

Could be that, it could be design, it could be how something is worded, it could be that what you want the client to see, isn’t being seen. Analytics helps to identify this problem. For instance I noticed recently a huge drop-off in visitors from Ipads, and a redesign apparently made some parts of the site dysfunctional for some ipad users, something we didn’t catch earlier.

Re: Google Analytics: Stop feeding the beast

#87

Post by ehnto »

tobiaslins wrote: post #65

For those who are searching for a GA alternative that can also be used as app analytics tool be sure to check out https://splitbee.io It also allows cookie-free tracking :)

Self-hosted Matomo is a good alternative in PHP land. Being PHP it makes it pretty easy to deploy on a VPS and use it as analytics for all your projects. That also puts you in control of it's performance and impact on your users.

You can also use a server-log only mode which uses zero client-side snippets/pixels to do the tracking work.

https://matomo.org/matomo-on-premise/

Re: Google Analytics: Stop feeding the beast

#88

Post by asidiali »

pletsch wrote: post #76
boffinism wrote: post #24

I really didn't want to use Google Analytics for a personal site (details in bio), but because it's a non-monetised personal site I really didn't want to spend money to know how many visitors I had, but because I'm trying to learn about content I really did want to know how many visitors I had, because that's a good way of discovering what content resonates etc. I tried PanelBear, but because I briefly hit the front…

I use Matomo, it runs on my home server, its open-source. Pretty sure you could run it on a Pi. There's a docker container that you can spin up in a few minutes. https://matomo.org/

Seconded - set up on a project instance last weekend in about 5 minutes, and it has been chugging along swimmingly since! And they’ve been doing it for a long time, Piwik was great even before the rebrand.

Re: Google Analytics: Stop feeding the beast

#89

Post by ehnto »

amzans wrote: post #67
boffinism wrote: post #24

I really didn't want to use Google Analytics for a personal site (details in bio), but because it's a non-monetised personal site I really didn't want to spend money to know how many visitors I had, but because I'm trying to learn about content I really did want to know how many visitors I had, because that's a good way of discovering what content resonates etc. I tried PanelBear, but because I briefly hit the front…

Hey I'm happy you gave Panelbear a try! It's always nice to hear someone is using what I've built. Regarding the free tier, I decided to offer it after hearing many people saying "I wish there was a free alternative for a blog that gets less than There's no strings attached. Only volume limits and shorter data retention (to prevent my AWS costs from blowing up). About traffic spikes (eg. reaching the front page of HN…

> even if you go over the limits, the system won't start rate limiting you for another 72 hours

That is super cool of you, to protect your users interests first.

Re: Google Analytics: Stop feeding the beast

#90

Post by softwaredoug »

weinzierl wrote: post #32
softwaredoug wrote: post #4

My personal site I don’t use any analytics. My metric I care about is whether I’m having an impact on my colleagues and domain. I generally don’t try to mode that quantitatively, I care more about whether it seems people around me are influenced or helped by what I write. If it’s useful to some colleagues, that’s enough for me.

I appreciate this attitude. What do you do to know if you have an impact instead of analytics?

One thing I could look at is Moz’s approximation for page authority and look at inbound links. But I don’t care that much about it right now.
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