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Google Analytics: Stop feeding the beast

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Re: Google Analytics: Stop feeding the beast

#91

Post by ehnto »

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/

+1, you own the experience and the data that way. Even if you don't use PHP in your projects, almost everywhere has PHP so it's not hard to host it.

Re: Google Analytics: Stop feeding the beast

#92

Post by carapace »

On a tangent, but related IMO: the whole WWW seems gross now.

The other day on that Mold linker project:

> I wanted to use the linker to link a Chromium executable with full debug info (~2 GiB in size) just in 1 second. LLVM's lld, the fastest open-source linker which I originally created a few years ago, takes about 12 seconds to link Chromium on my machine.

As much as I like that linker project, I can't help but feel it's like a pothead buying a bigger pipe: you're just going to smoke more weed.

How can it make sense in a sane world for a web browser to take up more space than entire operating systems? Red ( https://www.red-lang.org/ ) and Factor ( https://factorcode.org/ ) among many others deliver comparable capabilities in ~1M.

- - - -

The Gemini project is one interesting alternative. Every once in awhile I wonder what the folks using Urbit are up to in there.

But for the masses of unwashed users out there I think they're stuck with it. I feel like we are seeing the genesis of cyborg AIs with humans for neural nodes.

Re: Google Analytics: Stop feeding the beast

#93

Post by Dudeman112 »

smt88 wrote: post #22
heipei wrote: post #3

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. More serious thoughts: Google Analytics i…

Tracking is not just about improving conversions. It's primarily about understanding if your ads worked. It doesn't matter how good your product is if you can't tell anyone about it, and you can't spend a bunch of money telling people about it if you don't know which ad networks are giving you bang for your buck.

I think you're being silly.

As long as your product is good enough, no one needs a marketing budget or to measure if marketing is working.

And everyone has the resources and time to make their own analytics tools, if they need it, instead of relying on existing solutions

Re: Google Analytics: Stop feeding the beast

#94

Post by Mauricebranagh »

heipei wrote: post #3

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. More serious thoughts: Google Analytics i…

Google just need to offer an on-prem version of GA - that would sole so many of my problems.

The problem with your view is you have X resources to get things done - how do you measure the ROI or even get an idea of possible strategies.

Of course you can go back to the 1960's mad men era "its toasted" approach to marketing, but that's not the best use of resources.

Re: Google Analytics: Stop feeding the beast

#95

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #71
heipei wrote: post #3

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. More serious thoughts: Google Analytics i…

When I first put my personal website up on Github Pages last summer, I didn't include any analytics. I figured it was unnecessary—why should I care who was looking? I quickly realized the obvious—without any analytics, I had no idea whether or not I was just screaming into the ether. Even for a simple noncommercial site, it's discomforting! I now have Cloudflare Analytics and I'm much more satisfied. I feel as though…

I used to have GA on my Github documentation. Then I realized how much of it was garbage referer spam that Google wasn't doing anything to combat.

Re: Google Analytics: Stop feeding the beast

#96

Post by bogwog »

mschuster91 wrote: post #66
z92 wrote: post #23

Parse your server's access log file. The way it had been done for decades. "Analog" was popular then, Should be better options now.

Access logs are almost useless for analytics these days... all they give you is the URL that was visited and some extremely rough idea what OS and browser the client is using (UA parsing is a hellhole ). You don't get any more detailed information (e.g. device class, screen size/orientation) from analytics logs. Also, if you're using one of the free hosting providers (GH Pages and the likes) you're not even going to…

I wonder if you could use CSS media queries to collect additional data about device characteristics, by linking to different URLs at different breakpoints?

Like a breakpoint for portrait mode would set the background of something to an image that's just a 1x1 pixel. So when that resource is accessed, you know the request came from a device in portrait.

I guess it depends on how different browsers decide to access resource urls in CSS files. If a browser just downloads everything first, and then processes the media queries, then it wouldn't work.

Re: Google Analytics: Stop feeding the beast

#97

Post by Mauricebranagh »

ksm1717 wrote: post #77
seventh-chord wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except the things you mention correspond to looking at sales data in your backend DB, not putting google analytics in your frontend, right?

I think classifying grocery store operations as frontend/backend is too far from reality to be a useful analogy. That’s not to say that I don’t agree that google analytics is more insidious than just about anything grocery stores do.

Erm heard of footfall monitoring and tracking customers by their phones.

Re: Google Analytics: Stop feeding the beast

#99

Post by Simplicitas »

iujjkfjdkkdkf wrote: post #39

I'm coming around to the idea that Google (and Facebook etc) need to be called out and held accountable for the "negative externalities" that come with their business model, the same as if a company was polluting the physical environment. Google has turned much of the internet into a wasteland (there are examples as it related to news in the article but this is true for most content). They don't have to pay for this…

Thanks for succinctly recapping the core issue here.

Another externality from all this is the growth of misinformation, which our species seems so unaware and defenseless against.

Re: Google Analytics: Stop feeding the beast

#100

Post by arcturus17 »

Mauricebranagh wrote: post #94
heipei wrote: post #3

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. More serious thoughts: Google Analytics i…

Google just need to offer an on-prem version of GA - that would sole so many of my problems. The problem with your view is you have X resources to get things done - how do you measure the ROI or even get an idea of possible strategies. Of course you can go back to the 1960's mad men era "its toasted" approach to marketing, but that's not the best use of resources.

They’d probably steal your data and peek into it regardless.

My fatalistic outlook is justified by the amount of documented abuses they’ve committed over the years. Nothing is sacred to them, except the idea that “more data (in our servers) is good”.

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