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Google Analytics: Stop feeding the beast

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Re: Google Analytics: Stop feeding the beast

#151

Post by marssaxman »

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…

It would never occur to me to care, at all, whether something as trivial as a dish scrubber was a genuine name-brand item. What difference does it make? I suppose this is why I have experienced none of the trust issues people have begun talking about with Amazon, recently.

Re: Google Analytics: Stop feeding the beast

#152

Post by Pawka »

ehnto wrote: post #87
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/

Or even run it in a container anywhere. A while ago (when Matomo was named "Piwik") I had it running in a stateless containers (db was provided as a service).

Re: Google Analytics: Stop feeding the beast

#153

Post by enz »

crazygringo wrote: post #69
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…

> 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…

This is not the same kind of analytics. You are talking about something like HotJar with heat maps to find out how customers use the product for example.

Re: Google Analytics: Stop feeding the beast

#154

Post by mattnewton »

google234123 wrote: post #142
sizzle wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could talk to your users... (i.e. UX research), observe them using your website or product and ask them non leading probing questions to see what the intent is behind the behaviors affecting your bottom line. Qualitative research methods are a rich source of insight that is typically underinvested and underutilized. Analytics (quantitative data) can help you find areas of bottlenecks to explore further by doing q…

Users hate being bothered and hate taking surveys. Qualitative research isn't scientific anyway.

UX research participants are usually compensated, and so it's usually done to drill down deeper into problems that analytics found and test possible explainations. I don't see what's unscientific about that.

Re: Google Analytics: Stop feeding the beast

#155

Post by mattnewton »

godelski wrote: post #131
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worked for a tech company popular with enthusiasts when GDPR was first rolled out. We had a lot of requests from users who wanted us to provide their data per the GDPR allowance. We also had an influx of tech journalists filing GDPR requests in hopes of catching us doing something wrong or tracking too much personal data. When we sent users their "data", many of them were in disbelief at how little data they receiv…

I think Facebook gets the blame because they are at the end of the chain. They don't sell your data but they do sell the access to your data (from themselves through the website or tracking and what they bought from said other companies). Being that major player in the service it makes sense that they get the heat, but at the same time most people are still tech illiterate. I mean look at how people think Amazon is o…

I have never been inside a newsroom, so I can't know for sure, but I suspect facebook also gets a fair amount of the blame from news media because of their fraught relationship as pseudo-competitors.

Re: Google Analytics: Stop feeding the beast

#156

Post by crazygringo »

enz wrote: post #153
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…

This is not the same kind of analytics. You are talking about something like HotJar with heat maps to find out how customers use the product for example.

No, I'm talking about Google Analytics which is the topic of the article and parent comment.

Heat maps are great too but Google Analytics is still used as the foundation for figuring out which types of users are clicking and not clicking on what, both in isolation and as part of a pathway between elements/pages/etc.

Re: Google Analytics: Stop feeding the beast

#157

Post by jahewson »

carapace wrote: post #92

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 fe…

Why compare a web browser with a programming language? An equivalently rich OS would be a meaningful comparison, built with full debug symbols.

Re: Google Analytics: Stop feeding the beast

#158

Post by marrone12 »

cgriswald wrote: post #103
smt88 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Disclaimer: I hate Google Analytics because I hate Google, I hate monopolies, and I hate excessive hoarding of user data. I think the necessary aspects of tracking can be maintained without having all the bad aspects, but we need to break up the ad companies first. > without watching exactly how every customer looks at shelves This is absolutely not true. Do you have experience with managing brick and mortar stores?…

Rewards programs are opt-in. Stores have even stopped harassing me to sign up. Analytics are the equivalent of a computer following you around the store, watching what you look at, how long you look at it, what you pick up, what you pull out of your cart and put back... I’ve never in my life gotten message from the grocery store saying, “Hey, we saw you were looking at grapefruit. Here are some other citrus fruits we…

Brick and mortar ARE tracking you!

https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how-targ...

Re: Google Analytics: Stop feeding the beast

#160

Post by Dudeman112 »

arcturus17 wrote: post #101
Dudeman112 wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Are you being facetious? Everyone has the time to roll out their own analytics? Where do you work, Google?

I see even HN needs '/s' .

You'd think stating that marketing doesn't matter and everyone has time to develop analytics would trigger some sarcasm detection somewhere

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