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Google Analytics: Stop feeding the beast

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Re: Google Analytics: Stop feeding the beast

#311

Post by hsgdh3487 »

haihaibye wrote: post #253
musicale wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How many printers does Amazon think I need? I usually buy a new printer when it runs out of ink because it's cheaper than buying a new ink cartridge.

New printers usually come with less than full sized cartridges. Also look at third party solutions like external feeds. Even if it is cheaper, the externalities are not fully priced in, please think of the planet, thanks.

If "the externalities are not fully priced in", isn't that just good for me? I hate to say it, but my financial situation hasn't been great recently; I might just go for it.

Re: Google Analytics: Stop feeding the beast

#312

Post by teeray »

jart wrote: post #310

I've never understood how people can muster such hatred for a company that makes all the most outstanding technology products and then gives them away for free. The mental backflips that must take.

I think it’s because that they know it’s not free. It’s a subscription service paid for in information supplied by users. For some, this is an acceptable trade. Others would like to pay for services in dollars instead, but that’s not an option in many cases.

Re: Google Analytics: Stop feeding the beast

#313

Post by hnick »

lmkg wrote: post #207
bashinator wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Serious question - does Google Analytics tell you if I abruptly close your page only a few seconds after it's started loading?

Out-of-the-box, no. With custom work, yes. The amount of effort is not large, and there are off-the-shelf solutions available. The name commonly used is "engagement timer." By default, GA only sends one hit on page load. If there's no second hit, there's no way to tell if someone was looking at the page for a second or a minute or an hour.

How do they handle it? A keep-alive style ping, or something like a beforeunload event hook?

Re: Google Analytics: Stop feeding the beast

#314

Post by [deleted] »

dealforager wrote: post #250

The funny thing is that this is essentially a giant ad for this person's business, and their website uses GA (lol). I've noticed this is an increasingly popular tactic on Reddit and HN. You clickbait people to an article backed with no data that you know will tickle people's emotions. Then at the end you include a call to action to use their service because it will save the world. I used to hate GA as well as ads in…

[deleted]

Re: Google Analytics: Stop feeding the beast

#315

Post by worik »

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.

> Qualitative research isn't scientific anyway

Science is not the only form of truth.

Re: Google Analytics: Stop feeding the beast

#316

Post by viraptor »

mqrs wrote: post #309
dntrkv wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> couldn’t you still measure that by checking the backend and looking for a spike in activity towards the API endpoint that the UI invokes? You could have multiple UIs hitting the same endpoint. Also, why limit yourself with such crude metrics? > good UX doesn’t so much rely on Google Analytics but on a UX engineer’s depth of knowledge about human psychology UX in theory, and UX in application are two different thing…

You can still parameterizethe API calls if you want to attribute user activity to a specific flow, and that way you wouldn’t be “feeding the beast” that is GA.

How you mark/report the events is different from where you report them. You could use any one of self-hosted solutions on your own domain instead of GA without changing much the way you report back.

Re: Google Analytics: Stop feeding the beast

#317

Post by hunter-2 »

I really miss Sitemeter - loved their simple, no nonsense metrics that was exactly what I wanted from an analytics tool. I don't even understand the new version of GA, and have no idea why I still have it on my site.

But again, I don't want to pay for analytics. It's not a core necessity for my sites. Are there Sitemeter-like simple ads-monetized sites still?

I don't like Mixpanel and the other big ones.

Re: Google Analytics: Stop feeding the beast

#318

Post by gerash »

It is great to have alternatives to successful products and services that big companies provide. Esp. if the pitch is why this alternatives is better not why the incumbent is evil.

But the amount of negative campaigning (remember Scroogled campaign?) and BS that goes with it here makes me cringe each time I see one of these posts.

Re: Google Analytics: Stop feeding the beast

#319

Post by edmundsauto »

pcstl wrote: post #224
boplicity wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Huh? Analytics is how you focus on your product. For the first decade of my career, I really believed this, and spent a lot of time doing split tests, and studying analytics, and trying to "make things better" by understanding the numbers as they were given to me. This was a mistake. I've since learned that these numbers will rarely help me make meaningful improvements to my product, and my business. Sure, they can…

You're essentially arguing for qualitative data instead of quantitative, but both together is usually where the money is. I agree that qualitative analytics are underestimatd because they're hard to do, but I also think that having quantitative analytics together with qualitative allows you to contextualize your numbers in ways that lead to insights you wouldn't have otherwise. Also, after you've already reached prod…

Qualitative data has another challenge - representativeness. It's very easy to do 10 user interviews and feel comfortable that you understand the market. Our brains lie to us all the time.

Quantitative data lets you drill down into different dimensions. Because it is much easier to collect at scale (it's the sum of your users' interaction w/ your product, after all!), it's much easier to make representative decisions.

Re: Google Analytics: Stop feeding the beast

#320

Post by cookiengineer »

boplicity wrote: post #204
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…

> Huh? Analytics is how you focus on your product. For the first decade of my career, I really believed this, and spent a lot of time doing split tests, and studying analytics, and trying to "make things better" by understanding the numbers as they were given to me. This was a mistake. I've since learned that these numbers will rarely help me make meaningful improvements to my product, and my business. Sure, they can…

The issue I have with analytics, additional to your (imho) valid points is that lots of practical users seem to always measure the wrong endpoints and don't include negative outcomes.

Leads are useless without measuring how many people bounced off your shitty online shop, because they couldn't understand your UI.

Staying time is useless without measuring closed tabs, because your website is unreadable with ads.

The irony behind it is that ad metrics are used to buy/sell a website's worth for ads. Sometimes I feel like it's like a bubble that's invented on purpose to not have a measurable outcome of anything.

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