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Google Analytics: Stop feeding the beast

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Re: Google Analytics: Stop feeding the beast

#351

Post by maigret »

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…

> There's a similar problem with things like "user interviews." A common pitfall is to ask people which features they want.

Asking what users want is not the right way to do interviews. I advise you read "Just enough research" by Erika Hall. The goal of interviews is to gather enough data points to understand the user needs and struggle, and to know their journey through the product with accuracy, and also understanding why they use or don't use a function. It is not a way to get a "wish list".

Then, designers usually have tons of tools and methods to process this data, take decisions and try creative solutions (usually more than one), and play them back to the users through prototypes to see which ones work better. You can check design thinking as a starter, but there are many more.

Re: Google Analytics: Stop feeding the beast

#352

Post by unishark »

crazygringo wrote: post #275
unishark wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you are unable to find out that 90 percent of people can't use a major feature that you thought would differentiate your product, you are missing all forms of feedback, including much more important sources besides analytics.

I disagree completely because I've seen it in practice. A button turns out to be below the fold on common small screen sizes that a new designer forgot to consider. A bad translation results in 90% of users in a particular country misunderstanding something. A JavaScript library doesn't work on a common Android phone you don't test with. Latency issues make something virtually unusable from the other side of the coun…

One goalpost at a time please. 90% of users in "a given country" is not the same things as saying 90 percent of all users. Unless that country is so important that it's everyone, and again you needed to test that your product is usable in the first place.

And even so, while there are a lot of countries and languages, a collection of tests in all of them, which is all it takes for these examples, is not "big data". Again you are crediting analytics for things that people were fully capable of and responsible for doing in the days without traffic data. I realize it is great for the resume and sounds sexier to do "analytics" as opposed to just basic software testing (you should see what people are calling "AI" in other industries these days). And I'm certainly happy to agree that analytics has some value, say in improving wording and stuff that a single instance won't tell you, but again these aren't cases of that.

Re: Google Analytics: Stop feeding the beast

#353

Post by shenberg »

blacklight wrote: post #346

Firefox+NoScript+PiHole user here. Once the pages on your browser start rendering at twice the speed they normally render on other people's devices because you block all the analytics and ads crap, you never look back. And even though I don't use any analytics on my websites (heck, some of them don't even run a line of JS), I still get plenty of valuable (and privacy-aware) insights about user experience. Web server…

Bots. Spam ruins it for everyone. Cloudflare, for example, provide an analytics platform based off of logs, but it overreports visits by a huge amount for most cases because javascript is a good filter for most bots.

Here's Cloudflare's page on why there is a discrepancy between their numbers and GA-type services: https://support.cloudflare.com/hc/en-us/articles/36003768411...

And here's a blog post by a self-hosted-analytics provider who shows exact numbers from his personal blog: https://markosaric.com/cloudflare-analytics-review/

He has a stake in the matter, but it's also such a huge discrepancy that I'm guessing is hard to fake. Anecdotally, friends I have with small blogs mirror this experience.

Re: Google Analytics: Stop feeding the beast

#354

Post by stonogo »

donohoe wrote: post #233

Lets examine these "claims" a bit more closely... It’s a bloated script that affects your site speed Everything affects sites-peed. However its 19KB, thats not awful. It’s overkill for the majority of site owners Yes, agreed. But so what. It’s a privacy liability and requires an extensive privacy policy Would be nice if if it offered specifics on the "liability" but it does not. And for the weight of an "extensive pr…

Yes, let's.

  its 19KB, thats not awful.
The payload is 19KB. Then the browser has to run all that code, continually, for the duration of the visit. This sucks terribly on underpowered android phones, which is the most common internet access device on earth.

If you use Global Site Tag (as Google recommends) then it's more than twice as much code (and twice the GETs).

  But so what.
So a small shop has better things to focus on, and obsessing over Google's idea of analytics isn't necessarily the top priority. That's what the whole article is about.

  Would be nice if if it offered specifics on the "liability" but it does not.
Think of privacy as a limited resource: once you spend it, it's gone. In this case, you're spending your own privacy to get access to Google's dashboard. This could bite you in the ass if you ever found yourself at the negotiation table with a company that knows everything there is to know about your business.

And that's just one issue -- you're also, of course, dumping all possible info about your users into Google's servers as well, and you're not even getting paid for it.

  And for the weight of an "extensive privacy policy", I'm not buying this as a great reason.
You're not alone, but there are more people every day who do. You handwaving it away is fine but doesn't invalidate the point being made.

  Again, what!? I'm not seeing these prompts.
Congratulations, I suppose! But why are you acting confused? The author provided a link explaining them. Which prompts pop up vary according to the laws of the region Google geolocates you in. Spend a few bucks on a European VPN if you want proof.

I think your comment is the poorly researched rant. "What?" and "I'm not buying this" aren't sound arguments. You cherry-picked some bullet points, but ignored the citation provided, which expanded on every single one of them.

Re: Google Analytics: Stop feeding the beast

#355

Post by account42 »

cercatrova wrote: post #291
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…

Why is analytics only numbers / quantitative data to you? I've used services like HotJar that record the interactions of the user on the site or app which is qualitative analytics at scale, and it helped me identify how the user was actually using the product. I wouldn't not call this analytics simply because it's not numbers driven.

> I've used services like HotJar that record the interactions of the user on the site or app

That sounds creepy as fuck. Did you have informed consent from the users?

Re: Google Analytics: Stop feeding the beast

#356

Post by thinkindie »

While others have already pointed out that the author is also using Google Analytics with the other website that is promoting at the end of the post, I would like to point out that the same website is also using google fonts which, as much as i love it and i use it, it fits into the same category of a free google analytics.

Re: Google Analytics: Stop feeding the beast

#357

Post by cercatrova »

account42 wrote: post #355
cercatrova wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is analytics only numbers / quantitative data to you? I've used services like HotJar that record the interactions of the user on the site or app which is qualitative analytics at scale, and it helped me identify how the user was actually using the product. I wouldn't not call this analytics simply because it's not numbers driven.

> I've used services like HotJar that record the interactions of the user on the site or app That sounds creepy as fuck. Did you have informed consent from the users?

Of course not. And unless I'm in the EU, I don't need it (and even then, not really, HotJar can be made GDPR compliant). HN will definitely balk at me saying that, but understanding UX is much more important than whatever philosophies one has about not tracking users. Because if you don't understand UX, there's no point to the debate about tracking vs not tracking users, because you won't have any users in the first place.

Re: Google Analytics: Stop feeding the beast

#358

Post by account42 »

hsgdh3487 wrote: post #311
haihaibye wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

We're talking about printers - for most people they aren't exactly essential.

Re: Google Analytics: Stop feeding the beast

#359

Post by cercatrova »

maigret wrote: post #351
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…

> There's a similar problem with things like "user interviews." A common pitfall is to ask people which features they want. Asking what users want is not the right way to do interviews. I advise you read "Just enough research" by Erika Hall. The goal of interviews is to gather enough data points to understand the user needs and struggle, and to know their journey through the product with accuracy, and also understand…

A similar book is The Mom Test. You're not supposed to let the user find how they would've solved the problem (as had they known, they would've solved it themselves), you're supposed to understand their pain points and then design the most effective solution for them.

Re: Google Analytics: Stop feeding the beast

#360

Post by cryptica »

Advertising was never as lucrative as it is today and big data is not as useful as the corporate narrative wants us to think. What's really going on behind the scenes is massive scale credit laundering of newly printed fiat money. That's the real cash cow for these megacorps.
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