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Companies must stop using Google Analytics

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Re: Companies must stop using Google Analytics

#101

Post by namaria »

ramraj07 wrote: post #75
dijit wrote: post #34

My sister-in-law (girlfriends brothers girlfriend, not that it matters) recently studied for a data analytics certification. Actually several. The entire course (located on here: https://medieinstitutet.se ) is based on Google Analytics. Now her entire value is tied to the use of Google Analytics, she will almost certainly fight very hard to ensure that these skills remain relevant, nobody would want to retrain for 6…

You can learn the most generic course out there and still turn out clueless, you can also learn the most specific tool and come out and be able to generalize. As far as I can tell this depends entirely on the individuals ability to be resourceful. In that respect a GA specific course might help them Get their first job faster so maybe that’s not a bad thing at all.

If you already have the background to understand computation and software, you're: a) not one of the people at risk of making this bad decision or getting stuck there; b) already in possession of much more valuable skills than knowing some software suite.

Getting this background requires a non trivial amount of time. It's easy to take our ability to generalize different computer based tools when you already understand digital computer architecture and know a few programming languages. The vast majority of people do not start from such a broad base of knowledge when choosing some software tool to learn.

Re: Companies must stop using Google Analytics

#102

Post by dragonwriter »

ori_prior wrote: post #89
dijit wrote: post #34

My sister-in-law (girlfriends brothers girlfriend, not that it matters) recently studied for a data analytics certification. Actually several. The entire course (located on here: https://medieinstitutet.se ) is based on Google Analytics. Now her entire value is tied to the use of Google Analytics, she will almost certainly fight very hard to ensure that these skills remain relevant, nobody would want to retrain for 6…

This level of dependence on certain tools is neither rare nor unprecedented. Your run-of-the-mill business drone will be trained on Word/Excel/Outlook and be hard to impossible to retrain on anything else (either because of actual stupidity or resistance to change). This already starts at school where "Informatik" is often just learning where to click in Microsoft products. Similarly, tradespeople often specialize in…

> Your average car repair guy will often be forced to specialize in one brand of car.

Not because of skill issues, but maybe forced because they work for a dealership that sells a particular make exclusively or, less often, a specialty shop; most “car repair guys” outside of those environments have to be generalists.

> Your home appliance guy will preferrably sell and repair one brand of washing machine, dryer, dishwasher.

IME, the sales are done by shops that carry many brands, and delivery, installation, repair donw by firms that often have relations with the retailers and handle whatever you get from them, including multiple unita of different brands that come together with the same team. They may also have relations with the manufacturers, but those don’t seem usually to be exclusive.

Re: Companies must stop using Google Analytics

#103

Post by amelius »

I'm afraid this is not going to help much.

Instead, we should have a law against a panopticon.

I wonder how fast we'd have such a law if Google were a Chinese company ...

Perhaps the way to get rid of Google Analytics is thus to start a Chinese company and make everybody use their analytics tool.

Re: Companies must stop using Google Analytics

#104

Post by dathinab »

Nothing surprising, this was kinda clear already not too long after the regulation was passed and since then quite a lot of curt decisions which bordered that topic have painted a very clear picture of "it's not really compatible with the law/regulation but you might get away with it anyway".

Also given some scamy things google was found to be doing in their ad business and personal experiences people I know had when running different statistics and ad providers along side of google and noticing gross divergence I _personally_ really wouldn't trust google analytics or ads at all if I where a business.

Re: Companies must stop using Google Analytics

#105

Post by sethammons »

oneeyedpigeon wrote: post #60
pSYoniK wrote: post #59

What I am curios about is how much people actually use ALL the analytics information provided by a lot of these tools. I know Matomo and other such open source/self-hostable solutions, but how much info do you really use? I think for most use cases users would want to know if their content is consumed/read. Maybe how long someone spends on it and where they came from. For this sort of stuff you can write a small scri…

> For this sort of stuff you can write a small script to parse your logs. IFF you have access to your logs.

Why would you not have access to your logs? Not having access to logs doesn't even make sense to me. We honor hippa and gdpr and we can access logs. Beyond that, I am a proponent of structured logging and log aggregators that can help you see trends and analyze the logs, like Splunk or, to a lessor extent, DataDog.

Re: Companies must stop using Google Analytics

#106

Post by red_trumpet »

oneeyedpigeon wrote: post #82
Pannoniae wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or even if you don't want to use your web server's logs for this purpose for whatever reason, this is quite trivial to implement in JS yourself. No need for GA and other bloated analytics frameworks.

Well, you still need some kind of backend to store the data. You can send it to a 3rd party, but then you'll run into all the same GDPR issues.

> all the same GDPR issues

Not necessarily. If I read the article correctly, it is about sending data to the US:

> The complaints allege that the companies, in violation of the law, transfer personal data to the United States.

So if the 3rd party is inside the EU, you might be fine. Or at least you may run into different GDPR issues.

Re: Companies must stop using Google Analytics

#107

Post by viraptor »

capybara_2020 wrote: post #90
Cthulhu_ wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Roll your own" is hubris, unless you have the time, energy, inclination, theoretical knowledge, etc; I wouldn't try and solve solved problems if you can help it. But, host your own is definitely recommended IMO; a lot of the GDPR issues are resolved if you just host your own, because no data is shared to a 3rd party. Then you only need to worry about getting some approval and data retention. I'm sure data retention…

I would love to know other peoples opinion on this. But I am coming around to the idea that self hosted(atleast partially) might be cheaper and better if you are a single dev/a small team. The learning curve on the tools/hosting providers out there is has become very steep. Plus the costs are unclear with a lot of cloud providers and monthly subscription charges across the services you need can quickly stack up or th…

> I tried deploying an app to AWS a few months back.

AWS is a toolbox you can use to construct your app deployment/hosting environment. Unless you know or want to know how to (for example) setup routing on VPCs, it may be better to go with someone actually hosting apps rather than infrastructure.

Re: Companies must stop using Google Analytics

#108

Post by belorn »

oneeyedpigeon wrote: post #82
Pannoniae wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or even if you don't want to use your web server's logs for this purpose for whatever reason, this is quite trivial to implement in JS yourself. No need for GA and other bloated analytics frameworks.

Well, you still need some kind of backend to store the data. You can send it to a 3rd party, but then you'll run into all the same GDPR issues.

If the website is not just a static html page, there is likely a web-server with a database that can store information.

Re: Companies must stop using Google Analytics

#109

Post by jkukul »

bborud wrote: post #100

What analytics solutions are there that you can host yourself?

I tried the self-hosted version of Matomo [1][2] a few years back but I remember it was a bit underwhelming for the effort required to set it up.

[1] https://matomo.org

[2] https://github.com/matomo-org

Re: Companies must stop using Google Analytics

#110

Post by o_m »

acatton wrote: post #45

Who needs analytics? I'm confused. When I worked at companies using google analytics, 99.9% of the time they could have gotten this data from server logs with something like awstats or goaccess. To this day, I still don't get what's the point of embedding some javascript to do extra-requests or a tracking pixel, when the data was already given once.

I've worked at an web agency creating many websites for mid-sized companies (million of views each month). My conclusion is that it is about feelings. It feels good to know you have some data about your users, even if you in most cases are not going to look at it. If someone hire someone to look at it then the findings are not acted upon.

The best way to get feedback is to talk to your users face to face, or do a questionnaire.

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