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Companies must stop using Google Analytics

imy.se

171–180 of 672 posts

Re: Companies must stop using Google Analytics

#171
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.

What makes you think it’s legal to use those log files for that purpose? ;)

Re: Companies must stop using Google Analytics

#172
post #46

This case is about the old Analytics that was replaced with Google Analytics 4 in 2020. So they must stop using a version that Google definitely killed July 1 this year. There are arguments that GA4 would fail the same requirements. Denmark hold that view but it hasn't been tried. Their argument is that a EU-citizen that goes to Asia and visits a site there, will have his information sent to US servers and not EU ser…

No need for travels - all you need is to use a VPN/proxy/tor. IP geolocation is not a reliable proxy for physical location (let alone residency - while citizenship doesn't enter the equation at all). I don't find it problematic that the law recognizes this.

Yet IP address is the "personal data" they are claiming falls under the law. It's somehow both personal and useless at identification.

Re: Companies must stop using Google Analytics

#173
post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> will be economically useless if it is banned. Economically set back, maybe. "Useless" (with its implication of permanence) is way OTT.

How many can afford to spend 6 months re-training, and even worse: how many companies are willing to hire people who have no experience in their specific tool. I don't think it's permanent, but it does make them economically useless until such a time as they retrain.

If Google analytics was banned companies would have no choice but to hire and retrain people.

Re: Companies must stop using Google Analytics

#174
post #142
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…

I'm using plausible Analytics. It logs and displays very little data. And no PII data. It's more then enough for me. And a few clients whom I enabled it for, told me they very much liked the simplicity. Less data as a feature!

Plausible is great, and they just added conversion funnel analytics last week which was the big feature I was missing.

Re: Companies must stop using Google Analytics

#175
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is true not just for analytics but pretty much all features. Imagine you are a great speaker and instructor and have an audience. Right now you GIFT it to YouTube, Twitter, etc. and they monetize it for you, give you a tiny percentage, and even constantly direct your audience to competitors and other distractions. In fact YouTube even sells an option to advertise your videos on your competitor’s videos! I say —…

Holy 2008 what a website! I won't comment on any specific design choices here, but accessibility-wise: the text on the team page seems fuzzy? Looks like it's a text-shadow.

What is 2008 about this website? I don't know any websites from 2008 that look like that. What do current websites have which websites from 2008 don't?

When I visit YouTube, Facebook or Twitter, they seem extremely "busy", overrun with ads, and rather ugly, but we are used to them. I am not sure it's so bad to have a clean layout. But I am open to constructive criticism.

Re: Companies must stop using Google Analytics

#176
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…

> That said; we also have "Cloud Engineer" as a job title, so I'm not sure we will learn this lesson. Comparing something as vast and broadly reaching as "Cloud" is a disengenous comparison to something as specific as a tool like Google Analytics, kind of a wierd comparison IMO. The entire pattern of tech is towards the "cloud" - even if you refuse to use the big ones like Amazon, Microsoft, or Google, it's still tec…

> Comparing something as vast and broadly reaching as "Cloud" is a disengenous comparison to something as specific as a tool like Google Analytics

Is it? Tons of cloud people I know are very narrowly specialized and certified on AWS or Azure. They certainly don't ever apply for jobs using the other...

I'm sure they could retrain. But I'm also sure they don't want to.

Re: Companies must stop using Google Analytics

#177
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…

With a SaaS application, we use it for monitoring customer activity to drive support and sales renewal activity, to determine which features particular customers are using, to determine how they are using it, and how these things are changing over time. It's a vital part of everything we do from a product and sales perspective.

Re: Companies must stop using Google Analytics

#178
post #91

Every time a client makes me implement google analytics or facebook pixel code I die a little inside. And even though some actually use google ads, they have zero benefit from using analytics. I know, because I'm the one adjusting their campaigns. It's just another thing everyone does and one would be stupid not to, right, right? The lemming mentality always makes me sad because so many bad things in our society are…

Could you link to a site where you’ve rolled your own SPA? Or ideally the source code. I’d like to take a look as not many people do that, even less do so with enough attention to detail not to cause UX regressions (not that third-party solutions are brilliant either).

I'm an enjoyer of anonymity online and would rather not doxx myself. However if you have a specific question, I'd be happy to answer. I use js/jq for the front-end and php for the backend. Once you have your own CMS, turning it into a SPA means turning your index.php into a index.html that is php free and relies on ajax calls to change the content. So at minimum you need a mainbody.php and a head.php that accept inputs. After that it's just onclick actions on buttons that trigger the ajax function changeMainbody(targetPage). Or changeHead() after a user loggs in. On the phone app side you use the regular WebView, to avoid any cross-origin blocks and problems. Alternatively you can run it locally and pass the cookies as inputs - depending on the app needs. Should be safe using https, right? I fully expect to be scolded by someone with 20years more experience, but I guess that's how you learn.

Of course there's more to it, depending on the app needs. In my case it also auto refreshes the contents on a js timer.

What UX regressions did you have in mind as troubling? Things like resetting one's password if forgotten? Well all those things need to be turned into their own ajax calls and php scripts as well and sometimes reworked to fit mobile users needs. For resetting passwords specifically I just copied what Twitch.com does.

Re: Companies must stop using Google Analytics

#179
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…

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.

If you could trivially implement Matomo (a project that has been developing over 16 years) in JS, please open source it. Would love to get rid of the PHP in our stack.

Re: Companies must stop using Google Analytics

#180
post #9

Good. I hope the same authority does a round of fines for companies using noncompliant tracking opt out UX too. A nice chunk of total revenue as a fine without prior warning for anyone showing the "Accept all/Show purposes" question would be delicious.

To get the process started for a specific company, submit a complaint to the supervisory authority of the country the company is based in. Contacts: https://edpb.europa.eu/about-edpb/about-edpb/members_en

As an example, the article mentions these specific audits were triggered by complaints by NOYB.

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