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Stop donating your customers' data to Google Analytics

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Re: Stop donating your customers' data to Google Analytics

#11

Post by C1sc0cat »

lbrito wrote: post #2

So the solution is to use Amazon's tracker? I appreciate the problem and I would like to stop using GA in my static pages as well, but trading one privately-owned software from a tech giant for another privately-owned software from a different tech giant seems a bit ludicrous. I would readily swap GA for some decent open-source solution though.

And the freebie GA doesn't limit you to a 25% sample across the board basically the bigger the date range and amount of sessions the more sampling you get.

Id be interested to see how amazons et up would handle the set up I am backup analytics nerd for.

Major beverage brand hundreds of websites, multiple locales per site (a dozen or more for the big brands) on and has to handle roll up as well as well as custom metrics and dimensions.

Re: Stop donating your customers' data to Google Analytics

#13

Post by tomrod »

exotree wrote: post #10
clarry wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I would like to stop using GA in my static pages Why don't you? Do you really need this tracking at all?

Depends on the job, purpose of site, and goals being accomplished. Hard to demonstrate value and improve digital business outcomes without GA (and other tools like HEAP Analytics).

Yeah, the "value" being shown rarely actually investigates causal impact. Else they'd recognize that the literature shows that digital advertising has no measurable (provable) impact.[0]

I recognize that there is more to digital business than adds, such as paternalistic commercial guidance, dark patterns, web traversal, and so on. However, I haven't seen proof that these patterns matter, especially given recent critiques on A/B testing (relative to multi-armed bandit).

[0] https://www.gwern.net/docs/traffic/2015-lewis.pdf

Re: Stop donating your customers' data to Google Analytics

#14

Post by AndrewStephens »

The headline is wrong, it should be changed to "Stop donating your customers' data to Google Analytics ... donate to another large corporation instead!"

There are much better options out there. Quite apart from the solutions listed in these comments, a better option is to reconsider whether you really need analytics at all. Maybe the answer is yes if you are a business trying to understand your customers. But not every blog and project page needs analytics.

Re: Stop donating your customers' data to Google Analytics

#15

Post by snowwrestler »

The suggested Google Analytics implementation today is a collection of three separate Google technologies: the original GA, Doubleclick cookies to track demographics and interest, and Tag Manager to manage them.

The original GA does not give Google useful cross-site user data because it uses only first-party cookies and anonymizes data as it collected it. To my knowledge you can still implement GA this way If you want to. Such an implementation would be GDPR compliant in not tracking any personal data, although your counsel might still say you need to list them as “analytics” cookies in a cookie banner (mine did).

Re: Stop donating your customers' data to Google Analytics

#16

Post by winternett »

exotree wrote: post #10
clarry wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I would like to stop using GA in my static pages Why don't you? Do you really need this tracking at all?

Depends on the job, purpose of site, and goals being accomplished. Hard to demonstrate value and improve digital business outcomes without GA (and other tools like HEAP Analytics).

I think it depends on what type of business you conduct...

Just like people are putting Alexa in their homes and businesses, it can be potentially used for anti-competitive reasons, or to get inside information. This will get worse over time as we know...

A simple example is hacking a CEO's Alexa to listen to his phone calls at home to get insider trading tips...

The companies that make these products are not bound by an official code of ethics, and Governments barely understand the implications of technology, much less than corruption of technology. Laws to prevent misuse and manipulation of consumer products are weak, but proper investigation and enforcement of those laws are even weaker.

Google has also been changing Chrome Browser to suit it's information gathering needs as well. If they own the majority of market share, they won't really need their analytic tools on every site. We need to start thinking on a larger scale about how companies can influence culture, markets, and lives, and how to ensure there are proper rules in place to prevent catastrophe.

Re: Stop donating your customers' data to Google Analytics

#19

Post by jka »

akie wrote: post #4
lbrito wrote: post #2

So the solution is to use Amazon's tracker? I appreciate the problem and I would like to stop using GA in my static pages as well, but trading one privately-owned software from a tech giant for another privately-owned software from a different tech giant seems a bit ludicrous. I would readily swap GA for some decent open-source solution though.

I'm only aware of https://matomo.org/ (formerly Piwik) as a good open source alternative to Google Analytics. Are there others?

I can vouch for Countly ( https://github.com/countly ) which is open source, supports a few different platforms (web, iOS, Android), and has a nice administrative web interface.

The web SDK also supports collection of client-side JavaScript errors, which is neat for tracking down bugs and things which might harm user experience.

Re: Stop donating your customers' data to Google Analytics

#20

Post by nwellnhof »

snowwrestler wrote: post #15

The suggested Google Analytics implementation today is a collection of three separate Google technologies: the original GA, Doubleclick cookies to track demographics and interest, and Tag Manager to manage them. The original GA does not give Google useful cross-site user data because it uses only first-party cookies and anonymizes data as it collected it. To my knowledge you can still implement GA this way If you wan…

Yes, you can configure Google Analytics so that no data is shared with other Google services, at least no data about single visitors. I also came to the conclusion that using GA this way complies with the GDPR and I don't really understand what all the fuzz is about.
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