The problem is GA is orders of magnitude better than the competition for price to performance ratio.
Stop donating your customers' data to Google Analytics
131–140 of 163 posts
Re: Stop donating your customers' data to Google Analytics
#132It would be handy if people listed here all the alternatives that don't steal your customer info.
Disclaimer: I am the founder of RudderStack
(https://github.com/rudderlabs/rudder-server)
With our open-source data collection framework like RudderStack (an alternative to Segment), dumping data into a warehouse (Redshift/BigQuery/Druid etc) and sticking another open-source visualization layer on top (e.g. like SuperSet), it is possible to put together an alternative to Google Analytics. One of our early users did it and we wrote a blog about it
Re: Stop donating your customers' data to Google Analytics
#133I'm currently building a free analytics service that's the fastest. Ever. Faster than Fathom, Simple Analaytics, pretty much everything except Google Analytics you can think of. https://sdan.io/pingpong Still building it, but you can sign up for when it launches here: https://forms.gle/MhojBWWfdiWjZatC7 (I know it's ironically on google forms and I'll move away soon) > https://sdan.io/pingpong
> I'm currently building a free analytics service that's the fastest. Ever. How do you intend to make money from this free service?
If you're getting over a million hits I might add some incentive to donate, but mainly I take this as my payback to the developer community. I'm launching another product in a different domain at the moment and hoping that can compensate.
At the end of the day, if anything goes wrong, I'll always be happy to open source the whole thing.
Re: Stop donating your customers' data to Google Analytics
#134Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm building an analytics service and thank you for the feedback! I'm currently building a service that's nearly as fast as Google Analytics and simple as can be (although there's going to be a tone of new features soon). Here's the link: https://sdan.io/pingpong . If you want to signup/give feed back, I would greatly appreciate if you do so: https://forms.gle/MhojBWWfdiWjZatC7 !
This caught my eye: https://storage.googleapis.com/pingponganalytics/pingone.js So... I should install a script that loads from Google servers? Apart from that, you probably don't want to tie yourself to google like that. Once the users have this in their pages they will _never_ update it. You should use your own domain.
Yes. You're absolutely right.
I'm just hacking stuff together right now (and recently moved every single piece of infra onto a local server from GCP). I'm still in that migration process.
Re: Stop donating your customers' data to Google Analytics
#135Earlier quoted context omitted.
Please also bear in mind that any developer's personal time (whether your own or someone else's), while important and valuable - is also a trade-off against the aggregated time and value of your users' privacy.
... which, if users actually valued, they'd signal by ceasing to use one's site. There is basically no strong indication right now of any large segment of users boycotting sites because the users care about privacy. There's the same small amount that have always been present and the number doesn't appear to be growing.
It seems to me like a person could care about “these n people lacking privacy in this way” more than n times as much as they would care about any one of them marginally gaining or losing privacy in that way?
Or, idk if that is quite the right formulation for what I mean.
But, at the least, it seems likely that some people will sometimes be willing to take an amount of effort to protect the privacy of a large number of people, when they wouldn’t take that same amount of effort to just protect their own to the same degree.
It seems likely to me that a major impact of lack of privacy comes from many people lacking privacy, in ways that wouldn’t happen if it were only a few lacking it, and also where a few re-gaining it doesn’t influence the impact all that much.
If so, then people not avoiding something because of privacy concerns in sufficient numbers to substantially influence the amount of use, doesn’t seem to entirely rule out that they care about privacy. Perhaps their behavior could be attributed to a collective action problem, where they each would prefer that all of them avoid it, but don’t find it worthwhile to be among only a small number of people avoiding it.
Re: Stop donating your customers' data to Google Analytics
#136Earlier quoted context omitted.
Right, but don't you still need to own a server in order to log these GET requests?
You can do it with one of the hosted services. I don't know which ones support it exactly, but GoatCounter does (although it's kind of an undocumented feature until I merge PR #122).
Cool, I saw GoatCounter on HN a few days ago. I've looked into ways to get a user count without JS and without paying for hosting, but no luck yet. If you find out what free services support it I'd love to know.
Re: Stop donating your customers' data to Google Analytics
#137The main issue is that competition is basically cut out due to the free pricing of GA.
Very few businesses/people would choose to pay for something when GA is free. Why do that? To tell your customers "we value your privacy"?
Re: Stop donating your customers' data to Google Analytics
#138The main issue is that competition is basically cut out due to the free pricing of GA. Very few businesses/people would choose to pay for something when GA is free. Why do that? To tell your customers "we value your privacy"?
Don’t you think that, in today’s climate, customer knowledge and involvement about online tracking, fingerprinting, filter bubbles etc. is at an all time high? And that makes this the best time ever to indeed be proud to tell your customers that “we value your privacy”.
It’s one of Apple’s strongest marketing pillars.
Re: Stop donating your customers' data to Google Analytics
#139The 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.
As someone going through this right now, the main difficulty in being GDPR compliant with GA is the cookie problem.
You can either disable cookies to run GA in cookieless mode [1], which presumably will affect how GA performs, since they can't determine repeat visits (but this might be fine, depending on the type of site you have), or you need to gain active consent to enable analytics cookies [2], which isn't much good if you want metrics for all users, not just those that opt-ed in.
If someone has solved this reasonably, I'd love to hear how! For now it seems like cookieless is my only option.
[1] https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection... [2] https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/guide-to-pecr/cookies-a...
Re: Stop donating your customers' data to Google Analytics
#140The 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…
> 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).
Your council should also have advised you that you need active consent in your cookie banner, since GDPR raised the standard for consent, which is the stumbling block I'm facing. [1]
[1] See "In brief": https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/guide-to-pecr/cookies-a...