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Google Analytics: Stop feeding the beast

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Re: Google Analytics: Stop feeding the beast

#61

Post by onion2k »

heipei wrote: post #3

Here's a crazy idea: Don't use analytics at all but focus on your product. If your success relies solely on "improving conversions" by tracking your users and then changing the position and color of your "Checkout" button then maybe try setting yourself apart such that customers want to buy your product even despite an obnoxious purchasing flow. Only then start optimizing it. More serious thoughts: Google Analytics i…

I removed Google Analytics from https://ooer.com because it was taking my lighthouse performance score from 100 down to 99, and I wasn't using the data for anything anyway.

Re: Google Analytics: Stop feeding the beast

#62

Post by zserge »

softwaredoug wrote: post #4

My personal site I don’t use any analytics. My metric I care about is whether I’m having an impact on my colleagues and domain. I generally don’t try to mode that quantitatively, I care more about whether it seems people around me are influenced or helped by what I write. If it’s useful to some colleagues, that’s enough for me.

If the content of your blog is not too niche - one can easily live without analytics by just looking at the numbers of upvotes on HN/Reddit etc. However, for starters and for very narrow topics some kind of analytics would still be useful to help them grow the audience.

Re: Google Analytics: Stop feeding the beast

#64

Post by nineplay »

heipei wrote: post #3

Here's a crazy idea: Don't use analytics at all but focus on your product. If your success relies solely on "improving conversions" by tracking your users and then changing the position and color of your "Checkout" button then maybe try setting yourself apart such that customers want to buy your product even despite an obnoxious purchasing flow. Only then start optimizing it. More serious thoughts: Google Analytics i…

> If your success relies solely on "improving conversions" by tracking your users and then changing the position and color of your "Checkout" button

The problem is typically that you don't know if the color of your checkout button is a problem. Without some level of analytics you are only guessing as to what is driving your customers away and if your customers aren't educated engineers with comfortable incomes, you are probably going to guess wrong.

I've worked with analytics and I've often been surprised at where customers run into trouble.

Re: Google Analytics: Stop feeding the beast

#66

Post by mschuster91 »

z92 wrote: post #23

Parse your server's access log file. The way it had been done for decades. "Analog" was popular then, Should be better options now.

Access logs are almost useless for analytics these days... all they give you is the URL that was visited and some extremely rough idea what OS and browser the client is using (UA parsing is a hellhole).

You don't get any more detailed information (e.g. device class, screen size/orientation) from analytics logs.

Also, if you're using one of the free hosting providers (GH Pages and the likes) you're not even going to get access logs.

Re: Google Analytics: Stop feeding the beast

#67

Post by amzans »

boffinism wrote: post #24

I really didn't want to use Google Analytics for a personal site (details in bio), but because it's a non-monetised personal site I really didn't want to spend money to know how many visitors I had, but because I'm trying to learn about content I really did want to know how many visitors I had, because that's a good way of discovering what content resonates etc. I tried PanelBear, but because I briefly hit the front…

Hey I'm happy you gave Panelbear a try! It's always nice to hear someone is using what I've built.

Regarding the free tier, I decided to offer it after hearing many people saying "I wish there was a free alternative for a blog that gets less than There's no strings attached. Only volume limits and shorter data retention (to prevent my AWS costs from blowing up).

About traffic spikes (eg. reaching the front page of HN): even if you go over the limits, the system won't start rate limiting you for another 72 hours - that way you won't lose data during traffic spikes.

Hope it helps!

Re: Google Analytics: Stop feeding the beast

#68

Post by system16 »

tobiaslins wrote: post #60
system16 wrote: post #53

I've had so many clients from small companies to hobbyists convinced it's critical that Google Analytics be installed on their websites. Some even horrified when suggesting they don't need it. In most cases, the results aren't even looked at or acted upon, so this bloat is just sitting there and feeding Google data with little in return.

you could use analytics such as https://splitbee.io :) ux is great and you can use it without being a data scientist

When suggesting a product, I think it's typically best practice to disclose when you are the founder.

Re: Google Analytics: Stop feeding the beast

#69

Post by crazygringo »

heipei wrote: post #3

Here's a crazy idea: Don't use analytics at all but focus on your product. If your success relies solely on "improving conversions" by tracking your users and then changing the position and color of your "Checkout" button then maybe try setting yourself apart such that customers want to buy your product even despite an obnoxious purchasing flow. Only then start optimizing it. More serious thoughts: Google Analytics i…

> 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 huge performance issues, for example.

You don't know these things until you measure them. That's analytics.

Obviously analytics are only one piece of product improvement -- there's sitting down with users for 30 minutes to watch them use the product, interviews, surveys, etc.

But analytics are a critical piece. You can't focus on the product without analytics.

Analytics isn't just about conversion. Analytics is about the entire product experience.

Re: Google Analytics: Stop feeding the beast

#70

Post by Moru »

nineplay wrote: post #64
heipei wrote: post #3

Here's a crazy idea: Don't use analytics at all but focus on your product. If your success relies solely on "improving conversions" by tracking your users and then changing the position and color of your "Checkout" button then maybe try setting yourself apart such that customers want to buy your product even despite an obnoxious purchasing flow. Only then start optimizing it. More serious thoughts: Google Analytics i…

> If your success relies solely on "improving conversions" by tracking your users and then changing the position and color of your "Checkout" button The problem is typically that you don't know if the color of your checkout button is a problem. Without some level of analytics you are only guessing as to what is driving your customers away and if your customers aren't educated engineers with comfortable incomes, you a…

I mostly run into problems in webstores because they just can't run without pulling javascripts and iframes from 50 different domains. uMatrix blocks them all and I can't be bothered to figure out the absolute minimum to allow to get to order so I just leave. Do I even show up in your google analytics?
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