Counting Ghosts: A case for abandoning web analytics • Hacker News Board

Re: Counting Ghosts: A case for abandoning web analytics

#61

Post by digitalengineer » Tue, Sep 19, 2023, 5:57 PM UTC

josefresco wrote: post #14

I build websites for small business, and since the beginning have used Google Analytics. What used to be a valuable tool that I would eagerly tell my clients to utilize, has now become an overly complex nightmare I loathe to install and rarely recommend to my clients. I recently had a client ask to use StatCounter.com (my reaction: "they're still around?!?") and it was refreshingly simple, much like the original Goog…

GA4 is actually the simple version of GA. Lots of stuff is hidden. So it looks lol Google did exactly what you wanted )‘simplified Analytics service’). However, if you want an even simpler solution: Matamo is totally free as well.

Re: Counting Ghosts: A case for abandoning web analytics

#62

Post by marcosdumay » Tue, Sep 19, 2023, 6:05 PM UTC

gfodor wrote: post #36

I don't get it - it is a nice sentiment, but the crux of the argument seems to "go with your gut." The reason web analytics has been so popular is that you can actually improve your product significantly without as much subjectivity. Before web analytics, going with your gut was the only option. It turns out, threading events through a funnel that show you lost 90% of your users because your button doesn't show up on…

> Before web analytics, going with your gut was the only option.

The analytics people insistent denial that usability research ever existed seems to have reached a new level.

Re: Counting Ghosts: A case for abandoning web analytics

#63

Post by eddythompson80 » Tue, Sep 19, 2023, 6:06 PM UTC

astura wrote: post #44

eddythompson80 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ll raise you one better I came across yesterday https://logz.io/learn/how-to-run-opentelemetry-demo-with-log... If it’s not obvious, try scrolling a bit then try to go back to this page

Did they erase my browser history?

Just burn your browser and get a new one.

I was trying to look up what instrumentation with OTLP looks like and got so much rage yesterday I had to quit and do something else.

Re: Counting Ghosts: A case for abandoning web analytics

#64

Post by fmajid » Tue, Sep 19, 2023, 6:09 PM UTC

dustymcp wrote: post #60

mighmi wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've personally never been in a situation where analytics drove change. Even mere A/B testing seems like a ghost in (most?) organizations, where management or designers decide to force through their personal preferences. That said, I would love to join such an organization. Any suggestions on where to find data driven jobs?

Amazon?

The second half of this article explains Amazon's process around metrics, well worth a read:

https://commoncog.com/goodharts-law-not-useful/

Re: Counting Ghosts: A case for abandoning web analytics

#65

Post by masswerk » Tue, Sep 19, 2023, 6:11 PM UTC

consoomer wrote: post #54

I'm not even sure what I just read. I thought it was going to explain why they don't use any analytics anymore and all I got as a 10,000 foot answer that could be summarized as, "Well, because!" I don't use analytics on any of my services simply because I don't like analytics and people tracking me, so why would I do it to others? Does it mean I don't track my business metrics? No. I still measure general conversion…

As I understood it, the idea is that analytics are the wrong answer, or rather, if they are an answer, at all, you're asking the wrong questions. Which I, in turn, interpret as a signal for more opinionated approaches.

(Meaning, if you follow these kind of metrics closely, you may actually miss crucial opportunities, as these will always bind you to the perceived mainstream. Moreover, these analytics are still sparse and there may be hidden variables. E.g, you may have changed something in January, but what happened else in January, elsewhere, which may have had some impact? Finally, these metrics are always about intermediate goals and partial results, but never about the entire product or mission. Metrics for these are found elsewhere.)

Disclaimer: I abandoned all analytics for my own projects some years ago, and I do not miss anything. So I may be somewhat sympathetic to this.

Re: Counting Ghosts: A case for abandoning web analytics

#66

Post by gfodor » Tue, Sep 19, 2023, 6:13 PM UTC

marcosdumay wrote: post #62

gfodor wrote: post #36

I don't get it - it is a nice sentiment, but the crux of the argument seems to "go with your gut." The reason web analytics has been so popular is that you can actually improve your product significantly without as much subjectivity. Before web analytics, going with your gut was the only option. It turns out, threading events through a funnel that show you lost 90% of your users because your button doesn't show up on…

> Before web analytics, going with your gut was the only option. The analytics people insistent denial that usability research ever existed seems to have reached a new level.

What I wrote wasn't an insistent denial, try steelmanning next time. Extrapolating the magnitude of problems from user research is hard, since you're still sampling a distribution.

Re: Counting Ghosts: A case for abandoning web analytics

#67

Post by julianeon » Tue, Sep 19, 2023, 6:29 PM UTC

If you don't have any analytics, then how do you know your audience size? Is it 10 people per month? 1000 people? 1,000,000 people?

No offense but I can't accept "it doesn't matter."

Re: Counting Ghosts: A case for abandoning web analytics

#68

Post by rambambram » Tue, Sep 19, 2023, 6:30 PM UTC

For my no-code website package I built a simple non-tracking analytics tool (I'd rather call it 'visitor stats') and I definitely like to see what language my visitors use on their machine (guesswork for where they might come from), what screen size they have (on all my sites it's steadily more mobile than desktop, which is to be expected nowadays but was an eye-opener for me when I got back as a webdev a couple of years ago), what referring sites they come from and which pages are most visited.

For me personally, the visitor stats of my own websites are a little bit as 'likes' on social media (nice to have for a general idea about my content being liked), but then without big tech in between.

Re: Counting Ghosts: A case for abandoning web analytics

#69

Post by barnabee » Tue, Sep 19, 2023, 6:34 PM UTC

gfodor wrote: post #36

I don't get it - it is a nice sentiment, but the crux of the argument seems to "go with your gut." The reason web analytics has been so popular is that you can actually improve your product significantly without as much subjectivity. Before web analytics, going with your gut was the only option. It turns out, threading events through a funnel that show you lost 90% of your users because your button doesn't show up on…

> improve your product significantly without as much subjectivity

It's fake objectivity that often leads to a race to the boottom.

Between "engagement" as a terrible proxy for user happiness/success and the idea that it's more important and better if nobody can fail to use your app's "UX" than it is if it to enables a smaller number of people who take the time to learn to do really great things, all wrapped up in the VC driven dream of hypermegablitzscaling, all a reliance on analytics does is guarantee mediocrity.

I want software created by people who care enough not to look at the data.

Re: Counting Ghosts: A case for abandoning web analytics

#70

Post by didntcheck » Tue, Sep 19, 2023, 6:36 PM UTC

pcmaffey wrote: post #56

vpaulus wrote: post #3

Whatever it is about, I refused to read because of this silly scrolling/paginating

*Update: I removed the pagination and scrolling effects. The entire post can be read on a single page now. (And I didn't need analytics to understand something wasn't working lol.)

But you did need user feedback, which analytics would help with