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Google Analytics: Stop feeding the beast

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Re: Google Analytics: Stop feeding the beast

#71

Post by Wowfunhappy »

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…

When I first put my personal website up on Github Pages last summer, I didn't include any analytics. I figured it was unnecessary—why should I care who was looking?

I quickly realized the obvious—without any analytics, I had no idea whether or not I was just screaming into the ether. Even for a simple noncommercial site, it's discomforting!

I now have Cloudflare Analytics and I'm much more satisfied. I feel as though I'm respecting my users's privacy, while also getting a basic sense of traffic.

Re: Google Analytics: Stop feeding the beast

#72

Post by ehnto »

melomal wrote: post #59
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…

One sentence has decimated my digital marketing career and I honestly couldn't agree more. I think this has something to do with more than just Google itself though and good old capitalism. There are heaps of SaaS platforms out there (from my last point of reference there were 2000+ MarTech companies, I would guess double that now) that focuses on; A/B testing, email marketing automation, customer success tools, heat…

Focusing so hardcore on metrics can also lead to the loss of a curated product's edge. If you just keep following what the lemmings do you would end up falling off a cliff eventually, it often takes domain knowledge and experience to make educated opinions about how a product should move forward.

Selfishly, I hope you do stay in digital marketing, and be the change I want to see. Ad-tech needs some sanity and reality checks, and I hear a rumbling in the deep around ethical advertising practices.

Ad-tech is not just feeling more manipulative by the year, it's also feeling more and more like snake oil to your average business. I feel like there's a niche opening up for honest feeling, more simple online advertising networks.

Re: Google Analytics: Stop feeding the beast

#73

Post by toss1 »

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…

>>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.

YUP!!

Any company, especially startups, should treat analytics they way they should treat MBAs - as a plausibly useful sub-function *after everything else in the product/service is running well at scale*.

Before that, the entire focus should be on the product and how it gets smoothly to the customer.

Only when there is lots of extra sales and production capacity, and lots of extra cash piling up, THEN is the time to start adding financial guys to efficiently manage it, and analytics to optimize your channels, etc.

Plus, NEVER let either of those tails wag the dog. Once a company's financial numbers start to rely on the finance department, or the sales numbers start to rely on channel optimization, the death spiral has started. It may take a while and look like an improvement at first (e.g., see GE), but it is still a death spiral.

Focus on product and customers, period.

Re: Google Analytics: Stop feeding the beast

#74

Post by tristor »

dna_polymerase wrote: post #28
tristor wrote: post #13

After a recent story on HN about all the horrible tracking Disqus started to do after being acquired by an ad-tech company, I ditched it and Google Analytics on my semi-dormant personal website. The process of fixing it got me interested in working on my site again and I ended up upstreaming the patches into the Hugo theme I use[1], so now everyone with that theme can benefit easily. I ended up using GoatCounter[2] a…

Congrats, now you give your visitor‘s data to goatcounter instead of Google. If that catches on we might see this article about them in the future. Remove stats altogether, pay for your website stats, or roll your own. Just exchanging the free script isn‘t doing anything.

Removing stats altogether is certainly an option, but one of my motivating factors for expanding and working on my personal site is to write articles that people find interesting or helpful. Stats are one of the best ways to identify what those things are.

Rolling my own or self-hosting is also an option, but breaks my current flow which is based around using an SSG and hosting only static assets which can be CDNified. My intention with my site design is not to require any sort of dynamic structure or backend services, everything is just static HTML, CSS, and JS. As such, things like comments, analytics, etc are most easily integrated via a SaaS.

Given that GoatCounter doesn't use cookies, doesn't do any cross-site tracking, and provides me controls to limit what data is collected and how long it's retained, it seems a fair option given my constraints. I'm open to other alternatives, but I don't think it's a reasonable or tenable position to say that people shouldn't have website stats. Fundamentally the stats I'm collecting are basically the same information which would be contained in a http server log, hardly egregious, and something any user should expect to be collected if you're connecting to a server on the open internet.

Re: Google Analytics: Stop feeding the beast

#75

Post by crummybowley »

crazygringo wrote: post #69
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…

Yes, but analytics is also used to trick folks into buying a paper back full of shit.

A good product, that does what it advertises, does not need analytics. But a bad product, that somebody desperately wants to make successful, or at least successful enough to sell to a PE and exit, needs analytics.

Re: Google Analytics: Stop feeding the beast

#76

Post by pletsch »

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…

I use Matomo, it runs on my home server, its open-source. Pretty sure you could run it on a Pi. There's a docker container that you can spin up in a few minutes.

https://matomo.org/

Re: Google Analytics: Stop feeding the beast

#77

Post by ksm1717 »

seventh-chord wrote: post #36
smt88 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Disclaimer: I hate Google Analytics because I hate Google, I hate monopolies, and I hate excessive hoarding of user data. I think the necessary aspects of tracking can be maintained without having all the bad aspects, but we need to break up the ad companies first. > without watching exactly how every customer looks at shelves This is absolutely not true. Do you have experience with managing brick and mortar stores?…

Except the things you mention correspond to looking at sales data in your backend DB, not putting google analytics in your frontend, right?

I think classifying grocery store operations as frontend/backend is too far from reality to be a useful analogy. That’s not to say that I don’t agree that google analytics is more insidious than just about anything grocery stores do.

Re: Google Analytics: Stop feeding the beast

#78

Post by mrtksn »

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…

Let's think about it. Are games doing analytics? Games are essentially UIs that people pay for the privilege to use.

Although I am sure that contemporary game makers use analytics to understand user behaviour and optimize for in game spending and engagement, at least in the bigger games probably the core experience comes from creative human processes.

The more the analytics the further optimised the game would be towards KPI.

Also, I suspect that Netflix is creating it's materials based on analytics rather than creative human input.

Maybe the problem is not analytics but greed and ill chosen KPI? Pre-total-tracking world, creatives still needed to test ideas and to test ideas you need to be able to measure. They would pay attention to what sells, how people react to a specific line etc.

Maybe it was more fun because it was less optimised for profit?

Re: Google Analytics: Stop feeding the beast

#79

Post by chubot »

When I started https://www.oilshell.org/ I added Google Analytics because it was easy, and because it was something I'd seen a lot of other people do.

After actually using the web interface, I found it almost useless for getting feedback about my site.

So I switched it off and haven't missed it at all. Instead I simply analyze my own logs with a Python program. (There a bunch of lightweight alternative services that I could have considered, but my scheme works and is customizable)

I was lazy about this and should have done it much earlier, so I encourage others to do the same.

-----

It should also save energy because your user's phone doesn't have to make a connection to another server. The original hit to http://www.oilshell.org/ has all that's necessary for logging. (no cookies in this case, but there could be if you want)

Google analytics were so prevalent that the NSA used the cookies to track (or attempt to track) the entire population:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2013/12/10...

If you simply don't include the analytics, then your users won't be subject to such threats. (this threat may be mitigated by now, but who knows if there's a similar one. If you don't need it, the easiest way is to not use the service)

Re: Google Analytics: Stop feeding the beast

#80

Post by janpot »

crazygringo wrote: post #69
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…

> you can find out if customers are using your new useful feature or if they can't find it

How do you find out if your "useful" feature isn't as useful as you thought it was? Or is it really always "the user can't find it"?

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