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>>> I never quite grasp how the above isn't just a matter of intuition to anyone working in the tech sector. Google Analytics thrives on developers' laziness in
by gedrap 11y ago
>>> I never quite grasp how the above isn't just a matter of intuition to anyone working in the tech sector. Google Analytics thrives on developers' laziness in my opinion.
Ah, the "not invented here" syndrome!
There are tons of things that you could do "in a couple of weeks" that more or less work. However, it doesn't mean you have to or even that it would be a good idea.
If all developers adopted the attitude that you have expressed, there would be thousands of sad sad developers who need to maintain shitty in-house analytics system because someone once said "I could do it in a week". There are tons of awful CMSes already because someone once said "I could do better than wordpress" / "I could create a better framework" / etc.
In a lot of the cases, GA is just good enough. Sure, you might need to spend some time to explore its features (custom dimensions, etc), there's more to GA than a number of pageviews for a given day. There are cases when GA is not enough. Fair enough. But it's definitely not the majority of the cases.
Sure, it makes sense for SpiderOak given it's target audience. However, there's no need to make such a generic statement about 'anyone working in the tech'.
- EGreg 11y agoThe answer is open source. Where is the wordpress to google's analytics product?
- gedrap 11y agoPiwik, Snowplow, etc. They do exist. Then the question is do you really want to maintain the infrastructure required to run the analytics smoothly? Especially if your company has dozens of millions of pageviews a month and depends on the real time needs (extra infrastructure to support that). Are you familiar enough with the stack so you could have a high degree of confidence that you can fix productions issues which are inevitable? Quite often, an honest answer here is 'no'. Then can you afford to lose a few hours/days/weeks (whatever it would take to fix the issue) of data? Again, often the answer here is 'no'. Of course, you have hosted solutions. But they are no better than GA in terms of privacy. Paid support exists too but the cost can skyrocket pretty quickly, on top of paying for the infrastructure and maintaining it.
- eevilspock 11y agoProcessing logs is a lot cheaper than the javascript download and other additional http requests needed for google analytics, not to mention the privacy costs. Cheaper for the website, the user, and the web in general. Not to mention you get perfectly accurate analytics, with no loss due to request blockers or disabled javascript. The code for this is generic. An open source solution costs nothing beyond some CPU to process the logs and a database to store the analytics.
- __jal 11y agoIf you make decisions with money riding on the answers, it costs a lot more than CPU and DB. Perhaps systems administration is somehow very cheap for you, but I'm willing to bet it is still not "nothing" - even if the cost is you personally not watching a TV show you like because you're patching the web server on your analytics box for your personal vanity domain, that's still a cost. For most operations, sysadmins are somewhat expensive, and because of that, busy. This is why Urchin was such a good idea, and why Google bought them - the proposition is to trade your users' privacy for the admin time it takes to support another internal app. There's an absolute no-brainer, assuming you don't care about your users' privacy (IIRC, they were going to sell the service before Google ate them, but that's ancient and trivial history).
- eevilspock 11y ago>because you're patching the web server on your analytics box If you're business is so small that an additional low-volume web server just to display your analytics (you don't need one for the actual tracking) is a big deal, then the same web server that serves your product can serve your analytics. Not a big deal.
- __jal 11y agoI'm glad we both agree that analytics for a vanity domain is not a big deal. It also was a bounding example for my argument, not my argument.