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Piwik, Snowplow, etc. They do exist. Then the question is do you really want to maintain the infrastructure required to run the analytics smoothly? Especially

by gedrap 11y ago

Piwik, 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 ago
Processing 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 ago
  If 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 ago
      I'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.
- iheartmemcache 11y ago
  It's been a while since I've used GA but being able to segment into age, gender, and interests(1) are things that you can't do without paying a marketing aggregator hundreds of thousands of dollars a month or using GA. You can do some geolocation classification and things like campaign effectiveness, bounce rate, etc, but since Google has so much aggregate data off-hand the value of being able to classify user-x as "Male, 40s, Interests-similar-to-demographic-we-sell-to"(2) is invaluable whether you're selling seats of enterprise software, high-fashion luxury items, or cheapo stoner knick-knacks. You can't really market segment with your own software. (1) https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/3125360?hl=en&ref_topic=3123779 https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/3125360?hl=en&re... (2) https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/2819948 https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/2819948
  - eevilspock 11y ago
    Sure. So now the question is, why would Google offer all of this for "free"? Is it really free? Who pays, and in what ways?
    - iheartmemcache 11y ago
      Obviously, they're using the same information that's helping you calibrate your campaigns to add to the hive-mind, so they can further data-mine. You're sacrificing the anonymity of your end-users in doing so. Obviously they're offering it so that they can refine their profile of you more accurately to sell ads / direct more relevant traffic to you better. I'm not an industrial engineer but I've been reading about it for the last few weeks. I turned off Adblock for a while and even with my Opt-out plugins(a,b) I started getting ads for $4,500 Fluke multimeters. The combination of one's search history plus a fairly comprehensive history of the sites you visit(b) to a terrifying degree, but at the same time, the average business with only a few million dollars a year going towards both sales and marketing can't really approach Quantcast and ask for access to their API. a: https://tools.google.com/dlpage/gaoptout https://tools.google.com/dlpage/gaoptout b:https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/do-not-track/ckdcpbflcbeillmamogkpmdhnbeggfja?hl=en-US https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/do-not-track/ckdcp... b: I don't have the study off-hand, but IIRC some guy after finishing his masters from Stanford wanted to assess how much information Google had re: an average users browser history. The findings, based off Common Crawl data of the top 100k sites + presence of GA.js yielded something like ~> 75% of the web was tracked (not to be confused with how much of an end-user's traffic is tracked, that number will be far higher) based on sites with a GA.js history factoring in Referer tags. Those were unweighed numbers, i.e., I bet more than one out of two 45 year old woman's traffic can be analyzed to a 95% degree of completely entirely based off of Pinterest, Facebook, search history and the outbound links from her e-mail.

by gedrap 11y ago

eevilspock 11y ago

Processing 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 ago
If 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 ago
    I'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.
iheartmemcache 11y ago
It's been a while since I've used GA but being able to segment into age, gender, and interests(1) are things that you can't do without paying a marketing aggregator hundreds of thousands of dollars a month or using GA. You can do some geolocation classification and things like campaign effectiveness, bounce rate, etc, but since Google has so much aggregate data off-hand the value of being able to classify user-x as "Male, 40s, Interests-similar-to-demographic-we-sell-to"(2) is invaluable whether you're selling seats of enterprise software, high-fashion luxury items, or cheapo stoner knick-knacks. You can't really market segment with your own software. (1) https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/3125360?hl=en&ref_topic=3123779 https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/3125360?hl=en&re... (2) https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/2819948 https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/2819948
- eevilspock 11y ago
  Sure. So now the question is, why would Google offer all of this for "free"? Is it really free? Who pays, and in what ways?
  - iheartmemcache 11y ago
    Obviously, they're using the same information that's helping you calibrate your campaigns to add to the hive-mind, so they can further data-mine. You're sacrificing the anonymity of your end-users in doing so. Obviously they're offering it so that they can refine their profile of you more accurately to sell ads / direct more relevant traffic to you better. I'm not an industrial engineer but I've been reading about it for the last few weeks. I turned off Adblock for a while and even with my Opt-out plugins(a,b) I started getting ads for $4,500 Fluke multimeters. The combination of one's search history plus a fairly comprehensive history of the sites you visit(b) to a terrifying degree, but at the same time, the average business with only a few million dollars a year going towards both sales and marketing can't really approach Quantcast and ask for access to their API. a: https://tools.google.com/dlpage/gaoptout https://tools.google.com/dlpage/gaoptout b:https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/do-not-track/ckdcpbflcbeillmamogkpmdhnbeggfja?hl=en-US https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/do-not-track/ckdcp... b: I don't have the study off-hand, but IIRC some guy after finishing his masters from Stanford wanted to assess how much information Google had re: an average users browser history. The findings, based off Common Crawl data of the top 100k sites + presence of GA.js yielded something like ~> 75% of the web was tracked (not to be confused with how much of an end-user's traffic is tracked, that number will be far higher) based on sites with a GA.js history factoring in Referer tags. Those were unweighed numbers, i.e., I bet more than one out of two 45 year old woman's traffic can be analyzed to a 95% degree of completely entirely based off of Pinterest, Facebook, search history and the outbound links from her e-mail.