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I could never understand why any ecommerce company would use GA. They are collecting your user's data for ad targeting. Well, guess what? They target ads to

I could never understand why any ecommerce company would use GA. They are collecting your user's data for ad targeting. Well, guess what? They target ads to your users for competitor's products. You browse a site that has GA on it looking to buy a bike, then that user get hit with bike ads on other sites that host Google ads. Almost every site owner I've spoken to about this issue was unaware of it. Server side analytics prevents this, or use an analytics package that has no advertising business.

mozilla98 9y ago
Of course. Why else would GA be free? I've read 90% of websites are using GA. That must be an enormous expense to Google to track that much data.
cm2012 9y ago
99% of ecommerce folks are not a scale where this would effect anything, and even then google display ads are less than 5% of the usual online marketing mix. It's well worth the tradeoff for the power and flexibility of GA.
- gator-io 9y ago
  Why would scale matter?
  - cm2012 9y ago
    As a small company, you are barely affecting Google's targeting algorithms on your own.
    - gator-io 9y ago
      They target individual users based on their browsing history. Scale doesn't matter.
yuhong 9y ago
Is that the main problem with GA or are there other problems? I have been thinking of a Google problems mailing list for while now.
soared 9y ago
The benefit from using GA is enormous and the cost to implement is near-zero (for the company). The benefits you get vastly outweigh any potentially lost revenue.