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Apart from privacy, I also went that route because hardly ever looked at all tha data GA or (the thing formerly known as) Piwik collect, at least beyond bare co

Apart from privacy, I also went that route because hardly ever looked at all tha data GA or (the thing formerly known as) Piwik collect, at least beyond bare counts. I care about hits per page (ideally by humans, unique or not), the time it takes to generate the page server side, and how long it takes until the DOM is finished loading. I throw that into buckets, i.e I have hourly counts for the last few weeks, daily counts for the last few months, and so on; the only stuff that will be kept "forever" are yearly counts. I still rarely look at it, but at least now it takes up little space.

Theodores 8y ago
Glad to read your comment. I believe that we create too much data to make sense of with default tracking for everything. We also hire people too readily to look at that data, the next step being that these analytics people start making unreasonable demands, in part due to how Google obfuscate how their search engine works and therefore people in the game of SEO really do not know what they are talking about. As a consequence of this you can end up having SEO people destroying a site that is designed for humans to read as they still have quaint notions about keyword stuffing. Because these people have no real knowledge of code or the products the website hopes to sell they have a less than useful effect. They will track that one conversion and give themselves brownie points for their SEO and disregard the thousands of others who didn't get past the wall of SEO keywords to get as far as a converting page. What surprises me is how poor the server side analytics tools are. Server logs should be great and what SEO people look at side by side with their frontend analytics. They should be doing this for basic sanity reasons, to see if the 'hits' add up or whether some slow loading pages burdened with scripts that never fire is mangling the statistics. Or even to check if some developer has 'gone rogue' and stopped the scripts being loaded on pages that matter to them. Yet despite the obvious utility of server side tracking - not least the no cookie message - nobody is doing a good job of providing decent software for it that would pass muster with SEO types.

Theodores 8y ago

Glad to read your comment. I believe that we create too much data to make sense of with default tracking for everything. We also hire people too readily to look at that data, the next step being that these analytics people start making unreasonable demands, in part due to how Google obfuscate how their search engine works and therefore people in the game of SEO really do not know what they are talking about. As a consequence of this you can end up having SEO people destroying a site that is designed for humans to read as they still have quaint notions about keyword stuffing. Because these people have no real knowledge of code or the products the website hopes to sell they have a less than useful effect. They will track that one conversion and give themselves brownie points for their SEO and disregard the thousands of others who didn't get past the wall of SEO keywords to get as far as a converting page. What surprises me is how poor the server side analytics tools are. Server logs should be great and what SEO people look at side by side with their frontend analytics. They should be doing this for basic sanity reasons, to see if the 'hits' add up or whether some slow loading pages burdened with scripts that never fire is mangling the statistics. Or even to check if some developer has 'gone rogue' and stopped the scripts being loaded on pages that matter to them. Yet despite the obvious utility of server side tracking - not least the no cookie message - nobody is doing a good job of providing decent software for it that would pass muster with SEO types.