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To see what content is popular, to see what countries users are coming from, to how long a given page is retaining a visitor... all of this lets a business know

To see what content is popular, to see what countries users are coming from, to how long a given page is retaining a visitor... all of this lets a business know what they need to change/offer/stop to better serve their customers and attract more customers. I had a very niche ecommerce site for a couple of years, for ease I was only shipping to U.S. customers. I noticed that something like 20% of my traffic was coming from Canada so I decided to enable shipping to Canada but added a 5$ premium on top of the actual shipping cost. I had a sale to Canada the first hour of enabling it in my cart and Canada ended up being roughly 10% of my orders, even after I raised the premium/handling fee to 10$. Looking at my GA page once caused more money to be going into my pocket and filled a need for Canadian customers. I didn't need to learn a programming language or spend tens of hours trying to figure out, through articles, how to copy paste a bunch of code together to recreate something comparable.

Kovah 7y ago
My question then would be, why do you need to use especially Google Analytics for that? Stats like "visitors per country" are a core feature of all major analytics suites. I set up analytics for many site on my job and I never experienced a use case where GA offered that specific feature no other software had.
- ryanmercer 7y ago
  GA is free and takes seconds to set up. Not everyone knows how to code, not everyone is a professional web dev or CS ninja, not everyone has piles of VC money to throw at such things. GA works, is well organized, and is often integrated with a lot of cart/web builder services where you simply have to plug in a short string and pop over to the GA website. I needed a vegetable knife recently. I could have (and I do have the skills, and have made many knives over the past 25 years) purchased some appropriate steel and made one myself in 3-5 hours and had it incredibly sharp but I opted to buy a Mercer stainless steel one on Amazon for 20$~ because it required much less effort. I also couldn't care less about Google or the NSA or Lectroids from another dimension tracking me so I don't rush to go "I'd better cater to the small percentage of my potential customers that want to leave zero trace on the internet, there are countless tools out there they can use to minimize that trail of breadcrumbs. This data is usable to me and Google makes it easy" and I imagine, even the company in question was like "some people want privacy but those that are concerned can easily block this with a browser extension, in their hosts file, and/or at a hardware level so we'll go ahead and use it and save a bunch of time".
  - Nextgrid 7y ago
    You're essentially saying that violating your users' privacy is OK because not everyone has the skill or money to do it the right way? In this case would you also say it's OK to be stealing in stores because it's cheaper than getting things the correct way by paying for them, and that stores concerned about theft should just do a better job at preventing you from stealing by using the real-life-equivalent of a hosts file to prevent you from entering the store?
    - ryanmercer 7y ago
      >You're essentially saying that violating your users' privacy is OK I'm not holding a gun to their head and telling them to visit my site. If I walk into a business, or someone's house, I assume I'm being monitored. Websites are the same thing.
      - JohnFen 7y ago
        If I walk into a non-Google business or someone's house, I don't assume that Google is the one monitoring me.
      - tripzilch 7y ago
        > I'm not holding a gun to their head and telling them to visit my site. And I'm not threatening to skin you alive if you don't stop it. How are threats of violence okay again?
    - bryan_w 7y ago
      I think his point is that he doesn't consider it a violation of privacy and that the people who do usually are better at controlling the data that is leaving their computer anyways.
      - ryanmercer 7y ago
        Exactly. The people making all the fuss in this thread, are the people that are probably already blocking via one or more solutions. "Don't track me!" I can't, you are blocking it "You shouldn't be tracking me!"
rfrey 7y ago
All of that can be done with local server logs,complete with pretty graphs and reports.
- ryanmercer 7y ago
  Or with a couple of mouse clicks it can be done with GA. Most people don't want to stare at lines of code, write cod, and fiddle around in logs for hours and hours. I have literally no idea how to extract that data in a comparable fashion and it would likely take me many hours of reading and trying to copy paste random bits of code I find in articles together to attempt to do the same. Obviously the company in question should have someone capable of doing that but most smaller companies and small business website owners don't, hiring someone to create that would cost money. Stuff like GA you can copy paste an identifier or line of code, make it live and you're done. You now have a bookmark you can go to and see lots of actionable data in a nice visual form. Most people don't care about a website tracking their OS/location/time spent on change etc so why would I, or someone else, put a bunch of extra work into fashioning something from scratch when there's a perfectly usable product that takes seconds to deploy and is easily blocked by those that don't want you to easily access that information about them? If you need a knife most people would buy a knife. They would not buy a length of steel, cut it to rough shape, file or grind it down to the final shape, then spend an hour or more putting an edge on it with wet stones. Besides, the people that don't want tracked by Google are probably already blocking google via software and/or hardware solutions.
- at_a_remove 7y ago
  I am out of that game. Once upon a time, I labored over WebTrends for about a hundred different sites. It was not a great time. I am not sure what would be a good replacement for Google Analytics these days but I had an absolutely terrible time with WebTrends and server-side logs. I was pretty doubtful about the results produced, as well.
- UncleMeat 7y ago
  And then crawlers completely mess up your data. And it’s another thing to maintain and process.
fludlight 7y ago
This is an honest, detailed answer from an end user. Basically, he values simple demographic information about his visitors and doesn’t care about privacy. This is what countless other GA users have said here on HN and elsewhere. If you want more privacy then build a better GA (from the typical end user perspective, recall the famous comment here that no one will use Dropbox because they can instead just run some Unix commands).
JohnFen 7y ago
> To see what content is popular, to see what countries users are coming from, to how long a given page is retaining a visitor... All of those things can be determined by using a web server log analyzer.
tripzilch 7y ago
> I didn't need to learn a programming language or spend tens of hours trying to figure out, through articles, how to copy paste a bunch of code together to recreate something comparable. Tens of hours, people. THIS is what your privacy is worth to some. You forget that, while doing the unethical thing might seem a lot less hard, simply NOT doing the thing is also not hard at all! So that's not an excuse. You seem to think you have a right to the earnings of the difference between those two, over the backs of your visitors' privacy. THAT is the argument you have to explain. Not the part of how you managed to get fancy analytics for free by selling out your visitors.

Kovah 7y ago

My question then would be, why do you need to use especially Google Analytics for that? Stats like "visitors per country" are a core feature of all major analytics suites. I set up analytics for many site on my job and I never experienced a use case where GA offered that specific feature no other software had.

ryanmercer 7y ago
GA is free and takes seconds to set up. Not everyone knows how to code, not everyone is a professional web dev or CS ninja, not everyone has piles of VC money to throw at such things. GA works, is well organized, and is often integrated with a lot of cart/web builder services where you simply have to plug in a short string and pop over to the GA website. I needed a vegetable knife recently. I could have (and I do have the skills, and have made many knives over the past 25 years) purchased some appropriate steel and made one myself in 3-5 hours and had it incredibly sharp but I opted to buy a Mercer stainless steel one on Amazon for 20$~ because it required much less effort. I also couldn't care less about Google or the NSA or Lectroids from another dimension tracking me so I don't rush to go "I'd better cater to the small percentage of my potential customers that want to leave zero trace on the internet, there are countless tools out there they can use to minimize that trail of breadcrumbs. This data is usable to me and Google makes it easy" and I imagine, even the company in question was like "some people want privacy but those that are concerned can easily block this with a browser extension, in their hosts file, and/or at a hardware level so we'll go ahead and use it and save a bunch of time".
- Nextgrid 7y ago
  You're essentially saying that violating your users' privacy is OK because not everyone has the skill or money to do it the right way? In this case would you also say it's OK to be stealing in stores because it's cheaper than getting things the correct way by paying for them, and that stores concerned about theft should just do a better job at preventing you from stealing by using the real-life-equivalent of a hosts file to prevent you from entering the store?
  - ryanmercer 7y ago
    >You're essentially saying that violating your users' privacy is OK I'm not holding a gun to their head and telling them to visit my site. If I walk into a business, or someone's house, I assume I'm being monitored. Websites are the same thing.
    - JohnFen 7y ago
      If I walk into a non-Google business or someone's house, I don't assume that Google is the one monitoring me.
    - tripzilch 7y ago
      > I'm not holding a gun to their head and telling them to visit my site. And I'm not threatening to skin you alive if you don't stop it. How are threats of violence okay again?
  - bryan_w 7y ago
    I think his point is that he doesn't consider it a violation of privacy and that the people who do usually are better at controlling the data that is leaving their computer anyways.
    - ryanmercer 7y ago
      Exactly. The people making all the fuss in this thread, are the people that are probably already blocking via one or more solutions. "Don't track me!" I can't, you are blocking it "You shouldn't be tracking me!"

rfrey 7y ago

All of that can be done with local server logs,complete with pretty graphs and reports.

ryanmercer 7y ago
Or with a couple of mouse clicks it can be done with GA. Most people don't want to stare at lines of code, write cod, and fiddle around in logs for hours and hours. I have literally no idea how to extract that data in a comparable fashion and it would likely take me many hours of reading and trying to copy paste random bits of code I find in articles together to attempt to do the same. Obviously the company in question should have someone capable of doing that but most smaller companies and small business website owners don't, hiring someone to create that would cost money. Stuff like GA you can copy paste an identifier or line of code, make it live and you're done. You now have a bookmark you can go to and see lots of actionable data in a nice visual form. Most people don't care about a website tracking their OS/location/time spent on change etc so why would I, or someone else, put a bunch of extra work into fashioning something from scratch when there's a perfectly usable product that takes seconds to deploy and is easily blocked by those that don't want you to easily access that information about them? If you need a knife most people would buy a knife. They would not buy a length of steel, cut it to rough shape, file or grind it down to the final shape, then spend an hour or more putting an edge on it with wet stones. Besides, the people that don't want tracked by Google are probably already blocking google via software and/or hardware solutions.
at_a_remove 7y ago
I am out of that game. Once upon a time, I labored over WebTrends for about a hundred different sites. It was not a great time. I am not sure what would be a good replacement for Google Analytics these days but I had an absolutely terrible time with WebTrends and server-side logs. I was pretty doubtful about the results produced, as well.
UncleMeat 7y ago
And then crawlers completely mess up your data. And it’s another thing to maintain and process.

fludlight 7y ago

This is an honest, detailed answer from an end user. Basically, he values simple demographic information about his visitors and doesn’t care about privacy. This is what countless other GA users have said here on HN and elsewhere. If you want more privacy then build a better GA (from the typical end user perspective, recall the famous comment here that no one will use Dropbox because they can instead just run some Unix commands).

JohnFen 7y ago

> To see what content is popular, to see what countries users are coming from, to how long a given page is retaining a visitor... All of those things can be determined by using a web server log analyzer.

tripzilch 7y ago

> I didn't need to learn a programming language or spend tens of hours trying to figure out, through articles, how to copy paste a bunch of code together to recreate something comparable. Tens of hours, people. THIS is what your privacy is worth to some. You forget that, while doing the unethical thing might seem a lot less hard, simply NOT doing the thing is also not hard at all! So that's not an excuse. You seem to think you have a right to the earnings of the difference between those two, over the backs of your visitors' privacy. THAT is the argument you have to explain. Not the part of how you managed to get fancy analytics for free by selling out your visitors.