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Analytics may give you the number of paid subcriptions but that is not the reason it exists. Modern analytics systems are build to give you a statistical view o

by srrr 6y ago

Analytics may give you the number of paid subcriptions but that is not the reason it exists. Modern analytics systems are build to give you a statistical view of all events/interactions leading up to a conversion or, more important, to a conversion that did not happen. With this information it is possible to optimize all touchpoints a user has with your services. It is easy to track all aspects of subscriptions including recurring revenue. The data quality depends on the data you send to google analytics and is not "dubious" but in your own responsibility. And google analytics is really good in separating bots from human visits. If google analytics did only report vanity metrics to you, you most likely did not use it the right way. Maybe you missed the segmentation tools to find groups of users for whom your service did not work out?

jwr 6y ago
> google analytics is really good in separating bots from human visits That certainly wasn't my experience. But more generally: I optimize touchpoints using automated Bernoulli bandits with multiple variants. And I track the metrics that really matter (like signups, MRR, churn, etc) very, very carefully. My point was that just adding GA doesn't bring much value, and makes the web worse. Another example of how page visits don't matter: it's easy to get a huge spike of HN users clicking through. But if my SaaS has no relevance to HN users (except as a technical curiosity), this doesn't matter at all. It won't change my revenue, so it's irrelevant. Unless you run a site with ads, focusing on page visits doesn't make sense: it's like measuring the performance of a supermarket and getting excited about increasing traffic on a nearby highway. Could it influence your sales? Possibly. Is it actionable? Nope.
- jerven 6y ago
  GA used to be good in separating the bots from the humans, but now I don't think so. I see a huge number of visitors from Dublin that seem to be AWS sourced bots (and Asburn, both have bounce rates like no other city). Millions of visits, from a place where we would expect thousands.
  - cosmie 6y ago
    GA's "Filter bots" setting simply applies the IAB bot filtering list[1]. The resources required to operate a page rendering bot[2] used to be a high enough bar that the ones doing so were large actors and would make their way onto that list pretty quickly. The IAB list is still a helpful baseline (if overpriced if you want to lease the list itself[3]), but all it's doing is applying suppression based on things like known bot IP ranges and user agents. It's far less effective than it used to be since it's so incredibly easy and cheap nowadays for anyone with an interest to spin up a rendering bot. Now you've got to supplement it actively with your own set of filters and heuristics if you really want to get rid of bot traffic polluting your data. [1] https://iabtechlab.com/software/iababc-international-spiders-and-bots-list/ https://iabtechlab.com/software/iababc-international-spiders... [2] Scraping bots were cheap and easy to run before, but didn't render the GA javascript code so never showed up in analytics. It's only bots that use something like a headless browser to render the page that show up in GA, and those have only become commoditized and cheap/easy relatively recently. [3] Google applies the IAB list to your traffic for free if you check the setting for it, but if you want to use the IAB list yourself you have to pay $4k - $14k annually to lease it from IAB.
  - eli 6y ago
    The bots got better and harder to detect. You can actually set analytics to exclude traffic from a certain ISP or set of IPs on the View's Filters page. There is some legit traffic that comes from data centers, but only a tiny fraction.
- solidasparagus 6y ago
  It's more like the supermarket keeping track of what isles people are going down and what items they are looking at. Which supermarkets would do if they could because it's extremely valuable data.
  - cosmie 6y ago
    > Which supermarkets would do if they could They can, and they do. Here[1] is a random example of applying that to a supermarket (the other pages on that vendor's site shows some of the other ways the tech can be used). Solutions tend to use a mix of video camera data and cellular data (wifi and bluetooth beacons[2]) to track in-store movements and behavior. Done well, they can also connect individual store journeys to specific point of sale transactions, and understand hoe variations of in-store behavioral patterns ultimately influenced actual transactions. Which opens the door to running in-store optimization experiments very similarly to how you'd run A/B optimization tests for websites/apps. [1] https://retailerin.com/en/retailerINfor/customer-behaviour-analytics-for-grocery-stores/ https://retailerin.com/en/retailerINfor/customer-behaviour-a... [2] https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/marketing-resources/retail-marketing-beacon-technology/ https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/marketing-resources/retail-m...
    - solidasparagus 6y ago
      Very cool!

by srrr 6y ago

jwr 6y ago

> google analytics is really good in separating bots from human visits That certainly wasn't my experience. But more generally: I optimize touchpoints using automated Bernoulli bandits with multiple variants. And I track the metrics that really matter (like signups, MRR, churn, etc) very, very carefully. My point was that just adding GA doesn't bring much value, and makes the web worse. Another example of how page visits don't matter: it's easy to get a huge spike of HN users clicking through. But if my SaaS has no relevance to HN users (except as a technical curiosity), this doesn't matter at all. It won't change my revenue, so it's irrelevant. Unless you run a site with ads, focusing on page visits doesn't make sense: it's like measuring the performance of a supermarket and getting excited about increasing traffic on a nearby highway. Could it influence your sales? Possibly. Is it actionable? Nope.

jerven 6y ago
GA used to be good in separating the bots from the humans, but now I don't think so. I see a huge number of visitors from Dublin that seem to be AWS sourced bots (and Asburn, both have bounce rates like no other city). Millions of visits, from a place where we would expect thousands.
- cosmie 6y ago
  GA's "Filter bots" setting simply applies the IAB bot filtering list[1]. The resources required to operate a page rendering bot[2] used to be a high enough bar that the ones doing so were large actors and would make their way onto that list pretty quickly. The IAB list is still a helpful baseline (if overpriced if you want to lease the list itself[3]), but all it's doing is applying suppression based on things like known bot IP ranges and user agents. It's far less effective than it used to be since it's so incredibly easy and cheap nowadays for anyone with an interest to spin up a rendering bot. Now you've got to supplement it actively with your own set of filters and heuristics if you really want to get rid of bot traffic polluting your data. [1] https://iabtechlab.com/software/iababc-international-spiders-and-bots-list/ https://iabtechlab.com/software/iababc-international-spiders... [2] Scraping bots were cheap and easy to run before, but didn't render the GA javascript code so never showed up in analytics. It's only bots that use something like a headless browser to render the page that show up in GA, and those have only become commoditized and cheap/easy relatively recently. [3] Google applies the IAB list to your traffic for free if you check the setting for it, but if you want to use the IAB list yourself you have to pay $4k - $14k annually to lease it from IAB.
- eli 6y ago
  The bots got better and harder to detect. You can actually set analytics to exclude traffic from a certain ISP or set of IPs on the View's Filters page. There is some legit traffic that comes from data centers, but only a tiny fraction.
solidasparagus 6y ago
It's more like the supermarket keeping track of what isles people are going down and what items they are looking at. Which supermarkets would do if they could because it's extremely valuable data.
- cosmie 6y ago
  > Which supermarkets would do if they could They can, and they do. Here[1] is a random example of applying that to a supermarket (the other pages on that vendor's site shows some of the other ways the tech can be used). Solutions tend to use a mix of video camera data and cellular data (wifi and bluetooth beacons[2]) to track in-store movements and behavior. Done well, they can also connect individual store journeys to specific point of sale transactions, and understand hoe variations of in-store behavioral patterns ultimately influenced actual transactions. Which opens the door to running in-store optimization experiments very similarly to how you'd run A/B optimization tests for websites/apps. [1] https://retailerin.com/en/retailerINfor/customer-behaviour-analytics-for-grocery-stores/ https://retailerin.com/en/retailerINfor/customer-behaviour-a... [2] https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/marketing-resources/retail-marketing-beacon-technology/ https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/marketing-resources/retail-m...
  - solidasparagus 6y ago
    Very cool!