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Here's a crazy idea: Don't use analytics at all but focus on your product. If your success relies solely on "improving conversions" by tracking your users and t

by heipei 6y ago

Here's a crazy idea: Don't use analytics at all but focus on your product. If your success relies solely on "improving conversions" by tracking your users and then changing the position and color of your "Checkout" button then maybe try setting yourself apart such that customers want to buy your product even despite an obnoxious purchasing flow. Only then start optimizing it. More serious thoughts: Google Analytics introduces performance overhead for your website and now you have to explain to your users which third party is responsible for processing their data on top of yourself. Why introduce those headaches? Are the insights from Analytics really valuable enough to justify the cost? I personally haven't seen it.

Enginerrrd 6y ago
>Here's a crazy idea: Don't use analytics at all but focus on your product. If your success relies solely on "improving conversions" by tracking your users and then changing the position and color of your "Checkout" button then maybe try setting yourself apart such that customers want to buy your product even despite an obnoxious purchasing flow. Only then start optimizing it. This is part of why costco is so successful. When I buy a kirkland brand item, I know with like 95% confidence that I'm getting a quality product. Not only that, but they go through heroic lengths to vet the other products that they put out. If you buy extra virgin olive oil at costco, it's very likely that it's pure extra virgin olive oil. They turned retail on its head after 30 years of abuses by people focused on quarterly earnings and selling their brand into the ground. Instead of making the product as shitty as possible and charging as much as possible, costco hard caps their margins and will then invest money to optimize their suppliers manufacturing process to pass the savings along to their customers. The big thing with costco is trust. I trust them and their products because they've earned it. In the rare event something is wrong with their product, they'll make it right with basically no questions asked. They used to do this to an absurd degree until people started abusing it. Compare that to the amount of vetting I have to do for almost every amazon purchase now. It's a huge headache, and there's a lot of stuff I just won't buy off of amazon anymore.
- system16 6y ago
  Absolutely. Even though I find the Costco in-store experience stressful and the online experience lacklustre, I put them at the top of my list for all of my non-fashion shopping (unless I'm looking for dad clothes). I can always trust their products will be as high or better quality than anywhere else, and at the best or close to best price. And I have no worries about returns. Compare that to Amazon, which I have zero trust in. I absolutely can't trust the reviews, and I can't trust any products are genuine (even for minor things: my last purchase several months ago were steel wool dish scrubs - name branded, but I'm certain they were fake). I also don't trust them to do anything about it, because I've reported fake reviews, and fake products several times, and all of those sellers are still selling with thousands of 5 star reviews. The only thing it has going for it is price and convenience.
  - mint2 6y ago
    The latest trend on Amazon seems to be selling items packaged for non-us markets and shipping them to us customers. I bought a two pack Duracell lr44 battery and I think the entire packaging is in Turkish? Or maybe some Eastern European language. Regardless, the battery is definitely not packaged in a way that’s legal to sell in America and the Amazon page did not say it would be packaged for another country. Super shady. And I’m not even sure how to tell if it’s not 100% fake and not just the packing for another country.
    - rightbyte 6y ago
      Amazon's killer app is being able to sell illegal merchandize. Be it counterfait or surplus from Yugoslavia.
  - marssaxman 6y ago
    It would never occur to me to care, at all, whether something as trivial as a dish scrubber was a genuine name-brand item. What difference does it make? I suppose this is why I have experienced none of the trust issues people have begun talking about with Amazon, recently.
samb1729 6y ago
> Here's a crazy idea: Don't use analytics at all but focus on your product. If your success relies solely on "improving conversions" by tracking your users and then changing the position and color of your "Checkout" button then maybe try setting yourself apart I am very much onboard with this idea. The notion that it is a requirement that businesses track individual customers’ actions in order to succeed is pervasive in this newly-connected world we inhabit. It feels too early in my life to be a grumpy old man but I do certainly feel like it sometimes. Brick and mortar retailers manage to reach an acceptable level of business without watching exactly how every customer looks at shelves by just selling things people want or need and I don’t see why the internet should be much different. Surveillance just because we can is not something I like.
- smt88 6y ago
  Disclaimer: I hate Google Analytics because I hate Google, I hate monopolies, and I hate excessive hoarding of user data. I think the necessary aspects of tracking can be maintained without having all the bad aspects, but we need to break up the ad companies first. > without watching exactly how every customer looks at shelves This is absolutely not true. Do you have experience with managing brick and mortar stores? Ever been to a grocery store with a "discount"/rewards program? That's their tracking of individual behavior. They also use credit card data for the same purpose, although CC data is less reliable than rewards cards. Coupons accomplish the same thing. You put out a specific coupon code for each newspaper/circular/TV ad, and then you see how they convert. Things like Google Analytics are just the web version of things that have been done for almost 100 years.
  - seventh-chord 6y ago
    Except the things you mention correspond to looking at sales data in your backend DB, not putting google analytics in your frontend, right?
    - madeofpalk 6y ago
      Depends whether you think a "loyalty" program, or customer tracking cameras is frontend or backend
hobs 6y ago
And if you are not the CEO the head of product comes to the CEO and says "my team needs this" and then you ship it. Spending political capital on something that "the entire industry uses!!" doesn't usually align with my incentives.
smt88 6y ago
Tracking is not just about improving conversions. It's primarily about understanding if your ads worked. It doesn't matter how good your product is if you can't tell anyone about it, and you can't spend a bunch of money telling people about it if you don't know which ad networks are giving you bang for your buck.
- dbbk 6y ago
  Yeah, as a bootstrapper on a shoestring budget I'm not gonna dump a load of money into eg LinkedIn ads and just hope and pray that something happened. I need to know if they worked.
- Dudeman112 6y ago
  I think you're being silly. As long as your product is good enough, no one needs a marketing budget or to measure if marketing is working. And everyone has the resources and time to make their own analytics tools, if they need it, instead of relying on existing solutions
  - arcturus17 6y ago
    Are you being facetious? Everyone has the time to roll out their own analytics? Where do you work, Google?
    - PeterisP 6y ago
      While developing your own analytics seems like overkill, you definitely can host your own analytics, using one of the many solutions where all the analytics data are kept on your own servers.
    - Dudeman112 6y ago
      I see even HN needs '/s' . You'd think stating that marketing doesn't matter and everyone has time to develop analytics would trigger some sarcasm detection somewhere
      - 6y ago
CarVac 6y ago
Also it makes you spend less time obsessing over the numbers when there are fewer numbers. It's refreshing that the only analytics I get for my open source project is github traffic, not website traffic or download counts.
andrewstuart2 6y ago
I'm totally on board with not obsessing over user behavior or tweaking unrelated things in hopes of a revenue boost, but I prefer the scientific approach, which means I still want metrics. I'd like to know when I make a product change whether that improves the number of people who see my product and stick around versus seeing and leaving. I don't have anything live that uses Google Analytics but I've used it once or twice in the past, and the primary thing they got right is that it's just so dang easy, and I'm almost guaranteed to have the data I want. I'd so much rather support an open source product that does the same, though.
- statstutor 6y ago
  I have a rule that I only collect data: - if it is immediately and directly useful to my primary goals (the goals come before the data), and, - if I'm confident in advance that the results will have some statistical power (so, A/B testing colour schemes is out), and, - if I have planned in advance what the business consequence of the data analysis is. Having any more numbers than that just creates obsession. Aren't we all posting comments here, looking for validation from the upvote counter?
melomal 6y ago
One sentence has decimated my digital marketing career and I honestly couldn't agree more. I think this has something to do with more than just Google itself though and good old capitalism. There are heaps of SaaS platforms out there (from my last point of reference there were 2000+ MarTech companies, I would guess double that now) that focuses on; A/B testing, email marketing automation, customer success tools, heat mapping and much more. They have funders who want their returns, one way or another. Which then leads the marketing team of the SaaS to develop growth hacking articles which startups tend to absorb. As a marketer you are backed into a corner of having to test everything because there are so many articles out there showing us how A/B testing a button from 17px to 18px increased sales by 50%. Or this genius new AI content tool that can swap things around for each and every user to match up with their purchase intent. It's gambling. There is data and some poor calculations that lead you astray hoping for that quick win. You will also find that one 'unicorn' SaaS will also dictate the UI/UX for the vast majority of others out there, look at Intercom which basically has been cloned in design across the board.
- ehnto 6y ago
  Focusing so hardcore on metrics can also lead to the loss of a curated product's edge. If you just keep following what the lemmings do you would end up falling off a cliff eventually, it often takes domain knowledge and experience to make educated opinions about how a product should move forward. Selfishly, I hope you do stay in digital marketing, and be the change I want to see. Ad-tech needs some sanity and reality checks, and I hear a rumbling in the deep around ethical advertising practices. Ad-tech is not just feeling more manipulative by the year, it's also feeling more and more like snake oil to your average business. I feel like there's a niche opening up for honest feeling, more simple online advertising networks.
  - melomal 6y ago
    Exactly, I've worked for a couple of start-ups that focused completely on growth hacking. Product was 2nd simply because of tech debt build up. A lot of people assume reading GA data you can unearth these hidden gems, it's nothing more than gambling. The issue with me being the reality checker is that I am considered 'negative', 2 years down the line after I'm long gone and reality bites, I look like some sort of messiah. Damned if I do, damned if I don't. Doing my SEO volunteer work with small shop owners in the UK during lockdown opened my eyes. As you said the average business is hammered with SEO, PPC, growth tips (snake oil) to the point you have to try it. But they don't have the time so it's half baked mostly and they feel disheartened. Honestly, ad-tech is nothing more than going to the casino and thinking you can win against the house.
onion2k 6y ago
I removed Google Analytics from https://ooer.com https://ooer.com because it was taking my lighthouse performance score from 100 down to 99, and I wasn't using the data for anything anyway.
nineplay 6y ago
> If your success relies solely on "improving conversions" by tracking your users and then changing the position and color of your "Checkout" button The problem is typically that you don't know if the color of your checkout button is a problem. Without some level of analytics you are only guessing as to what is driving your customers away and if your customers aren't educated engineers with comfortable incomes, you are probably going to guess wrong. I've worked with analytics and I've often been surprised at where customers run into trouble.
- Moru 6y ago
  I mostly run into problems in webstores because they just can't run without pulling javascripts and iframes from 50 different domains. uMatrix blocks them all and I can't be bothered to figure out the absolute minimum to allow to get to order so I just leave. Do I even show up in your google analytics?
crazygringo 6y ago
> Don't use analytics at all but focus on your product. Huh? Analytics is how you focus on your product. By instrumenting your product with analytics, you can find out if customers are using your new useful feature or if they can't find it. If they're performing a task quickly because it's easy, or slowly because they're struggling with the UX. And you find out that customers on a certain mobile device are suffering huge performance issues, for example. You don't know these things until you measure them. That's analytics. Obviously analytics are only one piece of product improvement -- there's sitting down with users for 30 minutes to watch them use the product, interviews, surveys, etc. But analytics are a critical piece. You can't focus on the product without analytics. Analytics isn't just about conversion. Analytics is about the entire product experience.
- crummybowley 6y ago
  Yes, but analytics is also used to trick folks into buying a paper back full of shit. A good product, that does what it advertises, does not need analytics. But a bad product, that somebody desperately wants to make successful, or at least successful enough to sell to a PE and exit, needs analytics.
  - andrewingram 6y ago
    The problem is that when making a product you're often wrong, what you think is a good product is often a bad product, or it's a nearly good product with a couple of fatal flaws that can only be seen in hindsight. S While some people have an uncanny sense of vision, and seem hit on the right ingredients more often than seems fair, but most companies aren't led by this kind of person. You need things that tell you when and how to course-correct, this is what analytics gives you. Now, of course, this needs to be balanced against privacy concerns. I push back on things that track literally everything (the tools that record every click and cursor movement are fascinating, but undeniably creep), and I try to avoid sending any PII to 3rd-parties. The amount of stuff Google Analytics phones home about by default is also pretty troubling. I'm on board with basically every privacy-based criticism of tracking, but I don't buy this argument that only bad products benefit from it.
Wowfunhappy 6y ago
When I first put my personal website up on Github Pages last summer, I didn't include any analytics. I figured it was unnecessary—why should I care who was looking? I quickly realized the obvious—without any analytics, I had no idea whether or not I was just screaming into the ether. Even for a simple noncommercial site, it's discomforting! I now have Cloudflare Analytics and I'm much more satisfied. I feel as though I'm respecting my users's privacy, while also getting a basic sense of traffic.
- kevin_thibedeau 6y ago
  I used to have GA on my Github documentation. Then I realized how much of it was garbage referer spam that Google wasn't doing anything to combat.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- account42 6y ago
  You definitely don't need client-side anaylitics to know if you content is being viewed. I don't know if Cloudflare Analytics is that but a simple view counter on the backend (ie a log analyzer) is enough for that. Or just search for your site to see if people link to it.
  - Wowfunhappy 6y ago
    > a simple view counter on the backend (ie a log analyzer) is enough for that. I can't do that on Github Pages. Cloudflare Analytics gives me a tad more information than raw page views—for instance, I can see what sites people came from. But there's zero individual user tracking.
    - account42 6y ago
      > But there's zero individual user tracking. Yes, individiual user tracking is creepy. Stop doing it.
toss1 6y ago
>>Here's a crazy idea: Don't use analytics at all but focus on your product. If your success relies solely on "improving conversions" by tracking your users and then changing the position and color of your "Checkout" button then maybe try setting yourself apart such that customers want to buy your product even despite an obnoxious purchasing flow. Only then start optimizing it. YUP!! Any company, especially startups, should treat analytics they way they should treat MBAs - as a plausibly useful sub-function *after everything else in the product/service is running well at scale*. Before that, the entire focus should be on the product and how it gets smoothly to the customer. Only when there is lots of extra sales and production capacity, and lots of extra cash piling up, THEN is the time to start adding financial guys to efficiently manage it, and analytics to optimize your channels, etc. Plus, NEVER let either of those tails wag the dog. Once a company's financial numbers start to rely on the finance department, or the sales numbers start to rely on channel optimization, the death spiral has started. It may take a while and look like an improvement at first (e.g., see GE), but it is still a death spiral. Focus on product and customers, period.
mrtksn 6y ago
Let's think about it. Are games doing analytics? Games are essentially UIs that people pay for the privilege to use. Although I am sure that contemporary game makers use analytics to understand user behaviour and optimize for in game spending and engagement, at least in the bigger games probably the core experience comes from creative human processes. The more the analytics the further optimised the game would be towards KPI. Also, I suspect that Netflix is creating it's materials based on analytics rather than creative human input. Maybe the problem is not analytics but greed and ill chosen KPI? Pre-total-tracking world, creatives still needed to test ideas and to test ideas you need to be able to measure. They would pay attention to what sells, how people react to a specific line etc. Maybe it was more fun because it was less optimised for profit?
- daemin 6y ago
  Yes games are doing analytics. What do you think half of the achievements are for in a game - a very primitive form of analytics. There is usually an achievement for making it past the first level or prologue, there's another one for finishing the game, and probably many more for passing stages of the game. These are all to see how many people progress that far in the game. Apart from that there's also crash telemetry and other event based tracking included in games.
  - nitrogen 6y ago
    I believe I read that some games even track what you look at and for how long.
- atombum 6y ago
  I think for companies like Activision, EA, analytics drive a massive amount of their decision making. I would even go so far as to posit that Blizzard (a master of psychological manipulation), most decisions are driven by analytics based optimization for engagement FIRST, then mechanics and creative design get to come play. I have no evidence, nor am I an insider, just an observer and scholar of games.
- karpierz 6y ago
  A prime example of analytics driving games is Slay the Spire, where they would record every decision you made and outcomes in the game to better balance the experience and give the player interesting decisions. https://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/314975/How_Slay_the_Spires_devs_use_data_to_balance_their_roguelike_deckbuilder.php https://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/314975/How_Slay_the_Spir...
Mauricebranagh 6y ago
Google just need to offer an on-prem version of GA - that would sole so many of my problems. The problem with your view is you have X resources to get things done - how do you measure the ROI or even get an idea of possible strategies. Of course you can go back to the 1960's mad men era "its toasted" approach to marketing, but that's not the best use of resources.
- arcturus17 6y ago
  They’d probably steal your data and peek into it regardless. My fatalistic outlook is justified by the amount of documented abuses they’ve committed over the years. Nothing is sacred to them, except the idea that “more data (in our servers) is good”.
- novok 6y ago
  The choice isn't GA or no analytics. You can do local server side analytics yourself if you wanted to, and even buy an on-prem product from someone out there that does the same.
justapassenger 6y ago
> Here's a crazy idea: Don't use analytics at all but focus on your product. If your success relies solely on "improving conversions" by tracking your users and then changing the position and color of your "Checkout" button then maybe try setting yourself apart such that customers want to buy your product even despite an obnoxious purchasing flow. Only then start optimizing it. Here’s crazy idea for early humans - don’t use fire to cook your food. If your health depends on cooking meat, instead of hunting only for the healthy, bacteria and parasite free ones, then you should first focus on getting only highest quality meat, and only then figure out what to do with it.
- craftinator 6y ago
  Your analogy is not applicable. A better example would be... Well better. Perhaps: "Here's a crazy idea for early humans - don't map out the location and habits of all the food that you hunt to maximize the number you kill, instead focus on improving the tools that you hunt with so you can reliably kill what you need. Only focus on maximizing kills when you start needing more food than you can find."
dheera 6y ago
PSA: Add this to /etc/hosts if you don't want other sites collecting info from you via Google Analytics/Ads 0.0.0.0 googleanalytics.com 0.0.0.0 googlesyndication.com A more complete list of things worth adding to /etc/hosts here (I'm not affiliated with this): https://github.com/StevenBlack/hosts https://github.com/StevenBlack/hosts
- userbinator 6y ago
  I've always had the ones with the dash, since they are what's mentioned in the official docs ( https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection/analyticsjs https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection... ): 0.0.0.0 google-analytics.com 0.0.0.0 www.google-analytics.com 0.0.0.0 ssl.google-analytics.com I'm not sure what googleanalytics.com is for, however; but I'll add it to my HOSTS, in any case.
- ss64 6y ago
  The only supported way to block GA without breaking pages is to use a plug-in https://tools.google.com/dlpage/gaoptout https://tools.google.com/dlpage/gaoptout No doubt your use of the plug in is logged somewhere.
bshoemaker 6y ago
How in the world has this been upvoted lol
- hansel_der 6y ago
  not everyone sells UX of a website?
kitsunesoba 6y ago
Another headache induced by analytics is how one will sometimes need to discard an efficient and effective feature design and build it differently in order to be able to track use of the feature properly. It wouldn't surprise me in the least if the amount of time and energy burned on implementing analytics equals or exceeds that of the work on the feature it's tracking.
splaytreemap 6y ago
You're essentially saying "don't use data to inform your decisions." This is trolling at best. No idea how this is the top comment here.
jfdi 6y ago
Agreed. I'm building https://increment.me https://increment.me and we specifically avoid web analytics and 3rd party cookies entirely. We don't keep data that doesn't serve a purpose and don't sell our data to anyone. For feedback, we use Increment itself to gather feedback directly from customers. Having customers directly give feedback is one great signal that really works, particularly when you demonstrate your commitment to action it. When you combine this with a 1st party view of how the product is used like from ephemeral log data, you can get a great pulse on how well you're helping your customers get the most value from you - and how you can adapt to help them more. I wish every business I interacted with had the same philosophy in creating value for customers and building trust in every interaction.
marrone12 6y ago
This is so reductionist I really can't believe this is the top comment. What if your "product" is a web or app service that depends on user interactions? How can you actually know what your users are doing or how they're using your product if you can't track it?
- hansel_der 6y ago
  on the other hand: producers of physical products very often don't get to know what there customers are doing with it. just saying
ivanhoe 6y ago
> Here's a crazy idea: Don't use analytics at all but focus on your product. Here's even crazier one: Just do analytics on the backend instead?! You don't need GA, nor 3rd party tracking cookies, just a simple session ID and a proper web-server's log analyzer, and you can get almost all of the same metrics. You can nowadays even sniff on clients' screen resolutions and other browser details using just img srcset, css and log analyzers.
- walshemj 6y ago
  And ho many developer hours are you spending doing this at scale? - I doing this in 95 doing this for BT worldwide's Intranet.
koonsolo 6y ago
If you are running a successful product, I believe you. If not, I'll just ignore your advice. Seems fair?
mrskitch 6y ago
This is exactly the same thought I came to with browserless.io. There simply wasn’t enough traffic to make informed decisions, and when there was it was really silly things (small copy changes and the like). Eventually we just tore it all out, and never looked back. Improving the product and blogging about our findings are a win-win for us and the ecosystem at large, versus agonizing over traffic and data
heyn05tradamu5 6y ago
100% agree. I used to be a very "analytics focused" product manager until I joined an enterprise software company that hardly uses them and is wildly successful. We're succesful because we talk to our users about everything. I spend most of my time talking to customers and watching them use the software. We occasionally use analytics to help us validate hypotheses or assumptions, but that's always complimented with a full range of qualitative methods. Analytics can help with observation, but it'll never give you the "why". In my experience only observation and a lot of conversations will get you there.
- nickff 6y ago
  Enterprise-focused companies are often some of the most user-hostile, opaque organizations in the world. I would rather a company post prices and documentation openly (with analytics) rather than requiring me to sign up for at least an account, and more often, a one-hour sales call to get any information at all.
  - heyn05tradamu5 6y ago
    Sure, there are some bad enterprise software companies. What does this have to do with the original point though?
    - nickff 6y ago
      You said your enterprise company doesn’t use analytics, and just talks to people. I am describing how I find that to be worse.
partiallypro 6y ago
> Are the insights from Analytics really valuable enough to justify the cost? Yes. It is especially important when you are running ads and want to make sure you are getting the most bang for your buck in ad spend.
- account42 6y ago
  Ads also have a huge cost on society so you can stop that too.
danaliv 6y ago
Analytics revealed to me that a product I'd built (well, a free side project, but that's beside the point) was succeeding in the exact opposite of the market I'd built it for. I used to run an online Japanese-English dictionary. It was geared towards people learning Japanese. I built it when I was studying Japanese and thought it would be useful for other students. Turns out the overwhelming majority of the traffic to that site was from... Japan! I had it completely backwards! People weren't using it to aid their Japanese studies; they were using it to aid their English studies. (You might be tempted to suggest that it was in fact being used by people learning Japanese, and that those people were taking part in exchange/immersion programs, but there were other data that disproved this hypothesis.) I never would've realized that if I hadn't had analytics on there.
- account42 6y ago
  And? What does this trivia change about how you interact with that project? Is it not possible that there were other ways you could learn about this eventually?
pedro1976 6y ago
I agree. I dropped all analytics for my blog and sideprojects, thoufh I found out that for my personal motivation I really like some stats about user engagement. I could use the access logs from the webserver. Can anyone recommend a tool that post-processes those logs in a "analytics" like way?
shadowfaxRodeo 6y ago
100% agree. I use server-side analytics for vanity metrics like "unique visits," and a contact form for feedback. People really appreciate not being tracked, or having to agree to cookies.

by heipei 6y ago

Enginerrrd 6y ago

>Here's a crazy idea: Don't use analytics at all but focus on your product. If your success relies solely on "improving conversions" by tracking your users and then changing the position and color of your "Checkout" button then maybe try setting yourself apart such that customers want to buy your product even despite an obnoxious purchasing flow. Only then start optimizing it. This is part of why costco is so successful. When I buy a kirkland brand item, I know with like 95% confidence that I'm getting a quality product. Not only that, but they go through heroic lengths to vet the other products that they put out. If you buy extra virgin olive oil at costco, it's very likely that it's pure extra virgin olive oil. They turned retail on its head after 30 years of abuses by people focused on quarterly earnings and selling their brand into the ground. Instead of making the product as shitty as possible and charging as much as possible, costco hard caps their margins and will then invest money to optimize their suppliers manufacturing process to pass the savings along to their customers. The big thing with costco is trust. I trust them and their products because they've earned it. In the rare event something is wrong with their product, they'll make it right with basically no questions asked. They used to do this to an absurd degree until people started abusing it. Compare that to the amount of vetting I have to do for almost every amazon purchase now. It's a huge headache, and there's a lot of stuff I just won't buy off of amazon anymore.

system16 6y ago
Absolutely. Even though I find the Costco in-store experience stressful and the online experience lacklustre, I put them at the top of my list for all of my non-fashion shopping (unless I'm looking for dad clothes). I can always trust their products will be as high or better quality than anywhere else, and at the best or close to best price. And I have no worries about returns. Compare that to Amazon, which I have zero trust in. I absolutely can't trust the reviews, and I can't trust any products are genuine (even for minor things: my last purchase several months ago were steel wool dish scrubs - name branded, but I'm certain they were fake). I also don't trust them to do anything about it, because I've reported fake reviews, and fake products several times, and all of those sellers are still selling with thousands of 5 star reviews. The only thing it has going for it is price and convenience.
- mint2 6y ago
  The latest trend on Amazon seems to be selling items packaged for non-us markets and shipping them to us customers. I bought a two pack Duracell lr44 battery and I think the entire packaging is in Turkish? Or maybe some Eastern European language. Regardless, the battery is definitely not packaged in a way that’s legal to sell in America and the Amazon page did not say it would be packaged for another country. Super shady. And I’m not even sure how to tell if it’s not 100% fake and not just the packing for another country.
  - rightbyte 6y ago
    Amazon's killer app is being able to sell illegal merchandize. Be it counterfait or surplus from Yugoslavia.
- marssaxman 6y ago
  It would never occur to me to care, at all, whether something as trivial as a dish scrubber was a genuine name-brand item. What difference does it make? I suppose this is why I have experienced none of the trust issues people have begun talking about with Amazon, recently.

samb1729 6y ago

smt88 6y ago
Disclaimer: I hate Google Analytics because I hate Google, I hate monopolies, and I hate excessive hoarding of user data. I think the necessary aspects of tracking can be maintained without having all the bad aspects, but we need to break up the ad companies first. > without watching exactly how every customer looks at shelves This is absolutely not true. Do you have experience with managing brick and mortar stores? Ever been to a grocery store with a "discount"/rewards program? That's their tracking of individual behavior. They also use credit card data for the same purpose, although CC data is less reliable than rewards cards. Coupons accomplish the same thing. You put out a specific coupon code for each newspaper/circular/TV ad, and then you see how they convert. Things like Google Analytics are just the web version of things that have been done for almost 100 years.
- seventh-chord 6y ago
  Except the things you mention correspond to looking at sales data in your backend DB, not putting google analytics in your frontend, right?
  - madeofpalk 6y ago
    Depends whether you think a "loyalty" program, or customer tracking cameras is frontend or backend

hobs 6y ago

And if you are not the CEO the head of product comes to the CEO and says "my team needs this" and then you ship it. Spending political capital on something that "the entire industry uses!!" doesn't usually align with my incentives.

smt88 6y ago

Tracking is not just about improving conversions. It's primarily about understanding if your ads worked. It doesn't matter how good your product is if you can't tell anyone about it, and you can't spend a bunch of money telling people about it if you don't know which ad networks are giving you bang for your buck.

dbbk 6y ago
Yeah, as a bootstrapper on a shoestring budget I'm not gonna dump a load of money into eg LinkedIn ads and just hope and pray that something happened. I need to know if they worked.
Dudeman112 6y ago
I think you're being silly. As long as your product is good enough, no one needs a marketing budget or to measure if marketing is working. And everyone has the resources and time to make their own analytics tools, if they need it, instead of relying on existing solutions
- arcturus17 6y ago
  Are you being facetious? Everyone has the time to roll out their own analytics? Where do you work, Google?
  - PeterisP 6y ago
    While developing your own analytics seems like overkill, you definitely can host your own analytics, using one of the many solutions where all the analytics data are kept on your own servers.
  - Dudeman112 6y ago
    I see even HN needs '/s' . You'd think stating that marketing doesn't matter and everyone has time to develop analytics would trigger some sarcasm detection somewhere
    - 6y ago

CarVac 6y ago

Also it makes you spend less time obsessing over the numbers when there are fewer numbers. It's refreshing that the only analytics I get for my open source project is github traffic, not website traffic or download counts.

andrewstuart2 6y ago

I'm totally on board with not obsessing over user behavior or tweaking unrelated things in hopes of a revenue boost, but I prefer the scientific approach, which means I still want metrics. I'd like to know when I make a product change whether that improves the number of people who see my product and stick around versus seeing and leaving. I don't have anything live that uses Google Analytics but I've used it once or twice in the past, and the primary thing they got right is that it's just so dang easy, and I'm almost guaranteed to have the data I want. I'd so much rather support an open source product that does the same, though.

statstutor 6y ago
I have a rule that I only collect data: - if it is immediately and directly useful to my primary goals (the goals come before the data), and, - if I'm confident in advance that the results will have some statistical power (so, A/B testing colour schemes is out), and, - if I have planned in advance what the business consequence of the data analysis is. Having any more numbers than that just creates obsession. Aren't we all posting comments here, looking for validation from the upvote counter?

melomal 6y ago

One sentence has decimated my digital marketing career and I honestly couldn't agree more. I think this has something to do with more than just Google itself though and good old capitalism. There are heaps of SaaS platforms out there (from my last point of reference there were 2000+ MarTech companies, I would guess double that now) that focuses on; A/B testing, email marketing automation, customer success tools, heat mapping and much more. They have funders who want their returns, one way or another. Which then leads the marketing team of the SaaS to develop growth hacking articles which startups tend to absorb. As a marketer you are backed into a corner of having to test everything because there are so many articles out there showing us how A/B testing a button from 17px to 18px increased sales by 50%. Or this genius new AI content tool that can swap things around for each and every user to match up with their purchase intent. It's gambling. There is data and some poor calculations that lead you astray hoping for that quick win. You will also find that one 'unicorn' SaaS will also dictate the UI/UX for the vast majority of others out there, look at Intercom which basically has been cloned in design across the board.

ehnto 6y ago
Focusing so hardcore on metrics can also lead to the loss of a curated product's edge. If you just keep following what the lemmings do you would end up falling off a cliff eventually, it often takes domain knowledge and experience to make educated opinions about how a product should move forward. Selfishly, I hope you do stay in digital marketing, and be the change I want to see. Ad-tech needs some sanity and reality checks, and I hear a rumbling in the deep around ethical advertising practices. Ad-tech is not just feeling more manipulative by the year, it's also feeling more and more like snake oil to your average business. I feel like there's a niche opening up for honest feeling, more simple online advertising networks.
- melomal 6y ago
  Exactly, I've worked for a couple of start-ups that focused completely on growth hacking. Product was 2nd simply because of tech debt build up. A lot of people assume reading GA data you can unearth these hidden gems, it's nothing more than gambling. The issue with me being the reality checker is that I am considered 'negative', 2 years down the line after I'm long gone and reality bites, I look like some sort of messiah. Damned if I do, damned if I don't. Doing my SEO volunteer work with small shop owners in the UK during lockdown opened my eyes. As you said the average business is hammered with SEO, PPC, growth tips (snake oil) to the point you have to try it. But they don't have the time so it's half baked mostly and they feel disheartened. Honestly, ad-tech is nothing more than going to the casino and thinking you can win against the house.

onion2k 6y ago

I removed Google Analytics from https://ooer.com https://ooer.com because it was taking my lighthouse performance score from 100 down to 99, and I wasn't using the data for anything anyway.

nineplay 6y ago

> If your success relies solely on "improving conversions" by tracking your users and then changing the position and color of your "Checkout" button The problem is typically that you don't know if the color of your checkout button is a problem. Without some level of analytics you are only guessing as to what is driving your customers away and if your customers aren't educated engineers with comfortable incomes, you are probably going to guess wrong. I've worked with analytics and I've often been surprised at where customers run into trouble.

Moru 6y ago
I mostly run into problems in webstores because they just can't run without pulling javascripts and iframes from 50 different domains. uMatrix blocks them all and I can't be bothered to figure out the absolute minimum to allow to get to order so I just leave. Do I even show up in your google analytics?

crazygringo 6y ago

> Don't use analytics at all but focus on your product. Huh? Analytics is how you focus on your product. By instrumenting your product with analytics, you can find out if customers are using your new useful feature or if they can't find it. If they're performing a task quickly because it's easy, or slowly because they're struggling with the UX. And you find out that customers on a certain mobile device are suffering huge performance issues, for example. You don't know these things until you measure them. That's analytics. Obviously analytics are only one piece of product improvement -- there's sitting down with users for 30 minutes to watch them use the product, interviews, surveys, etc. But analytics are a critical piece. You can't focus on the product without analytics. Analytics isn't just about conversion. Analytics is about the entire product experience.

crummybowley 6y ago
Yes, but analytics is also used to trick folks into buying a paper back full of shit. A good product, that does what it advertises, does not need analytics. But a bad product, that somebody desperately wants to make successful, or at least successful enough to sell to a PE and exit, needs analytics.
- andrewingram 6y ago
  The problem is that when making a product you're often wrong, what you think is a good product is often a bad product, or it's a nearly good product with a couple of fatal flaws that can only be seen in hindsight. S While some people have an uncanny sense of vision, and seem hit on the right ingredients more often than seems fair, but most companies aren't led by this kind of person. You need things that tell you when and how to course-correct, this is what analytics gives you. Now, of course, this needs to be balanced against privacy concerns. I push back on things that track literally everything (the tools that record every click and cursor movement are fascinating, but undeniably creep), and I try to avoid sending any PII to 3rd-parties. The amount of stuff Google Analytics phones home about by default is also pretty troubling. I'm on board with basically every privacy-based criticism of tracking, but I don't buy this argument that only bad products benefit from it.

Wowfunhappy 6y ago

When I first put my personal website up on Github Pages last summer, I didn't include any analytics. I figured it was unnecessary—why should I care who was looking? I quickly realized the obvious—without any analytics, I had no idea whether or not I was just screaming into the ether. Even for a simple noncommercial site, it's discomforting! I now have Cloudflare Analytics and I'm much more satisfied. I feel as though I'm respecting my users's privacy, while also getting a basic sense of traffic.

kevin_thibedeau 6y ago
I used to have GA on my Github documentation. Then I realized how much of it was garbage referer spam that Google wasn't doing anything to combat.
- deleted 6y ago
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account42 6y ago
You definitely don't need client-side anaylitics to know if you content is being viewed. I don't know if Cloudflare Analytics is that but a simple view counter on the backend (ie a log analyzer) is enough for that. Or just search for your site to see if people link to it.
- Wowfunhappy 6y ago
  > a simple view counter on the backend (ie a log analyzer) is enough for that. I can't do that on Github Pages. Cloudflare Analytics gives me a tad more information than raw page views—for instance, I can see what sites people came from. But there's zero individual user tracking.
  - account42 6y ago
    > But there's zero individual user tracking. Yes, individiual user tracking is creepy. Stop doing it.

toss1 6y ago

>>Here's a crazy idea: Don't use analytics at all but focus on your product. If your success relies solely on "improving conversions" by tracking your users and then changing the position and color of your "Checkout" button then maybe try setting yourself apart such that customers want to buy your product even despite an obnoxious purchasing flow. Only then start optimizing it. YUP!! Any company, especially startups, should treat analytics they way they should treat MBAs - as a plausibly useful sub-function *after everything else in the product/service is running well at scale*. Before that, the entire focus should be on the product and how it gets smoothly to the customer. Only when there is lots of extra sales and production capacity, and lots of extra cash piling up, THEN is the time to start adding financial guys to efficiently manage it, and analytics to optimize your channels, etc. Plus, NEVER let either of those tails wag the dog. Once a company's financial numbers start to rely on the finance department, or the sales numbers start to rely on channel optimization, the death spiral has started. It may take a while and look like an improvement at first (e.g., see GE), but it is still a death spiral. Focus on product and customers, period.

mrtksn 6y ago

Let's think about it. Are games doing analytics? Games are essentially UIs that people pay for the privilege to use. Although I am sure that contemporary game makers use analytics to understand user behaviour and optimize for in game spending and engagement, at least in the bigger games probably the core experience comes from creative human processes. The more the analytics the further optimised the game would be towards KPI. Also, I suspect that Netflix is creating it's materials based on analytics rather than creative human input. Maybe the problem is not analytics but greed and ill chosen KPI? Pre-total-tracking world, creatives still needed to test ideas and to test ideas you need to be able to measure. They would pay attention to what sells, how people react to a specific line etc. Maybe it was more fun because it was less optimised for profit?

daemin 6y ago
Yes games are doing analytics. What do you think half of the achievements are for in a game - a very primitive form of analytics. There is usually an achievement for making it past the first level or prologue, there's another one for finishing the game, and probably many more for passing stages of the game. These are all to see how many people progress that far in the game. Apart from that there's also crash telemetry and other event based tracking included in games.
- nitrogen 6y ago
  I believe I read that some games even track what you look at and for how long.
atombum 6y ago
I think for companies like Activision, EA, analytics drive a massive amount of their decision making. I would even go so far as to posit that Blizzard (a master of psychological manipulation), most decisions are driven by analytics based optimization for engagement FIRST, then mechanics and creative design get to come play. I have no evidence, nor am I an insider, just an observer and scholar of games.
karpierz 6y ago
A prime example of analytics driving games is Slay the Spire, where they would record every decision you made and outcomes in the game to better balance the experience and give the player interesting decisions. https://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/314975/How_Slay_the_Spires_devs_use_data_to_balance_their_roguelike_deckbuilder.php https://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/314975/How_Slay_the_Spir...

Mauricebranagh 6y ago

Google just need to offer an on-prem version of GA - that would sole so many of my problems. The problem with your view is you have X resources to get things done - how do you measure the ROI or even get an idea of possible strategies. Of course you can go back to the 1960's mad men era "its toasted" approach to marketing, but that's not the best use of resources.

arcturus17 6y ago
They’d probably steal your data and peek into it regardless. My fatalistic outlook is justified by the amount of documented abuses they’ve committed over the years. Nothing is sacred to them, except the idea that “more data (in our servers) is good”.
novok 6y ago
The choice isn't GA or no analytics. You can do local server side analytics yourself if you wanted to, and even buy an on-prem product from someone out there that does the same.

justapassenger 6y ago

craftinator 6y ago
Your analogy is not applicable. A better example would be... Well better. Perhaps: "Here's a crazy idea for early humans - don't map out the location and habits of all the food that you hunt to maximize the number you kill, instead focus on improving the tools that you hunt with so you can reliably kill what you need. Only focus on maximizing kills when you start needing more food than you can find."

dheera 6y ago

PSA: Add this to /etc/hosts if you don't want other sites collecting info from you via Google Analytics/Ads 0.0.0.0 googleanalytics.com 0.0.0.0 googlesyndication.com A more complete list of things worth adding to /etc/hosts here (I'm not affiliated with this): https://github.com/StevenBlack/hosts https://github.com/StevenBlack/hosts

userbinator 6y ago
I've always had the ones with the dash, since they are what's mentioned in the official docs ( https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection/analyticsjs https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection... ): 0.0.0.0 google-analytics.com 0.0.0.0 www.google-analytics.com 0.0.0.0 ssl.google-analytics.com I'm not sure what googleanalytics.com is for, however; but I'll add it to my HOSTS, in any case.
ss64 6y ago
The only supported way to block GA without breaking pages is to use a plug-in https://tools.google.com/dlpage/gaoptout https://tools.google.com/dlpage/gaoptout No doubt your use of the plug in is logged somewhere.

bshoemaker 6y ago

How in the world has this been upvoted lol

hansel_der 6y ago
not everyone sells UX of a website?

kitsunesoba 6y ago

Another headache induced by analytics is how one will sometimes need to discard an efficient and effective feature design and build it differently in order to be able to track use of the feature properly. It wouldn't surprise me in the least if the amount of time and energy burned on implementing analytics equals or exceeds that of the work on the feature it's tracking.

splaytreemap 6y ago

You're essentially saying "don't use data to inform your decisions." This is trolling at best. No idea how this is the top comment here.

jfdi 6y ago

Agreed. I'm building https://increment.me https://increment.me and we specifically avoid web analytics and 3rd party cookies entirely. We don't keep data that doesn't serve a purpose and don't sell our data to anyone. For feedback, we use Increment itself to gather feedback directly from customers. Having customers directly give feedback is one great signal that really works, particularly when you demonstrate your commitment to action it. When you combine this with a 1st party view of how the product is used like from ephemeral log data, you can get a great pulse on how well you're helping your customers get the most value from you - and how you can adapt to help them more. I wish every business I interacted with had the same philosophy in creating value for customers and building trust in every interaction.

marrone12 6y ago

This is so reductionist I really can't believe this is the top comment. What if your "product" is a web or app service that depends on user interactions? How can you actually know what your users are doing or how they're using your product if you can't track it?

hansel_der 6y ago
on the other hand: producers of physical products very often don't get to know what there customers are doing with it. just saying

ivanhoe 6y ago

> Here's a crazy idea: Don't use analytics at all but focus on your product. Here's even crazier one: Just do analytics on the backend instead?! You don't need GA, nor 3rd party tracking cookies, just a simple session ID and a proper web-server's log analyzer, and you can get almost all of the same metrics. You can nowadays even sniff on clients' screen resolutions and other browser details using just img srcset, css and log analyzers.

walshemj 6y ago
And ho many developer hours are you spending doing this at scale? - I doing this in 95 doing this for BT worldwide's Intranet.

koonsolo 6y ago

If you are running a successful product, I believe you. If not, I'll just ignore your advice. Seems fair?

mrskitch 6y ago

This is exactly the same thought I came to with browserless.io. There simply wasn’t enough traffic to make informed decisions, and when there was it was really silly things (small copy changes and the like). Eventually we just tore it all out, and never looked back. Improving the product and blogging about our findings are a win-win for us and the ecosystem at large, versus agonizing over traffic and data

heyn05tradamu5 6y ago

100% agree. I used to be a very "analytics focused" product manager until I joined an enterprise software company that hardly uses them and is wildly successful. We're succesful because we talk to our users about everything. I spend most of my time talking to customers and watching them use the software. We occasionally use analytics to help us validate hypotheses or assumptions, but that's always complimented with a full range of qualitative methods. Analytics can help with observation, but it'll never give you the "why". In my experience only observation and a lot of conversations will get you there.

nickff 6y ago
Enterprise-focused companies are often some of the most user-hostile, opaque organizations in the world. I would rather a company post prices and documentation openly (with analytics) rather than requiring me to sign up for at least an account, and more often, a one-hour sales call to get any information at all.
- heyn05tradamu5 6y ago
  Sure, there are some bad enterprise software companies. What does this have to do with the original point though?
  - nickff 6y ago
    You said your enterprise company doesn’t use analytics, and just talks to people. I am describing how I find that to be worse.

partiallypro 6y ago

> Are the insights from Analytics really valuable enough to justify the cost? Yes. It is especially important when you are running ads and want to make sure you are getting the most bang for your buck in ad spend.

account42 6y ago
Ads also have a huge cost on society so you can stop that too.

danaliv 6y ago

Analytics revealed to me that a product I'd built (well, a free side project, but that's beside the point) was succeeding in the exact opposite of the market I'd built it for. I used to run an online Japanese-English dictionary. It was geared towards people learning Japanese. I built it when I was studying Japanese and thought it would be useful for other students. Turns out the overwhelming majority of the traffic to that site was from... Japan! I had it completely backwards! People weren't using it to aid their Japanese studies; they were using it to aid their English studies. (You might be tempted to suggest that it was in fact being used by people learning Japanese, and that those people were taking part in exchange/immersion programs, but there were other data that disproved this hypothesis.) I never would've realized that if I hadn't had analytics on there.

account42 6y ago
And? What does this trivia change about how you interact with that project? Is it not possible that there were other ways you could learn about this eventually?

pedro1976 6y ago

I agree. I dropped all analytics for my blog and sideprojects, thoufh I found out that for my personal motivation I really like some stats about user engagement. I could use the access logs from the webserver. Can anyone recommend a tool that post-processes those logs in a "analytics" like way?

shadowfaxRodeo 6y ago

100% agree. I use server-side analytics for vanity metrics like "unique visits," and a contact form for feedback. People really appreciate not being tracked, or having to agree to cookies.