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Google penalizes you for using Google Analytics
- youngtaff 5y agoLighthouse / PSI scores are irrelevant to search ranking. Data from the Chrome UX Report (CrUX) is going to be used in results ranking as part of the page experience update - this comes from real-world usage of Chrome GA affecting Lighthouse scores may be a good storyline for Simple Analytics (and there are plenty of reasons not to use GA) but you can still use GA and pass all the core web vitals
- prophesi 5y agoThe Chrome UX Report itself uses PSI, and all of its metrics are based on page performance, so I wouldn't say it's irrelevant.
- shadowfaxRodeo 5y agoGoogle may not be using Lighthouse to perform the tests, but it is understood that Google use performance metrics as an SEO factor. It's understandable that Simple Analytics would use Lighthouse to measure performance and extrapolate from there. I'm not sure how else they could do the test — as presumably they don't have access to Google's data.
- wereHamster 5y agoI don't think it's too far fetched to think that Google will somehow tweak CrUX numbers to counteract the performance drop caused by GA. For example, on a small percentage of users block GA and send the collected CrUX numbers with a special tag to the mothership, and then using only those when ranking sites.
- londons_explore 5y agoPossibly, but what they care about really is "What experience will users have when they visit a site". The GA script loading time is totally part of that, so why discount it from the measurements?
- wereHamster 5y agoHahahaha.... takes deep breath... «… they care about users»? ROFL… Google doesn't, never has, never will. Google cares about money. Period. It's in their interest to rank sites which use GA above sites which use competing products.
- toast0 5y agoKind of depends on how compelling GA is to the overall organization. GA makes some money, and maybe helps global tracking. Otoh, if it's an easy way to get ranking, that's going to be abused. And parts of the org do seem to want fast pages to win, so if GA means slow pages, there's a conflict.
- eli 5y agoExperience of Chrome users when they visit a site.
- nindalf 5y ago> this comes from real-world usage of Chrome Measured by what metric(s)? Core Web Vitals.
- tnolet 5y agoThis is kind of a snake pit. Google now has three different but related page performance initiatives. 1. Pagespeed insights 2. Web vitals, further sub divided into Core Web Vitals and just Web Vitals. 3. Lighthouse They all work together or are sub components of the other. Even more, two of three Core Web Vitals (Cumulative Layout Shift and First Input Delay) are not really reliably measures in a typical lab environment like PSI and Lighthouse: they require actual user interaction with a page. They are essentially RUM (Real User Monitoring) metrics. Other Web Vitals like Time to First Byte are much more deterministic.
- mtalhaashraf 5y agoI'm using Google Analytics to track pageview count on a website and it does appear to add around 0.4sec to Time-To-Interactive of the PageSpeed score. And the GA script size is about 40KB.
- cddotdotslash 5y agoIsn't this a good thing? One part of Google made a tool that evaluates performance and they're not giving any preference to their other tools, despite also being made by Google. If they hadn't objectively penalized you, everyone would be complaining that Google gave preferential treatment to their own products.
- onion2k 5y agoIt's a good thing that Google don't give preferential treatment to their own products. It's a bad thing that Google's own analytics product isn't good enough to still get 4x100 in Google's own perf tool. It means that people will give up and accept lower scores because it's "impossible" to be perfect. That harms everyone who uses the web.
- jefftk 5y agoWhy will people think it's impossible and give up, when competitors like Simple Analytics demonstrate that better performance is possible? (Disclosure: I work for Google, speaking only for myself)
- jmcan 5y agoMaybe small business owners doing this themselves will give up because they don't know about these other analytics services. But I agree I don't think a marketer would give up and settle for a lower score, but I definitely can see a marketer being frustrated with the lack of feedback in order to get a perfect score.
- lallysingh 5y agoThey could... Google it.
- salawat 5y agoNot everyone has the time, desire, inclination, or capability to articulate the questions required to chart out the "analytics package" space. Nor does everyone have the luxury of hiring a PM to do it for them.
- whatever_dude 5y agoTangent: I find GA to be mostly useless nowadays for any website used by a more tech savvy community. When comparing the GA results to server logs and a separate JS logging script, and already discounting for bots, it's clear GA is only counting about 10% of my visits. Too many people blocking that script. I have about 20 different sites using it that I manage in some form bit cannot couch for it anymore.
- throwaway3699 5y agoThis is why I proxy GA visits directly through my server. Full accuracy but less privacy issues as my clients don't require JavaScript and I can anon the IP myself. I'm surprised more people aren't doing this.
- lowpro 5y agoHave you written on how to do this/followed a guide somewhere?
- throwaway3699 5y agoThe Google Analytics Measurement Protocol documentation was used. We created a middleware which sends data to GA as a POST request (much like our regular logs middleware)
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- mobilio 5y agoUsing GA isn't bad because there are two ways to run it. First is when GA script is on <head> section. This is mostly popular, but making CWV scores little bit low. Second is when GA script is anywhere on page, but not on <head>. Like before </body> or in <body>. This doesn't hurt your CWV scores.
- tyingq 5y agoThey are using your latter example, here's the page: https://blog.simpleanalytics.com/with-ga-script https://blog.simpleanalytics.com/with-ga-script It is hurting the score. The GA script is NOT in the <head>.
- mobilio 5y agoYes - 91 on mobile. Because fonts, not because GTM.
- spicybright 5y agothat's kind of weird, I would think you'd want to measure things like time to dom load, if someone clicks off before that, etc. Maybe for performance reasons?
- mobilio 5y agoYes - putting on head can measure DOM loading and interactions as quick as they happens. But have performance hit - Webkit (Safari, Chrome, etc) doesn't show even single pixel on screen until they load all resources in head. And another bad news - HTTP partition cache for Safari and Chrome. Putting in body - you can not catch all interactions, but won't stop rendering. Everything is an compromise...
- spicybright 5y agoWowie, not a single pixel? So I'm not crazy firefox seems faster than chrome?
- josefresco 5y agoI really wish Google would split Analytics into two products. One for "advanced" website operators and one for "simple" users, aka business owners aka real people, not professional data analysts. The problem is that most of my clients don't care enough about their stats to pay $19/month. So they opt for the "free" option (Google Analytics) which is now being positioned for the high-end market.
- mywittyname 5y agoGA offers GA360 for "advanced" users who need integration with Ads, Videos, GCP, Salesforce, etc.
- varispeed 5y agoThe amount of data Google gets off of people using GA is incredible and they don't pay for it. Google should be paying people for using their GA.
- coldpie 5y agoGA's users are being paid with access to a product they find useful.
- robinj6 5y agoThis has frustrated me so much, as I spend a lot of time optimizing web performance. Gtag.js is pushed by analytics, however after loading it then async loads analytics.js. It is very inefficient, especially for sites that do not much more than track page views. It is the worst scoring factor on sites I optimize because there’s very little you can do about it without hacks.
- SquareWheel 5y agoIf you don't need any of the other features of GTag or GTM, you can omit them and just load analytics.js directly. It'll work fine and save you some data. https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection/analyticsjs https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection... I don't think this option exists with GA4, unfortunately.
- JohnTHaller 5y agoI like the idea of Simple Analytics but that pricing model is out of reach open source projects like PortableApps.com. Separating out by page views is tough when I only need a single user and don't care about support. $600 a year for up to a million page views per month and "contact us" for more means it'd probably be at least a couple thousand dollars a year.
- neltnerb 5y agoHonest question -- why do you need analytics on an open source project like the one referenced? What information could they possibly get from it that matters to what they're doing? I've used GA once on an open source focused blog, and the information was entirely "interesting" but I didn't get anything useful out of it other than a vague "hey people are visiting" picture that really changed nothing about what I was doing. Has analytics changed to be more useful? Who cares what countries people are visiting from? I feel like people don't question their need for analytics as much as they should and just automatically do it.
- JohnTHaller 5y agoIt's very handy for working to set up partnerships/sponsorships to help keep the project going, help bring other apps on board to use our open source format, and to track where site visitors are coming from to determine what languages we should add to the site (as either just a landing page or a full translation) or the software platform (currently in 56 languages).
- neltnerb 5y agoI guess I can see that, do potential partners and sponsors not just accept a website counter? I guess an outside company is sort of an auditor on that kind of things. Language localization stuff is about the only reason I could think of, and even then like... don't open source projects almost always rely on passionate users for translations? Thanks for the explanation in any case, I at least can picture the first working with bigcorp that doesn't know any other way of measuring the impact of what they fund.
- earthboundkid 5y agoThat's why I use https://github.com/jehna/ga-lite/ https://github.com/jehna/ga-lite/. It saves a roundtrip and is quite small.
- hrdwdmrbl 5y agoYou should see how much Facebook’s tracker impacts performance! GA does a relatively good job at not impacting performance compared with others. Not defending GA though, just whining about FB. :)
- mdoms 5y agoThis is an ad.
- devmunchies 5y agoTLDR; Google Analytics penalizes you for using Google Analytics (slower page speed), not Google.
- digitcatphd 5y agoAnyone who takes this article seriously has (A) not read how to lie with statistics (B) does not analyze bias in articles based on the person writing it and (C) is directly contributing to a society of misinformation.
- bhartzer 5y agoGoogle doesn't penalize sites in any way if you're using their products (like GA or embedding a YouTube video). This is just silly and flat out wrong to say that Google penalizes you for using Google Analytics. It's flat-out wrong and untrue. It's kind of like saying that buying Google Ads will boost your website's organic search engine rankings. I really suggest that SimpleAnalytics.com update the title tag on this, as it's just wrong. Period. That doesn't mean that using Google Analytics doesn't slow down your site (a bit) and Google should speed it up. I've had that complaint for years now, and Google just hasn't done anything about it that we can noticeably see.
- xnx 5y agoLooks like they're deploying the Simple Analytics script directly in the page source and the Google Analytics script via Google Tag Manager. Though Google Analytics through Google Tag Manager might be the Google-recommended way to deploy Google Analytics, this isn't exactly an apples-to-apples comparison. Would be interesting to see if Google Analytics directly in the page had a different score than through Google Tag Manager. That said, I would almost always trade the miniscule score penalty for serving something through Google Tag Manager (including Simple Analytics) for ease of maintenance.
- bhartzer 5y agoOfficial statement from Google's John Mueller regarding this: https://twitter.com/JohnMu/status/1389322980547833856 https://twitter.com/JohnMu/status/1389322980547833856 "No, it's not the case that we penalize for Google Analytics. We don't special-case Google products in Search, but that goes both ways. The LH score is not what we use in Search, but my ancient WP + GA site is 100 there." John Mueller
- jscheel 5y agoMy biggest complaint is that Lighthouse has a longstanding open bug where out-of-process iframes are counted in the main thread, thus causing third party embeds to wildly degrade the LH score, even when real performance is not affected much. This even happens to Google's own YouTube embed. Add one YT video to a page and see how destructive it is to a LH score. It's really difficult to explain to customers when they track their LH score like a professional bodybuilder tracks fat percentages.
- processing 5y agoI tried both Simple Analytics & Plausible but both are blocked by Adblockers which made then useless to us. In the end - ditched Google Analytics and just use log files & sales data.
- ihaveajob 5y agoWait until you measure of showing Google Ads!
- masswerk 5y agoBTW, the same is true for Google Fonts. These prove to be the major bottleneck on my sites. (Since I'm hosting fonts locally, these are at 100% performance or close. We may argue that in practice these fonts would probably have been available in cache, but this tends to be less a thing, compare Firefox privacy policies.) This is actually a testament to the neutrality of Lighthouse.
- swiley 5y agoHoly cow Google Fonts is a great way to say "go away" to people on slow internet connections. Please don't use it. Because you can't predict the metrics for the font until it loads it means you either: a) have the page jump around 30-60 seconds after the page loads (when the reader is probably half way through it) or b) leave the page blank for the 30-60 seconds it takes for the font to load, if it finishes loading at all.
- aymaneSennoussi 5y agoHello, this is stupid. Google doesn't penalize you for using GA, but because you're not using it the right way. If you want to use GA without JS overhead, use their API and build your own JS friendly tracker.