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Google Analytics 4

185 points by WalterSobchak 5y ago

deleted 5y ago
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abalaji 5y ago
As a hobbyist, this bums me out; I no longer will have the data from the day my humble blog made the front page of HN. Wish there was a way to migrate UA data to GA4, but from a bit of digging that doesn't seem possible.
- bartread 5y ago
  Same. I run a hobby site, and like being able to look back over all time and see the (in my case slow and gradual) buildup of traffic. The lack of migration route for historical data is frustrating, but I also don't particularly appreciate extra non-value-adding work being dumped on me for something I do for fun.
- bouke 5y ago
  That’s the price you pay for not owning your data.
- cube00 5y ago
  Keep in mind Google can suspend and lock your account at anytime for "suspicous behavour", there's no one you can contact, use this shutdown of UA to make the change today and start owning your own data. There are plenty of other good alternatives in the other comments.
- xnx 5y ago
  Its possible to export a reasonable amount of current googld analytics data via the api.
winternett 5y ago
Tiny-er dashboards! More confusing controls and useless new marketing terms! Even more useless dat ranges! It's all here!! The tool you don't use, but we do! Looking forward to not using it. :I
Gigachad 5y ago
Most interesting part about this for me is the name. I was never aware of there being a GA 3. It seems like every product went from numbered versions to continuous updates like when windows went to 10 and declared there would be no more numbered versions. But now the trend seems to be reversing and everyone wants that yearly numbered announcement with the hype that comes along with it. I wonder if we will start seeing more consumer software and online services hold back features to go in one big release rather than letting them drip out as they are done.
- taspeotis 5y ago
  > windows went to 10 But these Windows go to 11?
- Jerry2 5y ago
  >But now the trend seems to be reversing and everyone wants that yearly numbered announcement with the hype that comes along with it. And promotion and bonuses! This is the major impetus for these efforts.
- josephg 5y ago
  The problem with rolling releases is that there’s no way to say “I’m using the API as it was at version 3”. The last few years I’ve been increasingly thinking about software versions where the major version is part of the dependency name. So product Foo@1.2.3 is really “Foo1” at version 2.3. Foo1 is what you’re depending on, and so long as the semver guarantee holds, you should be able to incorporate rolling releases of Foo1’s versions. But because Foo2 (Foo@2.0.0) has a different API, it’s a different dependency and should be treated as if it were separate object in the dependency tree. And generally Foo1 and Foo2 should be able to sit, live and work side-by-side. The fact that Foo1 and Foo2 are both called "Foo" is an artefact of how humans write software, but its meaningless to the computer. Foo2 usually has all the features of Foo1, but because the API is programmatically incompatible, when it comes to the dependency tree, they should be totally separate items. You see forms of this all over the place. Eg, HTTP APIs are usually /api/v1/ not /api/v1.2/. Debian's apt repository has packages for 'llvm-10', 'llvm-11', 'llvm-12', and so on. I used to think this was silly; but now I think it might be the only way to do that in a coherent way.
Animats 5y ago
OK, if this is coming, how do we block it or send bogus data?
- jonobird1 5y ago
  FYI GA4 was released over a year ago, it seems it hasn't 'stuck' with not many people upgrading, at least with many people I've worked with. It is the default version when you setup a new GA property though.
- fourseventy 5y ago
  Any mainstream adblocker will block it.
- hedora 5y ago
  Would be more interested in sending it bogus data. Strangling it to death with ad blockers isn't working (or at least is doing less than the self inflicted damage being caused by mismanagement over at Google). How can we make its output completely wrong, instead of just incomplete? I'll happily stick a "do not track” header (or the new one) on the bogus requests. In my book, they've been warned to back off at that point, so any bad outcomes from tracking the requests are on them.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
chunkyks 5y ago
It feels like a cliche now. Read the article and of course, they're sunsetting something else.
- refulgentis 5y ago
  People react to Google deprecating support for previous versions of software as if Google is no longer providing the functionality altogether.
  - ceejayoz 5y ago
    > All standard Universal Analytics properties will stop processing new hits on July 1, 2023, and 360 Universal Analytics properties will stop processing new hits on October 1, 2023. After that, you’ll be able to access your previously processed data in Universal Analytics for at least six months. That seems to be what they're doing?
    - 1123581321 5y ago
      This is a forced upgrade to a new version of Google Analytics, not a discontinuation. Still the same product and no data will be lost.
      - ceejayoz 5y ago
        How are you reading "All standard Universal Analytics properties will stop processing new hits" as "everything will keep working fine" and "you’ll be able to access your previously processed data [for six months]" as a guarantee no data will be lost?
        1123581321 5y ago
        Because everyone's going to update their properties so analytics keep working. It's not like when a new chat product comes out and splinters your contacts into multiple chat products. It's like when, e.g., Heroku sends me an email saying I need to move apps off of a stack they're retiring. They're not killing off my app; I just need to run the command or agree to a maintenance window so it keeps working after a certain date. If I for whatever reason refuse to do anything, I can't seriously claim they're shutting me down. Especially with a long notice period.
jerrysievert 5y ago
I keep getting email from them to upgrade. Each email (and this article) remind me that I need to remove ga from the one site I have it on.
lmkg 5y ago
Personal opinion, Google is catastrophically shooting themselves in the foot here, and could lose their market dominance. GA's second-biggest moat (behind being free) is its existing install base. It's already in place on approximately every website on the Internet. And no one wants to change analytics vendors, because that breaks history, which is a no-no. You want to know if your visits are up/down vs last month or last year, you literally cannot answer that unless you are using the same tool this years as you were last year. By forcing a migration to a non-compatible version, Google loses that big advantage. If you're going to lose that anyways, then there's less of a reason to stick with GA. Now you're forcing people to gut-and-replace their existing data collection process, what incentive is there for people to stick with Google? One of the biggest reasons to stay with GA was just killed. The timing is also exceptionally atrocious. Google is, again, forcing people to expend the effort to rebuild their analytics implementations from scratch. Meanwhile court rulings are coming down on a monthly basis enumerating different ways in which Google Analytics violates GDPR. A lot of companies might just brush off these rulings by simply doing nothing, but now they're being forced to actively invest time and effort into Google Analytics. A lot of them are going to be doing an evaluation against privacy-conscious competitors that simply would not have happened if Google wasn't kicking people of their existing platform. The GA4 data model is also completely different from the GA Universal data model, which is an impediment to their fourth-biggest moat, the fact that every piece of BI software in the universe has a GA plug-in. Many of those plug-ins work despite not being actively maintained since 2015; the GA4 ecosystem is smaller and will take some time to recover. (The third-biggest moat is Google Ads integration. I suspect that Google imagines this to be bigger than it really is in practice.)
- Ecco 5y ago
  Interesting perspective. Thanks for sharing!
- robbiep 5y ago
  It’s an interesting argument, but in my view, one that sailed 2-3 years ago when they force-migrated everyone to firebase analytics, which fairly drastically changed our data views given as it was so heavily geared to revenue generating click businesses (as opposed to B2B SaaS). At that point we instituted a big program to move to Amplitude (which we’ve been fairly happy with, but probably won’t be perfect until we get our own data overlays through eventually getting a data lake etc etc) - now the move BACK to GA … II would never touch GA again or consider it for a new project
shanghaikid 5y ago
Any GA alternative?
- Gustomaximus 5y ago
  Matomo is probably the leading alternative. I'll in the process of looking alternatives as GA4 is a step back. I suspect alternate analytics companies are going to love Google for this decision.
  - raunometsa 5y ago
    >> I suspect alternate analytics companies are going to love Google for this decision. Oh yes! https://twitter.com/MarkoSaric/status/1504121261915574273 https://twitter.com/MarkoSaric/status/1504121261915574273
- epwr 5y ago
  I really like usefathom.com
- juddlyon 5y ago
  Plausible is excellent.
- desiarnezjr 5y ago
  https://matomo.org https://matomo.org
- basquiyacht 5y ago
  You might want to check out Simple Analytics as well. From a privacy perspective this is actually a good shout. We classified it as follows: Matomo looks more like Google and the data is yours. Plausible and Simple Analytics are more similar to one another in the sense that they only collect privacy-insenstive data. The main difference is that plausible still operates in a 'grey-area' by anonymizing IP addresses for 24 hours. This can be considered fingerprinting.
- slig 5y ago
  I like and use Clicky.
krnlpnc 5y ago
I honestly don't give a fsck about the new version or why it needs to be a breaking change. All I hear is: > We will begin sunsetting Universal Analytics — the previous generation of Analytics — next year. All standard Universal Analytics properties will stop processing new hits on July 1, 2023 Great, plenty of time to replace GA with another analytics solution.
- mkr-hn 5y ago
  I ditched analytics entirely when I realized they didn't tell me anything I didn't already know. Stat dashboards are skinner boxes that get in the way of doing the work of trying new things, getting feedback, and using it for the next thing.
  - jklinger410 5y ago
    The entire purpose of analytics is to tell you what you don't know. But go off.
    - ravenstine 5y ago
      While it might be a bit hyperbolic to suggest that analytics don't tell you anything new, I've seen vanity metrics toted around on more than one occasion as if it meant anything actionable or otherwise unknowable. I think this is more common than the other way around. It's like the ol' conundrum where an A/B test is performed on a design change, and the B version results in more "engagement" with the site; what they fail to openly mention is that so-called engagement may just be the frustration of the user trying to bypass your crummy design update. IMO, the best analytics for many businesses is customer acquisition and revenue as well as customer feedback. If you aren't adequately responding to those inherent analytics then you shouldn't yet be using The Google's form of black magic.
      - tppiotrowski 5y ago
        I joke around that my “best” traffic days are when my website is broken and users keep reloading the page to see if it is fixed.
aetherspawn 5y ago
I always thought Universal Analytics was the new product and GA 4 was the old product. That's how naming usually works ... go from numbered releases to continuous rolling releases. Not until a few months ago that I realized it was the other way around. Really poor product planning.
- a1371 5y ago
  I thought that was just me. Just learned that in this article. I actually was not using some stuff that said they support GA4 because I thought they were legacy. Sounds like a branding fail to replace "universal" with a random number.
enw 5y ago
Why does Google keep breaking backward compatibility?
- kyleee 5y ago
  for the benefit of individual googler's career trajectories?
- jdrc 5y ago
  it's too much work
- dbbk 5y ago
  The old data is probably illegal, if not granted with consent
streptomycin 5y ago
This seems kind of insane, so many people are using the old version of Google Analytics and have absolutely no compelling reason to upgrade other than Google forcing them. And it seems GA4 is fairly different in some ways, this is going to be a ton of churn for a ton of people. I guess Google thinks there really is no alternative, they can just force people to do extra work for no gain and they'll grumble and accept it?
- luckydata 5y ago
  aside of cookies not working anymore and the old model becoming illegal in some countries? I think it's compelling enough for people that actually need the data. For you maybe not and that's ok.
  - shostack 5y ago
    This needs to be higher. The industry is changing in fundamental ways. Certain things simply cannot be doing anymore, for better or worse.
cyral 5y ago
GA4 feels like a huge step backwards. Tons of functionality in the previous version is missing or replaced with smart “insights” (where you have to try to describe your query in plain text, which it will always get wrong). A good time to move on to something better.
- vgeek 5y ago
  It goes along with the philosophy of removing useful data that they've had for at least the last 10 years. Metrics like average position or search impression share in Adwords got removed, along with consistently broadening keyword match types (plus other quiet, but signficant shifts like moving away from second price auctions). The biggest introductions emphasized automated bidding strategies, view through conversions and hyper-optimistic offline conversion attribution tools. Analytics removed organic keyword data years ago and has shifted some focus towards multichannel attribution, but this is the biggest leap. The goal in PR speak is "understanding the customer journey across all channels" but in reality it is more like trying to capture more dollars from brand advertisers (see: big orgs with layers of burecracy with a big budget and 0 accountability) and mask the inefficiency of their platform for others (think lead gen-- Google tested running their own insurance comparison service, but it was more profitable to charge insurers $xx.xx per click instead. Similar situation with OTAs/home services). They keep adding layers of opacity to mask ever shrinking ROIs while making it easier for anyone to spend more on ads. Eventually they will get to the point where you set a budget and you get what they are willing to provide based on what their "AI" decides is best to maximize their fill rates, auction participants and their earnings per page view. No keywords or managed placements. It isn't like there is an alternative and their inertia isn't going anywhere.
- crftr 5y ago
  I'm running both UA and GA4 for that exact reason. My team can't pull all of their regular reports with GA4, alone.
travisgriggs 5y ago
Naive question. Sorry. I don’t do web app cloud micro service analytics sort of things. I’m used to quite a bit of verbiage in HN posts about Google ruining the internet with commercialization and ads and analytics and that sort of thing. But the comments here of which I’m a naive observer I guess, seem to be of a “how dare Google change what is an essential part of our tools!” Is this just a case of different HN subcultures taking time to post to each other? Or is it just my lack of understanding of the nuances of which part of modern web apps is good and/or evil?
- jamesfinlayson 5y ago
  I think this is a case of people being annoyed that a product that works just fine is being replaced. I have a handful of personal sites that I've slapped Google Analytics on, and while they're mostly using Google Analytics out of the box, I'd rather not have to spin my wheels reworking some custom events.
- ksec 5y ago
  >Naive question. Not really, at least you observed something. It is more like a silent majority. And I have been heavily downvoted for pointing this out previously. Sometimes post 2016 it went all the way to Ads equals evil on HN along with the rest of the internet and social media. Around 2017 / 2018 tracking becomes evil. This is further fueled in 2019 when Apple went on full PR attack ( or one could argue adding fuel to fire ) about tracking and ads. ( They subsequently pulled back and state they are not against ads after industry backlash ). Target advertising ( whatever that means [1] ). And working in FANNG ( before it was called MAAMA ) would become morally wrong for a short period of time on HN. But there are, legitimate uses for Ads, and legitimate uses for tracking. So every once in a while you see a few people who dare to offer their contrarian view, those that are working in the ad industry, or working as a business that requires the usage of tracking, funnelling and ads for sales. And offer their views that somehow gets the upvote to top post. Assuming the upvote is not gamed in anyway, that means there are a huge number of HN readers that rarely participate in any discussions, but upvoted something that largely go against the common trend on HN. There are also some sort of political angle to it. Although I tend to think they are separate issues rather than causes. [1] https://www.ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2021/8/27/understanding-privacy https://www.ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2021/8/27/understand...
creinhardt 5y ago
Yes, Google finally realized that everyone hated looking at 'pageviews', but loves looking for an event called 'page_view'. Much easier to understand! Honestly though, for a huge segment of their users this hides/obscures the number one metric they look for. I understand that with SPA"s and stuff things are much more event driven, but they're absolutely going to lose some users over this.
- lgrebe 5y ago
  Question being how many more do they gain? Especially in the mobile app space maybe - if you have a game where you upgrade your sword with gems and attack your neighbor, which if those actions would be a pageview? Just take a look at https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/9267735?hl=en https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/9267735?hl=en
  - creinhardt 5y ago
    That’s fair! I do think you could trigger events for that kind of thing in Universal Analytics though. Seemed to have plenty of affordances for use in apps as well. I still question whether going for a ‘clean break’ is the best idea. Obviously products have to improve, but I’m surprised to see them imperil their massive user base this way.
debrice 5y ago
It makes sense that google is attempting to adapt to new laws but they do it so slowly that it’s quite concerning for the future. Also the market has become much more competitive and there is plenty of alternatives to chose from at very fair prices.
exodust 5y ago
> "all while prioritizing user privacy". The way Google mentions "privacy" in the first sentence reminds me of a mining company mentioning "the environment" in the first sentence of their plan to dig a gigantic hole somewhere. A related note: I have concerns with Google's recent nagging of website owners to upload user data to Google, under the banner of "enhanced conversions". The idea is that Google takes the user data and matches with their user accounts. So a user logged into Google who clicks an ad, can be tracked across devices without the need for third party cookies. They expect the upload to happen on the conversion page - such as the thanks page on a website contact form. To me it feels like Google are trying to convince business owners that to be "leaders in your industry" they must help Google fill the void created by third party cookie banning. Site owners are now pushed to upload every contact form submission to Google for the purpose of what is effectively next-gen third party tracking. It bothers me how blatant and obnoxious the spin is around such pressure on businesses to share their customer data with Google, when it wasn't shared before for the purpose of tracking. "Don't worry, it's hashed data" is not good enough, and not the point.
- lgrebe 5y ago
  I feel quite tge same and step 5 in their migration guide underlines this: > 5. Activate Google Signals very low effort (If applicable; very low effort) https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/10759417 https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/10759417
funkidredd 5y ago
Nothing else in the Analytics space gives the right integration between your SEO and PPC. So for example, if I wanted to create an Analytics -based custom PPC audience based on a number of factors such as device, pages visited, events triggered and location (layered) directly into my AdWords campaigns, I'm going to have to use GA. And if I want to use Optimize for my PPC campaigns, then I'm going to have to still use GA. It's all out of the box and it's all "free", compared with the multiple vendors solutions I'd need to make the same scenario work in order to drive sales from web visitors. That's the google lock in right there. Meh.
unityByFreedom 5y ago
A 12-step upgrade procedure is insane [1] [2]. It's like they want people to ditch their product. I have an extremely basic setup that took 5 minutes to start using. Why is this not a one-click upgrade? [1] https://i.imgur.com/uZmfUfJ.png https://i.imgur.com/uZmfUfJ.png [2] https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/10759417 https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/10759417
- nyuszika7h 5y ago
  > It's like they want people to ditch their product. And I hope they do.
- syncerr 5y ago
  bc their target market is not developers
  - wussboy 5y ago
    Bingo. Their target market is the managers and decision makers who don't have time or knowledge to do anything other than look at the Magic Quadrant and tell their team which to implement.
    - manquer 5y ago
      It still doesn't make sense , no manager is going to be okay loosing historical data.
      - wussboy 5y ago
        That’s something for another department to figure out. Keeps the BI team employed…
- nightski 5y ago
  I find it amusing someone actually had to take the effort to classify those and find a way to differentiate what constituted "very low effort" vs. "low effort" or how many meetings were involved.
roschdal 5y ago
Brace yourself
markdown 5y ago
I had dozens of (client) websites that ran GA, but then Google, the internet behemoth with some of the greatest engineers in the world, couldn't even figure out how to stop spam from polluting their control panel. It became useless to me and I haven't used it in at least five years. If there's anyone here who still uses GA, can you tell me if they ever solved the problem of referrer spam?
- porker 5y ago
  No they haven't, and I've never worked out a way to clean it out of the reports. At minimum they need a disavow tool.
  - bethling 5y ago
    Interesting -- I got quite a bit up until 3 or 4 years ago, but it's essentially vanished for me. Not sure which cases they've cleaned up, and which ones they haven't I guess.
CSSer 5y ago
I suspect this is due to slow adoption. The majority of SaaS reporting tools don’t currently have integrations for GA4 last I checked (admittedly been awhile). The particular one I had in mind had it coming in the next year or so, but the lack of a clear date seemed to indicate to me it wasn’t a priority because, well, it wasn’t driving their bottom line. This should grease the wheels. We’ve been creating and including both with gtag(‘config’, ‘ID’) lines for some time now in anticipation of something like this.
dmje 5y ago
I hate everything about GA4. It's a totally counter intuitive, massively over complex interface. Things that were easy in the old version are now either insanely hard or simply missing. I'm moving my clients to Matomo and they're loving it.
- basquiyacht 5y ago
  Why did you choose Matomo?
  - dmje 5y ago
    It gives me and clients what we need - nice simple engagement metrics. I'm self hosting and it's easy to setup.
lienhoangduy 5y ago
I have tried GA4 before but the issues with the event when can not record still not be fixed.
npunt 5y ago
'Their upgrade path is your opportunity' to paraphrase Jeff Bezos, for any of the competing analytics offerings out there. Seems like a good time to make a break from GA and do your part to reduce centralized surveillance on the web.
jwr 5y ago
I stopped using Google Analytics when I realized that it doesn't produce any useful actionable data for me. It's just a feel-good thingy, where I watch the page view numbers and go "oooh". Those page view numbers do have a relationship to my business. But it's like measuring traffic on a highway when your store is next to it. The numbers will be somewhat related, but not actionable in any way. I guess it makes sense if you get paid by page views (ad-supported sites?). But I have a B2B SaaS and I get paid by subscriptions. I rarely care about any of the metrics that GA shows, and I found that many of them are bogus anyway. I could probably wrestle GA into measuring what I need, but why bother, there are easier ways to handle that. A nice side benefit is that I'm not participating in the global people-tracking business and I'm not subjecting my users/customers to that.
- lgrebe 5y ago
  What are you using for quantitative behavioral data at your B2B SaaS?
  - matsemann 5y ago
    What we've done before is just add events in our db, or even just aggregate log data to find what we want in a grafana dashboard or whatever. Much more reliable than GA with them being blocked. And often I don't need the data they add, I care more about how many clicked a button versus how many saw it, and I'm in a better position to track that than Google.
  - traceroute66 5y ago
    > What are you using for quantitative behavioral data at your B2B SaaS? Properly instrumented code allows this as a side-benefit. The main benefit of properly instrumented code being that it makes debugging a breeze.
  - jwr 5y ago
    I track all money-related metrics very precisely (using ProfitWell and spreadsheets). I wrote code for traffic source attribution and used it to find out that my money spent on super-targeted LinkedIn, Facebook and Google ads resulted in precisely $0 revenue, so I stopped advertising and the code is now rusty. I wrote code for A/B testing (this is something you really want to have integrated with your site) using the multi-armed bandit approach and used it to find out that with low traffic of a B2B SaaS it takes months to reach conclusions. That is still sometimes used, but not a whole lot, and only because the multi-armed bandit approach with Thompson sampling is nice enough to prioritize "better" options over time, so you can leave it running safely without baby-sitting it the whole time. Overall the problem with a B2B SaaS is that unless you are already huge, the amount of good actionable data that you can work with is small. It's much better to spend the effort on making a product that people will want to use, e.g. talk to your customers.
peakaboo 5y ago
Google Analytics is about to be banned in Europe. Couldn't be more happy.
phlsa 5y ago
I wonder if Google realized that Analytics has become unfathomably complex for non-power users and wants a clean break now. I run a side business[1] that is lucky to not be dependent on search ads. We started using GA 10-ish years ago because it was free and took almost no effort to set up. But over the years it just got more and more complicated to use, to the point where it got hard to act on the results. Last year, I switched to Plausible[2] for data protection reasons. The unexpected side effect was that I suddenly understand every single metric in my analytics tool. As a result, I use it a lot more for actual decision-making. [1] https://push-conference.com https://push-conference.com [2] https://plausible.io https://plausible.io edit: typos
- sccxy 5y ago
  +1 for Plausible. I use selfhosted version. I agree that less features is upside for better understanding of all collected data. Simple dashboard is all I need and I guess it is same for most of websites.
- topicseed 5y ago
  The new version GA4 is definitely not on the easier side. New words, new mental model, new report flow, etc. I am not sure if I like it or if I hate it.
  - d0gbread 5y ago
    It's a better data model with a significantly worse UI. Hard to believe they put it out there as is.
    - topicseed 5y ago
      Yep, I think that's the proper summary. I like the all-in move to "events", but the UI, especially for content-heavy websites, is incredibly more difficult to navigate and extract insights from.
- shafyy 5y ago
  Kudos for mentioning Plausible. I also love and use them. They actually inspired me to start a privacy-focused products analytics tool that doesn't track unique users (and is open-source). Shamelessly plugging it here: https://fugu.lol https://fugu.lol (GitHub: https://github.com/shafy/fugu https://github.com/shafy/fugu)
AdriaanvRossum 5y ago
Privacy TLDR; Google Analytics 4 has a few changes that should improve their privacy aspects: IP Anonymization: not GDPR proof Server location: not changeable Use of Cookie Banner: still needed Deleting Individual User Data: improvement Limited Data Storage: slight improvement In short, they say they fix a lot of privacy issues, but they don't really address the real issues like the use of IP addresses and the location of your data. [1] Disclosure: I'm the founder of Simple Analytics. [2] [1] https://blog.simpleanalytics.com/google-to-sunset-universal-analytics-in-2023 https://blog.simpleanalytics.com/google-to-sunset-universal-... [2] https://simpleanalytics.com/ https://simpleanalytics.com/
- dbbk 5y ago
  > IP Anonymization: not GDPR proof Apparently they are updating GA4 to remove all use of IP addresses entirely: https://www.adexchanger.com/online-advertising/google-analytics-to-stop-logging-ip-addresses-and-sunset-old-versions-in-privacy-standards-overhaul/ https://www.adexchanger.com/online-advertising/google-analyt... > Use of Cookie Banner: still needed It still works without cookie consent though, once you incorporate their Consent Mode.
  - lmkg 5y ago
    GA4's IP Anonymization is good but not sufficient. Your IP Address is exposed to Google's servers, and is redacted after collection. Per GDPR, this still counts as Google processing your IP Address. It is not clear what actually works when you incorporate Consent Mode. I haven't actually found any reports that include the data supposedly collected. I also have some doubts that Consent Mode does not actually require consent (see IP Address concerns above).
    - dbbk 5y ago
      No, in the article they say alongside this announcement they're going beyond IP Anonymization and ceasing logging or storing IP addresses altogether. Of course, any network request is going to send an IP address... that's how the Internet works. If that alone is enough to make a service illegal then third-party analytics is going to be just flat out impossible for everyone.
marvinblum 5y ago
It looks like Google is finally reacting to some of the criticism [0] and changes a few things. I think it's still best to switch out your analytics or abandon it entirely if you don't rely on it. There are plenty of alternatives now [1]. GA is still a complex tool for people working with it full time. [0] https://pirsch.io/blog/google-analytics-declared-illegal-by-austrian-dsb/ https://pirsch.io/blog/google-analytics-declared-illegal-by-... [1] https://european-alternatives.eu/category/web-analytics-services https://european-alternatives.eu/category/web-analytics-serv...
adriangrigore 5y ago
I have https://s.mkws.sh/ https://s.mkws.sh/ as my analytics solution, sh, awk, httpd logs and cron.
dugmartin 5y ago
Seems like an (short term) opportunity for someone to build a product that pulls existing Google Analytics data via their API and stores it in a database to allow for viewing historical analytics data.
boredumb 5y ago
using the search console I can extract all the actionable information I need without having to burden users with downloading and executing GA.
pluc 5y ago
The "Still banned in Europe" version
XCSme 5y ago
I see many people don't like this change, so I'm shameless plugging my self-hosted analytics platform if you want to move away from GA: https://www.uxwizz.com/ https://www.uxwizz.com/
xnx 5y ago
It's crazy they're not allowing full (hit level) data export via Google takeout.
bastardoperator 5y ago
No thanks Google, you're evil now. You're not spying on my users or my business.
- zapdrive 5y ago
  Good luck preventing Google from snooping when most of your users use Chrome to visit your website or your Android app.
  - bastardoperator 5y ago
    I may not be able to prevent Google from spying, but I certainly do not have to assist them in their endeavor.
Hardik_Shah 5y ago
Google Analytics 4 is a web analytics service that allows you to track traffic and engagement on your websites and apps. This documentation contains implementation instructions and reference materials aimed at developers.
jbrooksuk 5y ago
[flagged]
123jay7 5y ago
Honest question but: What is a good alternative to GA?
sdoering 5y ago
I am a data analyst with 10+ years of experience. I have setup uncountable GA1 - GA3 implementations, eTracker, Matomo, Adobe Analytics from s_code to Appmeasurement and via Adobe Launch, Snowplow and quite a few others. I also have setup three implementations of Firebase and GA4. I can't for the love of god use this tool. It is in my eyes nothing but a mechanism for upselling GCE (esp. Big Query). Answering basic management and marketing questions about marketing goals (or other conversion goals reached) is a PITA. Building basic dashboards with Google Data Studio also. Taken together with the EU data privacy regulators regarding GA I nowadays just recommend clients to just ignore GA. Even if the USP is "but I can see my advertising numbers in there as well". Do they want to push people away from using their product?
- tootie 5y ago
  What's a plausible alternative though? Plausible?
  - sdoering 5y ago
    A plausible alternative depends on your use case. If you just want basic numbers (visitors, visits, page views, few interactions tracked) one can probably chose any of the myriad of alternatives like fathom, Plausible, Matomo, and so on. While with most of them you get what I would call "vanity metrics" (so not really actionable, more or less just "numbers go up or down") at least Matomo (self hosted) provides the ability to create essentially the experience of a free GA3 implementation. If you "just" had a code drop of basic GA3 code: just use whatever floats your boat. If you have custom dimensions, user interactions tracked as events, goals and stuff like that in the free GA3 version - go with Matomo (self hosted). Configure Matomo to have more than 5 custom dimensions (easy to do) and you can replicate (nearly) everything from your GA3 implementation. Only things you will be missing in any case is integration with Search Console and Google Ads.
    - Crazyontap 5y ago
      > While with most of them you get what I would call "vanity metrics" (so not really actionable, more or less just "numbers go up or down") This comment couldn't have come at a better time for me. I was just trying to compare the free analytics available and plausible looked okay to me. But since I haven't done anything actionable yet I think I'll research a little more. > so not really actionable What would you define as actionable metrics? Are you talking about the custom page triggers like scroll depth, click on obl, etc? Can you recommend what are the biggest actionable events for a saas site since you have experience with it? My source of knowledge on this is sadly a few youtube tutorials but if there is any resource you would recommend I'd highly appreciate the link.
celestialcheese 5y ago
Well shoot. Any way to export historical, basic data like what you'd find in the "Audience > Overview" tab? I should have expected this from Google, but damn, losing years and years of historical data is going to really hurt.
Angostura 5y ago
This certainly feels like Google is giving everyone a reason to explorer alternatives.
u2077 5y ago
Soon most of this tracking will be baked into the browser itself (as if it isn’t already). The topics api: https://github.com/jkarlin/topics https://github.com/jkarlin/topics
aww_dang 5y ago
Most of my users are blocking GA these days. I don't put it on new sites anymore. Crawlers from a certain country do execute GA js. This causes stats to vary wildly. Not sure if it will be worth my time to go back and remove the old tags from those sites. Cannot see a reason to upgrade. It was nice to know, but there are more important metrics. The multivariate testing suite was fun at one time. However it isn't as useful when your core users are all blocking it.
fold_left 5y ago
Are there any competitors out there that can import historical data from Google Analytics? I've not checked, can you even export your historical data from GA?

185 points by WalterSobchak 5y ago

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

As a hobbyist, this bums me out; I no longer will have the data from the day my humble blog made the front page of HN. Wish there was a way to migrate UA data to GA4, but from a bit of digging that doesn't seem possible.

bartread 5y ago
Same. I run a hobby site, and like being able to look back over all time and see the (in my case slow and gradual) buildup of traffic. The lack of migration route for historical data is frustrating, but I also don't particularly appreciate extra non-value-adding work being dumped on me for something I do for fun.
bouke 5y ago
That’s the price you pay for not owning your data.
cube00 5y ago
Keep in mind Google can suspend and lock your account at anytime for "suspicous behavour", there's no one you can contact, use this shutdown of UA to make the change today and start owning your own data. There are plenty of other good alternatives in the other comments.
xnx 5y ago
Its possible to export a reasonable amount of current googld analytics data via the api.

winternett 5y ago

Tiny-er dashboards! More confusing controls and useless new marketing terms! Even more useless dat ranges! It's all here!! The tool you don't use, but we do! Looking forward to not using it. :I

Gigachad 5y ago

Most interesting part about this for me is the name. I was never aware of there being a GA 3. It seems like every product went from numbered versions to continuous updates like when windows went to 10 and declared there would be no more numbered versions. But now the trend seems to be reversing and everyone wants that yearly numbered announcement with the hype that comes along with it. I wonder if we will start seeing more consumer software and online services hold back features to go in one big release rather than letting them drip out as they are done.

taspeotis 5y ago
> windows went to 10 But these Windows go to 11?
Jerry2 5y ago
>But now the trend seems to be reversing and everyone wants that yearly numbered announcement with the hype that comes along with it. And promotion and bonuses! This is the major impetus for these efforts.
josephg 5y ago
The problem with rolling releases is that there’s no way to say “I’m using the API as it was at version 3”. The last few years I’ve been increasingly thinking about software versions where the major version is part of the dependency name. So product Foo@1.2.3 is really “Foo1” at version 2.3. Foo1 is what you’re depending on, and so long as the semver guarantee holds, you should be able to incorporate rolling releases of Foo1’s versions. But because Foo2 (Foo@2.0.0) has a different API, it’s a different dependency and should be treated as if it were separate object in the dependency tree. And generally Foo1 and Foo2 should be able to sit, live and work side-by-side. The fact that Foo1 and Foo2 are both called "Foo" is an artefact of how humans write software, but its meaningless to the computer. Foo2 usually has all the features of Foo1, but because the API is programmatically incompatible, when it comes to the dependency tree, they should be totally separate items. You see forms of this all over the place. Eg, HTTP APIs are usually /api/v1/ not /api/v1.2/. Debian's apt repository has packages for 'llvm-10', 'llvm-11', 'llvm-12', and so on. I used to think this was silly; but now I think it might be the only way to do that in a coherent way.

Animats 5y ago

OK, if this is coming, how do we block it or send bogus data?

jonobird1 5y ago
FYI GA4 was released over a year ago, it seems it hasn't 'stuck' with not many people upgrading, at least with many people I've worked with. It is the default version when you setup a new GA property though.
fourseventy 5y ago
Any mainstream adblocker will block it.
hedora 5y ago
Would be more interested in sending it bogus data. Strangling it to death with ad blockers isn't working (or at least is doing less than the self inflicted damage being caused by mismanagement over at Google). How can we make its output completely wrong, instead of just incomplete? I'll happily stick a "do not track” header (or the new one) on the bogus requests. In my book, they've been warned to back off at that point, so any bad outcomes from tracking the requests are on them.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

chunkyks 5y ago

It feels like a cliche now. Read the article and of course, they're sunsetting something else.

refulgentis 5y ago
People react to Google deprecating support for previous versions of software as if Google is no longer providing the functionality altogether.
- ceejayoz 5y ago
  > All standard Universal Analytics properties will stop processing new hits on July 1, 2023, and 360 Universal Analytics properties will stop processing new hits on October 1, 2023. After that, you’ll be able to access your previously processed data in Universal Analytics for at least six months. That seems to be what they're doing?
  - 1123581321 5y ago
    This is a forced upgrade to a new version of Google Analytics, not a discontinuation. Still the same product and no data will be lost.
    - ceejayoz 5y ago
      How are you reading "All standard Universal Analytics properties will stop processing new hits" as "everything will keep working fine" and "you’ll be able to access your previously processed data [for six months]" as a guarantee no data will be lost?
      - 1123581321 5y ago
        Because everyone's going to update their properties so analytics keep working. It's not like when a new chat product comes out and splinters your contacts into multiple chat products. It's like when, e.g., Heroku sends me an email saying I need to move apps off of a stack they're retiring. They're not killing off my app; I just need to run the command or agree to a maintenance window so it keeps working after a certain date. If I for whatever reason refuse to do anything, I can't seriously claim they're shutting me down. Especially with a long notice period.

jerrysievert 5y ago

I keep getting email from them to upgrade. Each email (and this article) remind me that I need to remove ga from the one site I have it on.

lmkg 5y ago

Personal opinion, Google is catastrophically shooting themselves in the foot here, and could lose their market dominance. GA's second-biggest moat (behind being free) is its existing install base. It's already in place on approximately every website on the Internet. And no one wants to change analytics vendors, because that breaks history, which is a no-no. You want to know if your visits are up/down vs last month or last year, you literally cannot answer that unless you are using the same tool this years as you were last year. By forcing a migration to a non-compatible version, Google loses that big advantage. If you're going to lose that anyways, then there's less of a reason to stick with GA. Now you're forcing people to gut-and-replace their existing data collection process, what incentive is there for people to stick with Google? One of the biggest reasons to stay with GA was just killed. The timing is also exceptionally atrocious. Google is, again, forcing people to expend the effort to rebuild their analytics implementations from scratch. Meanwhile court rulings are coming down on a monthly basis enumerating different ways in which Google Analytics violates GDPR. A lot of companies might just brush off these rulings by simply doing nothing, but now they're being forced to actively invest time and effort into Google Analytics. A lot of them are going to be doing an evaluation against privacy-conscious competitors that simply would not have happened if Google wasn't kicking people of their existing platform. The GA4 data model is also completely different from the GA Universal data model, which is an impediment to their fourth-biggest moat, the fact that every piece of BI software in the universe has a GA plug-in. Many of those plug-ins work despite not being actively maintained since 2015; the GA4 ecosystem is smaller and will take some time to recover. (The third-biggest moat is Google Ads integration. I suspect that Google imagines this to be bigger than it really is in practice.)

Ecco 5y ago
Interesting perspective. Thanks for sharing!
robbiep 5y ago
It’s an interesting argument, but in my view, one that sailed 2-3 years ago when they force-migrated everyone to firebase analytics, which fairly drastically changed our data views given as it was so heavily geared to revenue generating click businesses (as opposed to B2B SaaS). At that point we instituted a big program to move to Amplitude (which we’ve been fairly happy with, but probably won’t be perfect until we get our own data overlays through eventually getting a data lake etc etc) - now the move BACK to GA … II would never touch GA again or consider it for a new project

shanghaikid 5y ago

Any GA alternative?

Gustomaximus 5y ago
Matomo is probably the leading alternative. I'll in the process of looking alternatives as GA4 is a step back. I suspect alternate analytics companies are going to love Google for this decision.
- raunometsa 5y ago
  >> I suspect alternate analytics companies are going to love Google for this decision. Oh yes! https://twitter.com/MarkoSaric/status/1504121261915574273 https://twitter.com/MarkoSaric/status/1504121261915574273
epwr 5y ago
I really like usefathom.com
juddlyon 5y ago
Plausible is excellent.
desiarnezjr 5y ago
https://matomo.org https://matomo.org
basquiyacht 5y ago
You might want to check out Simple Analytics as well. From a privacy perspective this is actually a good shout. We classified it as follows: Matomo looks more like Google and the data is yours. Plausible and Simple Analytics are more similar to one another in the sense that they only collect privacy-insenstive data. The main difference is that plausible still operates in a 'grey-area' by anonymizing IP addresses for 24 hours. This can be considered fingerprinting.
slig 5y ago
I like and use Clicky.

krnlpnc 5y ago

I honestly don't give a fsck about the new version or why it needs to be a breaking change. All I hear is: > We will begin sunsetting Universal Analytics — the previous generation of Analytics — next year. All standard Universal Analytics properties will stop processing new hits on July 1, 2023 Great, plenty of time to replace GA with another analytics solution.

mkr-hn 5y ago
I ditched analytics entirely when I realized they didn't tell me anything I didn't already know. Stat dashboards are skinner boxes that get in the way of doing the work of trying new things, getting feedback, and using it for the next thing.
- jklinger410 5y ago
  The entire purpose of analytics is to tell you what you don't know. But go off.
  - ravenstine 5y ago
    While it might be a bit hyperbolic to suggest that analytics don't tell you anything new, I've seen vanity metrics toted around on more than one occasion as if it meant anything actionable or otherwise unknowable. I think this is more common than the other way around. It's like the ol' conundrum where an A/B test is performed on a design change, and the B version results in more "engagement" with the site; what they fail to openly mention is that so-called engagement may just be the frustration of the user trying to bypass your crummy design update. IMO, the best analytics for many businesses is customer acquisition and revenue as well as customer feedback. If you aren't adequately responding to those inherent analytics then you shouldn't yet be using The Google's form of black magic.
    - tppiotrowski 5y ago
      I joke around that my “best” traffic days are when my website is broken and users keep reloading the page to see if it is fixed.

aetherspawn 5y ago

I always thought Universal Analytics was the new product and GA 4 was the old product. That's how naming usually works ... go from numbered releases to continuous rolling releases. Not until a few months ago that I realized it was the other way around. Really poor product planning.

a1371 5y ago
I thought that was just me. Just learned that in this article. I actually was not using some stuff that said they support GA4 because I thought they were legacy. Sounds like a branding fail to replace "universal" with a random number.

enw 5y ago

Why does Google keep breaking backward compatibility?

kyleee 5y ago
for the benefit of individual googler's career trajectories?
jdrc 5y ago
it's too much work
dbbk 5y ago
The old data is probably illegal, if not granted with consent

streptomycin 5y ago

This seems kind of insane, so many people are using the old version of Google Analytics and have absolutely no compelling reason to upgrade other than Google forcing them. And it seems GA4 is fairly different in some ways, this is going to be a ton of churn for a ton of people. I guess Google thinks there really is no alternative, they can just force people to do extra work for no gain and they'll grumble and accept it?

luckydata 5y ago
aside of cookies not working anymore and the old model becoming illegal in some countries? I think it's compelling enough for people that actually need the data. For you maybe not and that's ok.
- shostack 5y ago
  This needs to be higher. The industry is changing in fundamental ways. Certain things simply cannot be doing anymore, for better or worse.

cyral 5y ago

GA4 feels like a huge step backwards. Tons of functionality in the previous version is missing or replaced with smart “insights” (where you have to try to describe your query in plain text, which it will always get wrong). A good time to move on to something better.

vgeek 5y ago
It goes along with the philosophy of removing useful data that they've had for at least the last 10 years. Metrics like average position or search impression share in Adwords got removed, along with consistently broadening keyword match types (plus other quiet, but signficant shifts like moving away from second price auctions). The biggest introductions emphasized automated bidding strategies, view through conversions and hyper-optimistic offline conversion attribution tools. Analytics removed organic keyword data years ago and has shifted some focus towards multichannel attribution, but this is the biggest leap. The goal in PR speak is "understanding the customer journey across all channels" but in reality it is more like trying to capture more dollars from brand advertisers (see: big orgs with layers of burecracy with a big budget and 0 accountability) and mask the inefficiency of their platform for others (think lead gen-- Google tested running their own insurance comparison service, but it was more profitable to charge insurers $xx.xx per click instead. Similar situation with OTAs/home services). They keep adding layers of opacity to mask ever shrinking ROIs while making it easier for anyone to spend more on ads. Eventually they will get to the point where you set a budget and you get what they are willing to provide based on what their "AI" decides is best to maximize their fill rates, auction participants and their earnings per page view. No keywords or managed placements. It isn't like there is an alternative and their inertia isn't going anywhere.
crftr 5y ago
I'm running both UA and GA4 for that exact reason. My team can't pull all of their regular reports with GA4, alone.

travisgriggs 5y ago

Naive question. Sorry. I don’t do web app cloud micro service analytics sort of things. I’m used to quite a bit of verbiage in HN posts about Google ruining the internet with commercialization and ads and analytics and that sort of thing. But the comments here of which I’m a naive observer I guess, seem to be of a “how dare Google change what is an essential part of our tools!” Is this just a case of different HN subcultures taking time to post to each other? Or is it just my lack of understanding of the nuances of which part of modern web apps is good and/or evil?

jamesfinlayson 5y ago
I think this is a case of people being annoyed that a product that works just fine is being replaced. I have a handful of personal sites that I've slapped Google Analytics on, and while they're mostly using Google Analytics out of the box, I'd rather not have to spin my wheels reworking some custom events.
ksec 5y ago
>Naive question. Not really, at least you observed something. It is more like a silent majority. And I have been heavily downvoted for pointing this out previously. Sometimes post 2016 it went all the way to Ads equals evil on HN along with the rest of the internet and social media. Around 2017 / 2018 tracking becomes evil. This is further fueled in 2019 when Apple went on full PR attack ( or one could argue adding fuel to fire ) about tracking and ads. ( They subsequently pulled back and state they are not against ads after industry backlash ). Target advertising ( whatever that means [1] ). And working in FANNG ( before it was called MAAMA ) would become morally wrong for a short period of time on HN. But there are, legitimate uses for Ads, and legitimate uses for tracking. So every once in a while you see a few people who dare to offer their contrarian view, those that are working in the ad industry, or working as a business that requires the usage of tracking, funnelling and ads for sales. And offer their views that somehow gets the upvote to top post. Assuming the upvote is not gamed in anyway, that means there are a huge number of HN readers that rarely participate in any discussions, but upvoted something that largely go against the common trend on HN. There are also some sort of political angle to it. Although I tend to think they are separate issues rather than causes. [1] https://www.ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2021/8/27/understanding-privacy https://www.ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2021/8/27/understand...

creinhardt 5y ago

Yes, Google finally realized that everyone hated looking at 'pageviews', but loves looking for an event called 'page_view'. Much easier to understand! Honestly though, for a huge segment of their users this hides/obscures the number one metric they look for. I understand that with SPA"s and stuff things are much more event driven, but they're absolutely going to lose some users over this.

lgrebe 5y ago
Question being how many more do they gain? Especially in the mobile app space maybe - if you have a game where you upgrade your sword with gems and attack your neighbor, which if those actions would be a pageview? Just take a look at https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/9267735?hl=en https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/9267735?hl=en
- creinhardt 5y ago
  That’s fair! I do think you could trigger events for that kind of thing in Universal Analytics though. Seemed to have plenty of affordances for use in apps as well. I still question whether going for a ‘clean break’ is the best idea. Obviously products have to improve, but I’m surprised to see them imperil their massive user base this way.

debrice 5y ago

It makes sense that google is attempting to adapt to new laws but they do it so slowly that it’s quite concerning for the future. Also the market has become much more competitive and there is plenty of alternatives to chose from at very fair prices.

exodust 5y ago

> "all while prioritizing user privacy". The way Google mentions "privacy" in the first sentence reminds me of a mining company mentioning "the environment" in the first sentence of their plan to dig a gigantic hole somewhere. A related note: I have concerns with Google's recent nagging of website owners to upload user data to Google, under the banner of "enhanced conversions". The idea is that Google takes the user data and matches with their user accounts. So a user logged into Google who clicks an ad, can be tracked across devices without the need for third party cookies. They expect the upload to happen on the conversion page - such as the thanks page on a website contact form. To me it feels like Google are trying to convince business owners that to be "leaders in your industry" they must help Google fill the void created by third party cookie banning. Site owners are now pushed to upload every contact form submission to Google for the purpose of what is effectively next-gen third party tracking. It bothers me how blatant and obnoxious the spin is around such pressure on businesses to share their customer data with Google, when it wasn't shared before for the purpose of tracking. "Don't worry, it's hashed data" is not good enough, and not the point.

lgrebe 5y ago
I feel quite tge same and step 5 in their migration guide underlines this: > 5. Activate Google Signals very low effort (If applicable; very low effort) https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/10759417 https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/10759417

funkidredd 5y ago

Nothing else in the Analytics space gives the right integration between your SEO and PPC. So for example, if I wanted to create an Analytics -based custom PPC audience based on a number of factors such as device, pages visited, events triggered and location (layered) directly into my AdWords campaigns, I'm going to have to use GA. And if I want to use Optimize for my PPC campaigns, then I'm going to have to still use GA. It's all out of the box and it's all "free", compared with the multiple vendors solutions I'd need to make the same scenario work in order to drive sales from web visitors. That's the google lock in right there. Meh.

unityByFreedom 5y ago

A 12-step upgrade procedure is insane [1] [2]. It's like they want people to ditch their product. I have an extremely basic setup that took 5 minutes to start using. Why is this not a one-click upgrade? [1] https://i.imgur.com/uZmfUfJ.png https://i.imgur.com/uZmfUfJ.png [2] https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/10759417 https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/10759417

nyuszika7h 5y ago
> It's like they want people to ditch their product. And I hope they do.
syncerr 5y ago
bc their target market is not developers
- wussboy 5y ago
  Bingo. Their target market is the managers and decision makers who don't have time or knowledge to do anything other than look at the Magic Quadrant and tell their team which to implement.
  - manquer 5y ago
    It still doesn't make sense , no manager is going to be okay loosing historical data.
    - wussboy 5y ago
      That’s something for another department to figure out. Keeps the BI team employed…
nightski 5y ago
I find it amusing someone actually had to take the effort to classify those and find a way to differentiate what constituted "very low effort" vs. "low effort" or how many meetings were involved.

roschdal 5y ago

Brace yourself

markdown 5y ago

I had dozens of (client) websites that ran GA, but then Google, the internet behemoth with some of the greatest engineers in the world, couldn't even figure out how to stop spam from polluting their control panel. It became useless to me and I haven't used it in at least five years. If there's anyone here who still uses GA, can you tell me if they ever solved the problem of referrer spam?

porker 5y ago
No they haven't, and I've never worked out a way to clean it out of the reports. At minimum they need a disavow tool.
- bethling 5y ago
  Interesting -- I got quite a bit up until 3 or 4 years ago, but it's essentially vanished for me. Not sure which cases they've cleaned up, and which ones they haven't I guess.

CSSer 5y ago

I suspect this is due to slow adoption. The majority of SaaS reporting tools don’t currently have integrations for GA4 last I checked (admittedly been awhile). The particular one I had in mind had it coming in the next year or so, but the lack of a clear date seemed to indicate to me it wasn’t a priority because, well, it wasn’t driving their bottom line. This should grease the wheels. We’ve been creating and including both with gtag(‘config’, ‘ID’) lines for some time now in anticipation of something like this.

dmje 5y ago

I hate everything about GA4. It's a totally counter intuitive, massively over complex interface. Things that were easy in the old version are now either insanely hard or simply missing. I'm moving my clients to Matomo and they're loving it.

basquiyacht 5y ago
Why did you choose Matomo?
- dmje 5y ago
  It gives me and clients what we need - nice simple engagement metrics. I'm self hosting and it's easy to setup.

lienhoangduy 5y ago

I have tried GA4 before but the issues with the event when can not record still not be fixed.

npunt 5y ago

'Their upgrade path is your opportunity' to paraphrase Jeff Bezos, for any of the competing analytics offerings out there. Seems like a good time to make a break from GA and do your part to reduce centralized surveillance on the web.

jwr 5y ago

I stopped using Google Analytics when I realized that it doesn't produce any useful actionable data for me. It's just a feel-good thingy, where I watch the page view numbers and go "oooh". Those page view numbers do have a relationship to my business. But it's like measuring traffic on a highway when your store is next to it. The numbers will be somewhat related, but not actionable in any way. I guess it makes sense if you get paid by page views (ad-supported sites?). But I have a B2B SaaS and I get paid by subscriptions. I rarely care about any of the metrics that GA shows, and I found that many of them are bogus anyway. I could probably wrestle GA into measuring what I need, but why bother, there are easier ways to handle that. A nice side benefit is that I'm not participating in the global people-tracking business and I'm not subjecting my users/customers to that.

lgrebe 5y ago
What are you using for quantitative behavioral data at your B2B SaaS?
- matsemann 5y ago
  What we've done before is just add events in our db, or even just aggregate log data to find what we want in a grafana dashboard or whatever. Much more reliable than GA with them being blocked. And often I don't need the data they add, I care more about how many clicked a button versus how many saw it, and I'm in a better position to track that than Google.
- traceroute66 5y ago
  > What are you using for quantitative behavioral data at your B2B SaaS? Properly instrumented code allows this as a side-benefit. The main benefit of properly instrumented code being that it makes debugging a breeze.
- jwr 5y ago
  I track all money-related metrics very precisely (using ProfitWell and spreadsheets). I wrote code for traffic source attribution and used it to find out that my money spent on super-targeted LinkedIn, Facebook and Google ads resulted in precisely $0 revenue, so I stopped advertising and the code is now rusty. I wrote code for A/B testing (this is something you really want to have integrated with your site) using the multi-armed bandit approach and used it to find out that with low traffic of a B2B SaaS it takes months to reach conclusions. That is still sometimes used, but not a whole lot, and only because the multi-armed bandit approach with Thompson sampling is nice enough to prioritize "better" options over time, so you can leave it running safely without baby-sitting it the whole time. Overall the problem with a B2B SaaS is that unless you are already huge, the amount of good actionable data that you can work with is small. It's much better to spend the effort on making a product that people will want to use, e.g. talk to your customers.

peakaboo 5y ago

Google Analytics is about to be banned in Europe. Couldn't be more happy.

phlsa 5y ago

I wonder if Google realized that Analytics has become unfathomably complex for non-power users and wants a clean break now. I run a side business[1] that is lucky to not be dependent on search ads. We started using GA 10-ish years ago because it was free and took almost no effort to set up. But over the years it just got more and more complicated to use, to the point where it got hard to act on the results. Last year, I switched to Plausible[2] for data protection reasons. The unexpected side effect was that I suddenly understand every single metric in my analytics tool. As a result, I use it a lot more for actual decision-making. [1] https://push-conference.com https://push-conference.com [2] https://plausible.io https://plausible.io edit: typos

sccxy 5y ago
+1 for Plausible. I use selfhosted version. I agree that less features is upside for better understanding of all collected data. Simple dashboard is all I need and I guess it is same for most of websites.
topicseed 5y ago
The new version GA4 is definitely not on the easier side. New words, new mental model, new report flow, etc. I am not sure if I like it or if I hate it.
- d0gbread 5y ago
  It's a better data model with a significantly worse UI. Hard to believe they put it out there as is.
  - topicseed 5y ago
    Yep, I think that's the proper summary. I like the all-in move to "events", but the UI, especially for content-heavy websites, is incredibly more difficult to navigate and extract insights from.
shafyy 5y ago
Kudos for mentioning Plausible. I also love and use them. They actually inspired me to start a privacy-focused products analytics tool that doesn't track unique users (and is open-source). Shamelessly plugging it here: https://fugu.lol https://fugu.lol (GitHub: https://github.com/shafy/fugu https://github.com/shafy/fugu)

AdriaanvRossum 5y ago

Privacy TLDR; Google Analytics 4 has a few changes that should improve their privacy aspects: IP Anonymization: not GDPR proof Server location: not changeable Use of Cookie Banner: still needed Deleting Individual User Data: improvement Limited Data Storage: slight improvement In short, they say they fix a lot of privacy issues, but they don't really address the real issues like the use of IP addresses and the location of your data. [1] Disclosure: I'm the founder of Simple Analytics. [2] [1] https://blog.simpleanalytics.com/google-to-sunset-universal-analytics-in-2023 https://blog.simpleanalytics.com/google-to-sunset-universal-... [2] https://simpleanalytics.com/ https://simpleanalytics.com/

dbbk 5y ago
> IP Anonymization: not GDPR proof Apparently they are updating GA4 to remove all use of IP addresses entirely: https://www.adexchanger.com/online-advertising/google-analytics-to-stop-logging-ip-addresses-and-sunset-old-versions-in-privacy-standards-overhaul/ https://www.adexchanger.com/online-advertising/google-analyt... > Use of Cookie Banner: still needed It still works without cookie consent though, once you incorporate their Consent Mode.
- lmkg 5y ago
  GA4's IP Anonymization is good but not sufficient. Your IP Address is exposed to Google's servers, and is redacted after collection. Per GDPR, this still counts as Google processing your IP Address. It is not clear what actually works when you incorporate Consent Mode. I haven't actually found any reports that include the data supposedly collected. I also have some doubts that Consent Mode does not actually require consent (see IP Address concerns above).
  - dbbk 5y ago
    No, in the article they say alongside this announcement they're going beyond IP Anonymization and ceasing logging or storing IP addresses altogether. Of course, any network request is going to send an IP address... that's how the Internet works. If that alone is enough to make a service illegal then third-party analytics is going to be just flat out impossible for everyone.

marvinblum 5y ago

It looks like Google is finally reacting to some of the criticism [0] and changes a few things. I think it's still best to switch out your analytics or abandon it entirely if you don't rely on it. There are plenty of alternatives now [1]. GA is still a complex tool for people working with it full time. [0] https://pirsch.io/blog/google-analytics-declared-illegal-by-austrian-dsb/ https://pirsch.io/blog/google-analytics-declared-illegal-by-... [1] https://european-alternatives.eu/category/web-analytics-services https://european-alternatives.eu/category/web-analytics-serv...

adriangrigore 5y ago

I have https://s.mkws.sh/ https://s.mkws.sh/ as my analytics solution, sh, awk, httpd logs and cron.

dugmartin 5y ago

Seems like an (short term) opportunity for someone to build a product that pulls existing Google Analytics data via their API and stores it in a database to allow for viewing historical analytics data.

boredumb 5y ago

using the search console I can extract all the actionable information I need without having to burden users with downloading and executing GA.

pluc 5y ago

The "Still banned in Europe" version

XCSme 5y ago

I see many people don't like this change, so I'm shameless plugging my self-hosted analytics platform if you want to move away from GA: https://www.uxwizz.com/ https://www.uxwizz.com/

xnx 5y ago

It's crazy they're not allowing full (hit level) data export via Google takeout.

bastardoperator 5y ago

No thanks Google, you're evil now. You're not spying on my users or my business.

zapdrive 5y ago
Good luck preventing Google from snooping when most of your users use Chrome to visit your website or your Android app.
- bastardoperator 5y ago
  I may not be able to prevent Google from spying, but I certainly do not have to assist them in their endeavor.

Hardik_Shah 5y ago

Google Analytics 4 is a web analytics service that allows you to track traffic and engagement on your websites and apps. This documentation contains implementation instructions and reference materials aimed at developers.

jbrooksuk 5y ago

[flagged]

123jay7 5y ago

Honest question but: What is a good alternative to GA?

sdoering 5y ago

I am a data analyst with 10+ years of experience. I have setup uncountable GA1 - GA3 implementations, eTracker, Matomo, Adobe Analytics from s_code to Appmeasurement and via Adobe Launch, Snowplow and quite a few others. I also have setup three implementations of Firebase and GA4. I can't for the love of god use this tool. It is in my eyes nothing but a mechanism for upselling GCE (esp. Big Query). Answering basic management and marketing questions about marketing goals (or other conversion goals reached) is a PITA. Building basic dashboards with Google Data Studio also. Taken together with the EU data privacy regulators regarding GA I nowadays just recommend clients to just ignore GA. Even if the USP is "but I can see my advertising numbers in there as well". Do they want to push people away from using their product?

tootie 5y ago
What's a plausible alternative though? Plausible?
- sdoering 5y ago
  A plausible alternative depends on your use case. If you just want basic numbers (visitors, visits, page views, few interactions tracked) one can probably chose any of the myriad of alternatives like fathom, Plausible, Matomo, and so on. While with most of them you get what I would call "vanity metrics" (so not really actionable, more or less just "numbers go up or down") at least Matomo (self hosted) provides the ability to create essentially the experience of a free GA3 implementation. If you "just" had a code drop of basic GA3 code: just use whatever floats your boat. If you have custom dimensions, user interactions tracked as events, goals and stuff like that in the free GA3 version - go with Matomo (self hosted). Configure Matomo to have more than 5 custom dimensions (easy to do) and you can replicate (nearly) everything from your GA3 implementation. Only things you will be missing in any case is integration with Search Console and Google Ads.
  - Crazyontap 5y ago
    > While with most of them you get what I would call "vanity metrics" (so not really actionable, more or less just "numbers go up or down") This comment couldn't have come at a better time for me. I was just trying to compare the free analytics available and plausible looked okay to me. But since I haven't done anything actionable yet I think I'll research a little more. > so not really actionable What would you define as actionable metrics? Are you talking about the custom page triggers like scroll depth, click on obl, etc? Can you recommend what are the biggest actionable events for a saas site since you have experience with it? My source of knowledge on this is sadly a few youtube tutorials but if there is any resource you would recommend I'd highly appreciate the link.

celestialcheese 5y ago

Well shoot. Any way to export historical, basic data like what you'd find in the "Audience > Overview" tab? I should have expected this from Google, but damn, losing years and years of historical data is going to really hurt.

Angostura 5y ago

This certainly feels like Google is giving everyone a reason to explorer alternatives.

u2077 5y ago

Soon most of this tracking will be baked into the browser itself (as if it isn’t already). The topics api: https://github.com/jkarlin/topics https://github.com/jkarlin/topics

aww_dang 5y ago

Most of my users are blocking GA these days. I don't put it on new sites anymore. Crawlers from a certain country do execute GA js. This causes stats to vary wildly. Not sure if it will be worth my time to go back and remove the old tags from those sites. Cannot see a reason to upgrade. It was nice to know, but there are more important metrics. The multivariate testing suite was fun at one time. However it isn't as useful when your core users are all blocking it.

fold_left 5y ago

Are there any competitors out there that can import historical data from Google Analytics? I've not checked, can you even export your historical data from GA?