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Personal opinion, Google is catastrophically shooting themselves in the foot here, and could lose their market dominance. GA's second-biggest moat (behind bein

by 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
- lmkg 5y ago
  > 2-3 years ago when they force-migrated everyone to firebase analytics No, this is the same migration. This is my point: you weren't actually forced to migrate until now. The migration has been optional up until this announcement, and many people haven't. What your team did 2-3 years ago, the majority of organizations have been putting off. But now they can't anymore.
  - robbiep 5y ago
    Wow, is that right. We had some weird little projects that were web based that we didn't do anything with that we could still view through analytics.google but I felt that the mobile stuff was GOOOONE unless we did something. So they've basically said 'GA is closing unless you want to pay 120k/pa so move to firebase - GA is now Firebase Analytics' to now 'Firebase Analytics is Google Analytics again, but that thing we said you had to do you now have to definitively do?' ?
    - sanitycheck 5y ago
      100% - I jumped right on it when they said that, did a few hours of hurried research, then discovered that it wasn't actually possible to use Firebase for what we use GA for. Figured we just had to wait until they hit feature parity so I've been checking the status of things a few times a year ever since. ...and there's been very little movement. We can still create "universal analytics" properties, we still can't do the same stuff in Firebase, and the GA4 "Measurement Protocol" is still in beta. I think our eventual move is going to be to a non-Google product.
      - robbiep 5y ago
        You’re right, there was so much feature asymmetry we couldn’t justify sticking around - we would have lost any valuable insights into user behaviour. Firebase analytics just seemed like a ‘made for ads and influencers’ analytics tool. What a monumental cockup by the team that decided that it was important to lose that pool of users. Because of that shift we actively avoided making any choices re any of the other Google cloud or firebase tools. There’s heaps of good ones around now - our shift to amplitude was a good one but I know there are a lot of other really simple and free ones about too
omeze 5y ago
Yea, as a first-time Google analytics user I recently had to navigate the GA4 vs UA products (the blogging platform I used only supported UA, but every new guide is for GA4). When it came to instrumenting my actual product, I just used Amplitude and try very hard to not have to open my GA4 dashboard (really, just to see traffic attribution). Can't believe _this_ is supposed to be some pillar of their legendary money making machine...
jedberg 5y ago
The only reason I've ever installed GA on any website was to get higher rankings on the Google ad sales pages to get better CPCs (including Reddit). That moat might be bigger than you think.
austinhutch 5y ago
> The GA4 data model is also completely different from the GA Universal data model Which is an abstraction that tries to handle old GA use-cases and the Segment/Amplitude style use-cases but does neither well.
snowwrestler 5y ago
I think you’re right, and I think we should consider the possibility that Google doesn’t want to maintain market share dominance of basic web analytics anymore. Because what do they get for it, in a world where large-scale cookie data pooling is increasingly difficult and in some cases illegal?
dbbk 5y ago
> 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. This is precisely why they're doing it with urgency though. These rulings are based on Universal Analytics. GA4, along with their Consent Mode (still in beta) is supposed to be designed to work entirely without cookies and IP addresses.

by lmkg 5y ago

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

lmkg 5y ago
> 2-3 years ago when they force-migrated everyone to firebase analytics No, this is the same migration. This is my point: you weren't actually forced to migrate until now. The migration has been optional up until this announcement, and many people haven't. What your team did 2-3 years ago, the majority of organizations have been putting off. But now they can't anymore.
- robbiep 5y ago
  Wow, is that right. We had some weird little projects that were web based that we didn't do anything with that we could still view through analytics.google but I felt that the mobile stuff was GOOOONE unless we did something. So they've basically said 'GA is closing unless you want to pay 120k/pa so move to firebase - GA is now Firebase Analytics' to now 'Firebase Analytics is Google Analytics again, but that thing we said you had to do you now have to definitively do?' ?
  - sanitycheck 5y ago
    100% - I jumped right on it when they said that, did a few hours of hurried research, then discovered that it wasn't actually possible to use Firebase for what we use GA for. Figured we just had to wait until they hit feature parity so I've been checking the status of things a few times a year ever since. ...and there's been very little movement. We can still create "universal analytics" properties, we still can't do the same stuff in Firebase, and the GA4 "Measurement Protocol" is still in beta. I think our eventual move is going to be to a non-Google product.
    - robbiep 5y ago
      You’re right, there was so much feature asymmetry we couldn’t justify sticking around - we would have lost any valuable insights into user behaviour. Firebase analytics just seemed like a ‘made for ads and influencers’ analytics tool. What a monumental cockup by the team that decided that it was important to lose that pool of users. Because of that shift we actively avoided making any choices re any of the other Google cloud or firebase tools. There’s heaps of good ones around now - our shift to amplitude was a good one but I know there are a lot of other really simple and free ones about too

omeze 5y ago

Yea, as a first-time Google analytics user I recently had to navigate the GA4 vs UA products (the blogging platform I used only supported UA, but every new guide is for GA4). When it came to instrumenting my actual product, I just used Amplitude and try very hard to not have to open my GA4 dashboard (really, just to see traffic attribution). Can't believe _this_ is supposed to be some pillar of their legendary money making machine...

jedberg 5y ago

The only reason I've ever installed GA on any website was to get higher rankings on the Google ad sales pages to get better CPCs (including Reddit). That moat might be bigger than you think.

austinhutch 5y ago

> The GA4 data model is also completely different from the GA Universal data model Which is an abstraction that tries to handle old GA use-cases and the Segment/Amplitude style use-cases but does neither well.

snowwrestler 5y ago

I think you’re right, and I think we should consider the possibility that Google doesn’t want to maintain market share dominance of basic web analytics anymore. Because what do they get for it, in a world where large-scale cookie data pooling is increasingly difficult and in some cases illegal?

dbbk 5y ago

> 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. This is precisely why they're doing it with urgency though. These rulings are based on Universal Analytics. GA4, along with their Consent Mode (still in beta) is supposed to be designed to work entirely without cookies and IP addresses.