6 ms·

Why don't they simply analyze the log files on their own, without sharing that data with other companies? For example, running some log files offline through A

by vog 11y ago

Why don't they simply analyze the log files on their own, without sharing that data with other companies? For example, running some log files offline through AWstats is not that hard, and the AWstats output is quite good for most purposes.

vdaniuk 11y ago
>AWstats is not that hard, and the AWstats output is quite good for most purposes. You haven't done any serious web analytics at scale, have you?
- cbd1984 11y ago
  You're missing the point so comprehensively I have to conclude it's deliberate.
  - vdaniuk 11y ago
    Huh, am I? Has anyone offended by this "transgression" of privacy by Mozilla thought this through to its logical conclusion? Let's see. 1. Mozilla is one of the good, independent orgs that don't have profit as their main goal. They do fight for the interests of the community at large. 2. If they remove third-party analytics from their web properties, Mozilla instantly loses valuable actionable insights that significantly increase their efficiency as an organization. Creating a viable alternative to Google Analytics is practically impossible for Mozilla due to lack of resources. 3. If Mozilla loses operational efficiency, Google/Microsoft becomes more powerful and are able to obtain more users for Chrome/IE. They use all analytics they need. Less users for Mozilla means less income from search engine deals and less influence. 4. No meaningful privacy increase for users is achieved, Google Analytics is now installed on (billions - 1) websites. So. You want a non-profit with proven track record of shipping great software and protecting the interests of individuals to take a significant hit in the name of hard-line ideological principle that won't really benefit the users. I guess I am missing the point.
    - mattmanser 11y ago
      I mean this is an honest way, but what actionable insights? Mozilla aren't selling anything on that page. They won't be making key engineering decisions off of the page. Could you detail the gains that they could make that makes the world a better place? That justify any sort of tracking over '300, 000 people viewed this page today' that you can get from your own logs? There is some data that might be occasionally useful, like screen sizes, but only occasionally.
      - whichdan 11y ago
        What about funnel analysis?
      - giovannibajo1 11y ago
        I would say that browser usage, demography (country distribution etc.) and navigation paths (bounce rate, funnels, etc.) within the site are all important data points to optimize a non-profit website. I'm not sure anybody can make a point for GA to be life changing for that site, but the opposite is also true (the saving in privacy from visitors is not going to have a game-changing effect). I also think that a pragmatic organization should focus on a few very important battles that it thinks it can win, rather than trying to fight everything in the name of ideology.
        mattmanser 11y ago
        Browser usage is in the user agent string. Country is in the IP address. You don't need a third party analytics system for them. And none of this information will ever be used it is just gathered and sent to a third party.
      - Osmose 11y ago
        Off the top of my head, based off things we normally look for in our analytics: - See how people get to the privacy page from where they enter the site. Useful to see if some categories are getting more traffic than others, so that we can re-balance if, for example, we think that Privacy is not getting the attention we want it to. - See how long people are staying on this page. What if the writing or infographic don't make sense to users? We can try and improve them so that users come away with a better understanding of privacy. - How are users interacting with those circles? If they're not hovering over any of the circles, maybe we should make it auto-switch between them to draw the user's eye over. Or maybe if they're only hovering over the first three, we should make those first three the most important aspects of privacy to make sure they're seen. The goal of Shape of the Web is (in my eyes) to educate users about the issues that the open internet faces today, and to help give them a framework for thinking about what the web is (it's hard to think about a thing if you don't know how it's "shaped"). All of these metrics help us improve the page's ability to convey information so we can better educate users.
threeseed 11y ago
This isn't the 90s. AWstats is not a solution for web analytics. Funnels, Segmentation, Retention, Path Visualisation, Event Tracking. These are basic features used by marketing teams every day. And rolling your own solution with something like Hadoop (which would need for Mozilla sized traffic) is a big undertaking.
- Silhouette 11y ago
  Tools like AWStats might not be up to the job, but there are other tools that do offer these kinds of features without sending data to Google. There's no need to roll your own just to do decent analytics without using Google Analytics.
  - vdaniuk 11y ago
    Care to back up your claims with some links?
    - Silhouette 11y ago
      The most obvious alternative is probably Piwik[1], which offers similar basic functionality to regular Google Analytics out of the box, but is also Open Source and highly customisable/extensible via a plugin model. Among the features threeseed mentioned, funnel visualisation is probably the weakest area in the baseline version right now. There have been various plug-ins available to do it for a long time, but it's not built-in yet. That said, this area is underpowered in GA as well, and at least with Piwik you can do something about it (and people actually do). Piwik has been in development for nearly a decade, has been downloaded millions of times, and is in active use by high-profile, high-volume sites. It's every bit as production-ready as Google Analytics. [1] http://piwik.org/ http://piwik.org/
      - vdaniuk 11y ago
        Piwik is fine open-source software, I won't argue with that. However, it isn't really comparable in advanced features with GA: * advanced funnel analysis, such as multi-channel funnels * attribution models and analysis * advanced visualization and analysis tools * age/gender demographic and interest reports * custom dimension and custom metrics * mobile android/iphone SDK for apps and many other features including content experiments, webmaster tools integration, social data hub(though this one is mostly useless) etc.
acdha 11y ago
Have you considered the volume that Mozilla's web properties see? AWstats is fine for a small site with very modest reporting needs but a site at Mozilla's scale would need a lot more infrastructure. If it's not a core service, it's unsurprising that they'd want to outsource it rather than hiring a team to run dozens of new servers.
- RA_Fisher 11y ago
  They could sample the data and apply inferential statistical methods. Google Analytics does this, too.

by vog 11y ago

vdaniuk 11y ago

>AWstats is not that hard, and the AWstats output is quite good for most purposes. You haven't done any serious web analytics at scale, have you?

cbd1984 11y ago
You're missing the point so comprehensively I have to conclude it's deliberate.
- vdaniuk 11y ago
  Huh, am I? Has anyone offended by this "transgression" of privacy by Mozilla thought this through to its logical conclusion? Let's see. 1. Mozilla is one of the good, independent orgs that don't have profit as their main goal. They do fight for the interests of the community at large. 2. If they remove third-party analytics from their web properties, Mozilla instantly loses valuable actionable insights that significantly increase their efficiency as an organization. Creating a viable alternative to Google Analytics is practically impossible for Mozilla due to lack of resources. 3. If Mozilla loses operational efficiency, Google/Microsoft becomes more powerful and are able to obtain more users for Chrome/IE. They use all analytics they need. Less users for Mozilla means less income from search engine deals and less influence. 4. No meaningful privacy increase for users is achieved, Google Analytics is now installed on (billions - 1) websites. So. You want a non-profit with proven track record of shipping great software and protecting the interests of individuals to take a significant hit in the name of hard-line ideological principle that won't really benefit the users. I guess I am missing the point.
  - mattmanser 11y ago
    I mean this is an honest way, but what actionable insights? Mozilla aren't selling anything on that page. They won't be making key engineering decisions off of the page. Could you detail the gains that they could make that makes the world a better place? That justify any sort of tracking over '300, 000 people viewed this page today' that you can get from your own logs? There is some data that might be occasionally useful, like screen sizes, but only occasionally.
    - whichdan 11y ago
      What about funnel analysis?
    - giovannibajo1 11y ago
      I would say that browser usage, demography (country distribution etc.) and navigation paths (bounce rate, funnels, etc.) within the site are all important data points to optimize a non-profit website. I'm not sure anybody can make a point for GA to be life changing for that site, but the opposite is also true (the saving in privacy from visitors is not going to have a game-changing effect). I also think that a pragmatic organization should focus on a few very important battles that it thinks it can win, rather than trying to fight everything in the name of ideology.
      - mattmanser 11y ago
        Browser usage is in the user agent string. Country is in the IP address. You don't need a third party analytics system for them. And none of this information will ever be used it is just gathered and sent to a third party.
    - Osmose 11y ago
      Off the top of my head, based off things we normally look for in our analytics: - See how people get to the privacy page from where they enter the site. Useful to see if some categories are getting more traffic than others, so that we can re-balance if, for example, we think that Privacy is not getting the attention we want it to. - See how long people are staying on this page. What if the writing or infographic don't make sense to users? We can try and improve them so that users come away with a better understanding of privacy. - How are users interacting with those circles? If they're not hovering over any of the circles, maybe we should make it auto-switch between them to draw the user's eye over. Or maybe if they're only hovering over the first three, we should make those first three the most important aspects of privacy to make sure they're seen. The goal of Shape of the Web is (in my eyes) to educate users about the issues that the open internet faces today, and to help give them a framework for thinking about what the web is (it's hard to think about a thing if you don't know how it's "shaped"). All of these metrics help us improve the page's ability to convey information so we can better educate users.

threeseed 11y ago

This isn't the 90s. AWstats is not a solution for web analytics. Funnels, Segmentation, Retention, Path Visualisation, Event Tracking. These are basic features used by marketing teams every day. And rolling your own solution with something like Hadoop (which would need for Mozilla sized traffic) is a big undertaking.

Silhouette 11y ago
Tools like AWStats might not be up to the job, but there are other tools that do offer these kinds of features without sending data to Google. There's no need to roll your own just to do decent analytics without using Google Analytics.
- vdaniuk 11y ago
  Care to back up your claims with some links?
  - Silhouette 11y ago
    The most obvious alternative is probably Piwik[1], which offers similar basic functionality to regular Google Analytics out of the box, but is also Open Source and highly customisable/extensible via a plugin model. Among the features threeseed mentioned, funnel visualisation is probably the weakest area in the baseline version right now. There have been various plug-ins available to do it for a long time, but it's not built-in yet. That said, this area is underpowered in GA as well, and at least with Piwik you can do something about it (and people actually do). Piwik has been in development for nearly a decade, has been downloaded millions of times, and is in active use by high-profile, high-volume sites. It's every bit as production-ready as Google Analytics. [1] http://piwik.org/ http://piwik.org/
    - vdaniuk 11y ago
      Piwik is fine open-source software, I won't argue with that. However, it isn't really comparable in advanced features with GA: * advanced funnel analysis, such as multi-channel funnels * attribution models and analysis * advanced visualization and analysis tools * age/gender demographic and interest reports * custom dimension and custom metrics * mobile android/iphone SDK for apps and many other features including content experiments, webmaster tools integration, social data hub(though this one is mostly useless) etc.

acdha 11y ago

Have you considered the volume that Mozilla's web properties see? AWstats is fine for a small site with very modest reporting needs but a site at Mozilla's scale would need a lot more infrastructure. If it's not a core service, it's unsurprising that they'd want to outsource it rather than hiring a team to run dozens of new servers.

RA_Fisher 11y ago
They could sample the data and apply inferential statistical methods. Google Analytics does this, too.