Hacker News Reader

Comment by tibbon | Hacker News Reader

Good standing doesn't seem to be vague to me really. Your account isn't violating some ToS, delinquent, etc... Most accounts are probably in good standing.

I wouldn't worry about this too much. It doesn't cut you off, just limits it to updating once per day (basically just a day behind). Its possible that your business/company is dependent on information from hourly reporting in realtime, and if that's the case you should probably augment GA with some other paid service or roll your own BI internally.

View on HN

I think it is a bit weird (and points to a fairly serious lack of 'Chinese walls') that google would change the behavior of their analytics package based on your account for a completely unrelated offering.

I see adwords, adsense and analytics (as well as search) as unrelated offerings by google.

Analytics has always been tied to AdWords. There used to be a page-view-per-month hard cap that could be removed by linking to an active (spending $) AdWords account. AdWords integration is also pushed pretty heavily in the GA training material, and even in the certification exam. In the real world, there are quite a lot of people whose only experience with GA is optimizing CPC campaigns. Personally, I've never used it for that purpose, but Google pushes them as a bundle.

Funny, I've been using analytics, adwords and adsense for years (adwords not so much for the last two years or so) and I never clued in to that.

I wonder if I'm alone in that perception or if this is more common.

That's curious, because I was just at a talk by Alma Whitten who said that Google didn't use any of the GA data for profiling or ad-related stuff, and simply provided it as a service. Did I misunderstand her, or, possibly, you?

Even if they don't use it from their side to maximize the efficiency of displaying ads, they want you to use it to maximize your AdWords performance and/or AdSense revenue. They make it easy to link your account to your AdWords/AdSense account so that you can run tests and reports.

Alma Whitten might be uninformed. (Was this talk recorded? Do you have a link to it?) There are some options in the account UI that, if enabled, allow Google to do some analysis of your data.

Link directly to their help center: http://www.google.com/support/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&...

Ooh, okay, I think I see where the misunderstanding is: I was asking Alma (in questioning time at a talk at the IFIP/PrimeLife summer school ( http://www.cs.kau.se/IFIP-summerschool/program.html ), which was unfortunately not recorded) about website users' information, not the data of the website itself. Though it's a pretty fine line there, isn't it!

I told her that I blocked google analytics because I didn't want it to find out things about me for advertising etc. She responded saying that Google doesn't do that, but now that I think about it she was probably saying that Google doesn't profile me specifically, nothing about anonymised data... yeah, now I'm not so sure. :)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com