Install Snowplow Analytics on the Google Cloud Platform | Hacker News Reader

Install Snowplow Analytics on the Google Cloud Platform

simoahava.com

3 pointscosmie3 comments

Snowplow Analytics[1] is a really great tool for web analytics, especially for companies that want to own their data or have privacy concerns. It's pretty straightforward to replicate a lot of the reporting that you can do with Google Analytics, while giving you full access to the clickstream data that hampers more custom analysis within GA (at least in the free version, the premium GA360 product allows raw access to the clickstream data Google Analytics collects[2]).

[1] https://snowplowanalytics.com/

[2] https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/3437618?hl=en

You can in fact use it to get the raw GA clickstream data into a database, in real-time. You send in a copy of the GA data alongside sending to Google.

Thanks for stating that directly! Re-reading my comment, it didn't come off as clearly as intended. And in fact, Simo also has a guide that walks through doing precisely what you mention[1].

What I meant was that with a standard and free GA installation, barring a paid GA360 subscription, you can't gain raw access directly to the GA clickstream from Google. And GA has a lot of unintuitive assumptions in their data processing that people only tend to become aware of once that assumption spectacularly breaks down for their use case, and you can't do any post-processing to account for it historically, because you can't access the clickstream data.

An alternative to paying for GA360 would be to duplicate your clickstream to Snowplow, using a technique like [1]. Which allows you to both leverage the GA interface and integration for run-of-the-mill needs where it works, and fall back to the duplicated data within Snowplow once you hit a wall inside of GA.

It's a really successful, cost effective, low-friction method I've used in organizations with a really immature analytics environment that's expected to mature over time. The familiarity and accumulated knowledgebase around GA makes it easy to get started, then cut over to Snowplow as needs and use cases evolve, before eventually hitting a critical point where the investment in GA360 finally makes sense. It creates an incredibly low-friction maturation process for end users, since the data models and historical data are consistent throughout. So there's minimal change management and consistent reliability related to any modeling, reporting, use cases, knowledge/training/skills transferability, etc that you've built up internally. It's analogous to abstracting the backend architecture behind a consistent and stable API, so you don't break anything along the way.

[1] https://www.simoahava.com/analytics/automatically-fork-googl...

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