Comment by sjwright | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sjwright | Hacker News Reader

I run a reasonably large website and about two years ago it dawned on me that I never checked Google Analytics. It was completely useless. It wasn't telling me anything useful. I also knew that it was marginally user hostile (or at least perceived as such) and affecting page performance, even if only slightly.

Removing it felt momentous and insane. But in November 2018 I finally plucked up the courage and removed it. The crazy thing is, until this article appeared on the top of Hacker News reminded me, I had completely forgotten that I had removed it. Far from the world ending, it turned out to be the most inconsequential thing imaginable.

(I remember pouring over web server logs in Analog and AWStats 15+ years ago. Now I honestly can't remember why. I think it was some combination of vanity... and because everyone else was doing it. I suspect for most web developers GA was just the natural evolution of that muscle memory.)

GA and AWStats are both awful products for a lot of people. For us, we check out Fathom dashboard daily to see referrers and popular content. And vitality (right now we can see a ton of traffic coming from HN). When I used GA, I never checked it.

Fathom being so quick to load and simple to use, I glance at it here and there. I had given up on trying to find a good 'light' way to navigate Analytics.

I've looked at many reporting tools, most of them are probably great for corporate/enterprise stuff.

I'm self-employed, so I have no boss or shareholders that need pretty reports with bar charts. In my case my site is deeply database driven and I can build engagement statistics directly from real data using complex SQL queries.

And while there's only a few such 'reports' that I check regularly, most of them are temporally incongruous—I think that's how you'd describe it—in that they look at what happened in the past contextualised by what's known in the present. (E.g. tracking engagements from new/irregular users, while they were new/irregular users, but which subsequently became regular users.)

Well that’s a different story then. It sounds like you measure things your own way, so I agree that analytics are pointless in your edge case.

For us, we have generated a lot of revenue by measuring what works and what doesn’t. That’s why analytics are worth it for a lot of people.

> GA and AWStats are both awful products for a lot of people.

Just wonder, what's awful about AWStats?

Sure it's dated, and "analog" in a way that it's log-based, not JS. But it does not send the tracking to the third party, can be used offline.

I don’t believe it’s compliant with various regulations. I haven’t looked in-depth

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