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Comment by onion2k | Hacker News Reader

None of my website users need to block Google Analytics.

Same here. Also, I don't regret it: I realized that most data from GA is actually garbage. Both because of its dubiousness and because "page visits" do not correspond to any meaningful actionable business metric, unless you are in the adtech business (in that case, rethink your life choices).

These days, I worry about signups and subscriptions, and run my own A/B (bayesian bandit) experiments.

This is exactly how you recognize a good internet marketeer. They don't focus on getting a lot of traffic, they focus on getting the right traffic.

Not sure what you mean by "from GA" given that the tool collects what you tell it to collect. The data is only garbage if you don't have or hire the skillset to use it, and when you do you'll have proper leading indicators for your business metrics and quantitative prioritization support.

Mine either. They also don't have to worry about Facebook analyzing click behavior via the SDK.

Sigh - the number of websites which were broken when browsing the internet from China because trackers from Facebook were not wrapped in exception handling and the endpoints were blocked.

Literally couldn't give the companies business.

/rage

Are you not tracking your sites performance at all or are you just not using Google Analytics of Facebook analytics for that?

Are there any (open source) privacy friendly alternatives with similar basic features?

Piwik is probably the most “out of the box” open source GA alternative, there’s also Snowplow if you want it to be a full edge-through-to-data-warehouse solution.

Piwik is now Matomo

Sorry to say, but without analytics and campaign analytics, you probably don't know what your user want or need. I don't like the analytics auto hate behavior.

Edit: I don't justify google and facebook wrongdoing in the past and present. But to hate on those who are (forced) using them and calling to remove them from the website is not helping without an alternative. It will surly take a toll on your digital presence. Showing better alternatives is the way to go.

Analytics are fine, the problem is analytics without consent.

You can collect analytics yourself, no Google needed.

Not ads insight which are crucial in digital marketing.

Ad insight can be done on your end by having each ad campaign redirect to your website with a "campaign ID" URL parameter, and you can measure the click/conversion rate by seeing how many people arrive on your site with each campaign ID.

Why do you think it increases user's privacy? I don't think Google uses analytics data for tracking the user.

Think again.

> Why do you think it increases user's privacy? I don't think Google uses analytics data for tracking the user.

You've got to be kidding

It's expected when i got to a website that the owner of the website knows i've visited

It's not expected that when I visit a website unrelated to google or facebook that they know about it

Google uses every datapoint they get their hands on to track their users. No matter if its a share button, google analytics, youtube embed, custom search, gmail or any other Google product. They can and will use it to track the users.

This is not true. One can make a product better without relying on analytics. Sure, it takes more time (and probably more skilled people) but it's possible. There are companies out there doing well without GA.

GA is just one tool, and it’s not even the best one (though the better tools are often worse privacy-wise). But client side analytics will always be able to deliver UX insights that you’ll simply never be able to get any other way. If you had two equivalently skilled and resourced product teams, one would always be at a disadvantage to the other if only one of them was using client-side analytics tooling.

That said, product teams that are actually good enough to gather and productively use that sort of data aren’t very common, so switching off client-side analytics probably wouldn’t make much difference to most organisations. Page hits and error stats can be pretty easy to make use of, but you can get that from server logs.

Why is analytics synonymous with Google analytics?

Duopoly (Duo-monopoly) with Facebook Analytics.

More like duopoly with Adobe Analytics, at least among companies that invest in their analytics instead of just implementing GA or FB Analytics because they're free and never really use them.

Adobe Analytics is enterprise grade though, and is usually only used by companies large enough to have their own analytics department or contract out to analytics consultants.

This is a very limited solution. For instance, how can you track what search keywords showed your clicked ads on Google? The advertiser keep and will keep all the power (=all the context) to themselves exactly because of that reason.

Is there any difference in privacy from user's perspective if you use Google Analytics or self hosted? If any, the later is more prone to be hacked or misused than former and could not be easily blocked like Google's.

I'd argue that yes, there is a difference between having lots of small data silos with private data and having one huge database that tracks complete behavior chains. I don't really care whether the bartender at my usual pub knows what I like to drink, but I would care if there were a global database tracking my drinking behavior.

Yes there is, it's harder to track you around the web when the data is scattered around multiple places with no way to group the identifiers.

The article explain very well he is using Plausible analytics, that works without cookies or stocking strong PIs. https://plausible.io/data-policy

There's no analytics hate per se; the problem is the centralization of all usage data at Google, and analytics without consent.

I don't like the analytics auto hate behavior.

It's not "auto hate", it's 25 years experience of making web stuff. I used to track users. I can read Apache logs by sight alone. I was an Urchin stats user before Google bought them. I had hit counters.

I realised a long time ago that massive data gathering didn't really help me. I had a ton of data and no idea what to do with it. If you launch a site and find the engagement time is 5.54s and users scroll 40% down the page before the bounce when they hit the site from a Google SERP for "my special page" that doesn't tell you why they left. That only tells you that they did. If you want to fix the problem you need to actually reach people and engage with them. To build what users want you need to actually talk to users.

Maybe some people can get value out of GAnalytics data, but I reckon for most users it's "metrics theatre". They're randomly poking at their website and seeing if the numbers change. That's stupidly inefficient when you can just talk to some people instead and immediately know where the problems are because people will tell you if you ask. Oh boy, will they tell you. It's hard to make them stop.

Often I try to help sites with more generic, borked issues. Your comment about "Oh boy, will they tell you" brought one to the fore.

I sent the following to a site. Do you think I received a response? A reply?

Either they don't actually read emails from customers, or they employ a person which became 'confused', and their eyes glazed over, once they failed to understand the message.

(Note that I sent to about 5 email addresses. The one sent after I purchased the pillow, a website info, whois email addresses, and even took 2 minutes to find the CEO email address. Yup. No response from any of them.

And more than 18 months later (I just checked), the SPF record remains unchanged.)

I wonder.

While metrics may be helpful, I wonder how many only pay attention to metrics, and then ignore emails such as mine.

Hello,

I'm terribly sorry, but unfortunately you've sold a pillow to a SysAdmin. And now that you've done something wrong "with computers", I'm going to prattle on whilst your eyes glaze over. :P

But in all seriousness, I recently ordered a pillow from you. Yet your confirmation email bounced! Here's why:

May 13 07:10:54 XXX postfix/smtpd[32163]: NOQUEUE: milter-reject: RCPT from smtp2.shopify.com[104.198.207.207]: 551 5.7.1 SPF verification failure: sender host 'smtp2.shopify.com'[104.198.207.207] not among explicitly allowed origin hosts for domain 'canadiandownandfeather.com', and misses are forbidden; REJECT; from=<info@canadiandownandfeather.com> to=<xxx> proto=ESMTP helo=<smtp2.shopify.com>

What's happening, is your SPF record does not list Shopify email servers, as valid for your domain name canadiandownandfeather.com...

You do have outlook.com there:

canadiandownandfeather.com. 300 IN TXT "v=spf1 include:spf.protection.outlook.com -all"

But not Shopify. If fact, the "-all" part at the end means "and nothing else can send mail!".

So, as you are telling people that outlook is the only acceptable place to send mail from? Until you fix this:

- some mail server servers, like mine, will completely reject your mail from shopify's platform - almost all remaining mail servers, will place this type of mail in SPAM folders

I must stress, that due to your 'outlook' line, normal email should work perfectly fine. We're only talking about email, using your domain, but from shopify's platform.

If you go here:

https://help.shopify.com/en/manual/intro-to-shopify/initial-...

And search for "SPF record", you'll see this:

-- To verify your customer email address, you need to add Shopify's SPF record — v=spf1 include:shops.shopify.com ~all — to the TXT record in your custom domain settings. --

Now.. you want to KEEP your outlook domain too.

So, just add "include:shops.shopify.com" to your TXT record, so both are there.. something like this:

"v=spf1 include:shops.shopify.com include:spf.protection.outlook.com -all"

Do this, and your problem should be fixed.

You can go here:

https://mxtoolbox.com/SuperTool.aspx?action=spf%3acanadiando...

And check if things are done correctly. --

I think the humour at the start might have been enough to make many people not read the email TBH. Something a little less tongue-in-cheek and simply nice/approachable is likely to net a better chance of response.

Yeah that first paragraph would have been better spent giving an overview of the information that was laid out after.

'I have found a problem. The problem has this negative impact. Brief description of problem.'

Be serious if you want to be taken seriously, especially in your initial communication with an unknown third-party.

Hard agree.

You don't describe the business problem, but go into incredible detail about technical details that either nobody reading the email[1] cares about.

Even more than that - you're basically asking them to run random bash commands from the internet.

They shouldn't trust your advice, anything you say would have to be verified by their own team, so the level of technical info is useless to them. In fact, including all the technobabble mnakes it look even more like a scam.

Remember, not that long ago it was a common scam to ask employees to make changes to the phone system, which would give the scammer free international calls. Your email is idenitical[2] to one of those scams.

A better email would be (and this isn't perfect):

"Hello, I am a recent customer of yours and noticed that all your confirmation emails aren't being sent properly and won't be delivered at all for most users.

I'm a sysadmin, so had a look at the the problem using public data, and it looks like your tech team overlooked a setting when they set up your email system. Its a easy mistake to make and would take them 5 minutes to fix.

The technical details are that there is an "SPF" record which says who is allowed to send emails as your company - this is correctly set up for your office emails through outlook, but not set up for the automated emails from shopify.

If you let your tech team know that shopify is missing from the SPF records, and they'll quickly see the issue and fix it within minutes.

If you would like more information about the issue, I'd be happy to advise further[3]"

[1] The people who do care won't see your email. [2] To the untrained user. [3] I mean, I wouldn't, but you seem like you would ;)

I get it, please see my other response.

RE: random bash commands. Part of the reason I linked shopify's SPF page to them -- an attempt to provide external validation.

But I get it. Which is why, as I mention in that other response, it doesn't matter what I send. Even pleas to forward to a technical person = ignored.

(I bet lots of tech people get forwarded all sorts of crap that IS a scam, so yell "DON'T FORWARD THIS STUFF TO ME".)

In fact, I have even called some places. One started screaming at me. I'm guessing some phone scam "got them", and therefore equated me to the same.

What can you do?

I mean, seriously?

Tell them that you placed an order, and did not receive a confirmation email. If you really feel obligated, you can mention something about SPF settings, but I literally would not provide more detail than "it might be related to your SPF settings."

Ah yes. Which is only sometimes responded to, and if so, with a "Check your SPAM folder" email.

If you respond to that without technical data, then you're basically saying "No, I did not receive it", and their response is "Your gmail lost it" (because mail = gmail).

The problem is that emails sent with "I didn't get the confirm email" are immediately thought to be "user error". And you know what?

99.9999% of the time, they surely are. Bad email providers, lost in SPAM folders, even missed in INBOX.

So if you don't include tech info, you're stuck in this category, else many exchanges back and forth.

Because once I then respond with technical info?

You get the same glassy-eyed type of incomprehension, with often zero response. Or a response that invites another 5 back and forths, with the other side upset, because now they feel ignorant.

I feel there really is no proper answer here... except, I still have to try. :P

While I know why you say this, I find it matters little.

I've started emails off with (very close to):

"NOTE: this is a technical issue. You may not understand it. Please forward to a technical person", with a lot of variety on that line.

These too garner little response.

I've started out with problem first, then tech info. It seems to matter little, and my humour via that first line, was an attempt to amuse non-technical types into reading further.

I must have concocted > 100 over the years. Perhaps 10% responded, regardless of the layout or form of the email. Even 10% is generous.

The reality? Anything technical, no matter how presented, is too confusing for many.

"I can read Apache logs by sight alone"

And actual log file parsing is what I'm missing in his comparison.

In the case of your 40% scroll map example, you don’t need to know why they left. You can start by making the page shorter or putting your CTA 35% of the way down the page.

Does anybody make the argument that analytics is supposed to tell you the why or what to do next? That’s up to you. The data just guides those decisions.

It doesn't seem like even with analytics they know

It just gives a false confidence in bullshit.

Most internet analytics and the billions spent on data mining is all for naught.

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