Show HN: GA Insights – Never Log into Google Analytics Again | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: GA Insights – Never Log into Google Analytics Again

42 pointspatrickmccurley28 comments

Hey HN!

We are Patrick & Chris, bootstrapped co-founders of GA Insights (https://www.ga-insights.com) - a simple way of getting reports and alerts for your tools inside Slack and Teams. We started as a technical tool to monitor client accounts in Slack, interfacing with Microsoft Azure insights, and then pivoted to supporting business intelligence tools like Google Analytics and Google Search Console.

The idea was born out of the angst that we had experienced using disparate tools to monitor our metrics, client & to share information. Google Analytics has an ever-evolving interface that most developers would rather not spend a day getting lost in. We decided to take the primary use cases we had for Google Analytics and provide an engine to process, visualize, and ship to Slack or Teams. This gets us daily or weekly reports on metrics such as page speed, bounce rates, page engagement, and when the cart checkout breaks.

Once we started to gain some traction with clients, we extended the capacity to include other data sources like Google Search Console and Google Ads, making it simple for indie businesses and large corporations to extract the value from these reporting surfaces and send them to a channel that we use every day, like Slack or Teams. We use ML to analyze 100s of metric streams to detect anomalies in your data, and are soon expanding into providing root-cause analysis when anomalies occur.

Currently, we send 2.6k alerts per week and 3.2K scheduled reports into Slack, Teams & Email. Slack has seen the biggest uptake followed by Teams. We run on Azure, combines NoSQL, Serverless, Redis, Warehousing, and scalable architecture to deal with bursty loads (common in report scheduling).

We're launching new data sources and integrations rapidly, with Facebook, Stripe, and Zapier next on our docket.

Happy to answer any questions you might have.

I get why it is this way, but it'd be cool if I could hook it up to a >500k website for cheap or free and you limit the account some other way unless I upgrade it -- maybe only a couple of alerts or reports per month.

Not sure what we could do here, but feel free to drop me a mail at patrick@ga-insights.com

Awesome. How are you solving for annotations and human-provided context to augment this data? This is a problem space I've thought a lot about, feel free to reach out if you want to chat.

Sure - drop me a mail at patrick@ga-insights.com. Happy to chat.

Would you be creating on premise service - ie analytics data directly from the site? Seems many browsers now block GA and other trackers.

Indeed, if this product is dependent on Google Analytics it is probably a little late: It's a matter of time before browsers are all blocking GA by default.

I don't see Chrome going anywhere for a long time, and I don't see Google blocking its own analytics service within its own browser on its own volition.

Google may have a hard time continuing to explain away it's refusal to respect user privacy as the sole browser that doesn't block GA. And if the Chrome team continues to fight privacy initiatives, Chrome will be replaced by something like Edge, which is compatible but also actually cares about privacy and security (these two things are the same, if you aren't prioritizing privacy you are not a secure browser).

Regulators will also be paying attention to this over the next few years.

I think a startup should be very aware of these risks if building off of GA.

I have a hard time believing Edge is any more private then Chrome, it's just a question of who gets the data.

I'd love to be proved wrong on this though.

It's weird for you to believe this, because Chrome is made by an ad company whose sole goal in existence is collecting data for ad targeting...

Many of Chrome's features are implemented in Edge by replacing Google services with Microsoft ones. So for many things, Microsoft may be collecting similar data (though likely not monetizing it at all).

But the key thing is that tracking prevention: It means your browser is leaking your data around the internet significantly less. Not just less to Google, but less to almost everyone else on the Internet. Chrome, by refusing to implement tracking prevention, is pretty much a leaky ship with holes in it.

Here's Edge's implementation: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/web-platform...

Here's Firefox's implementation: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/enhanced-tracking-prote...

Here's Safari's implementation: https://webkit.org/blog/7675/intelligent-tracking-prevention...

Chrome has nothing. Google paid some of their staff to write a FUD piece about how preventing tracking was a privacy risk somehow.

All valid points. Much appreciated.

I was coming from a position of "Why would MS remove anything instead of redirecting it to themselves", but failed to consider that they would be adding things themselves to prevent other tracking.

And don't get me wrong, I agree Microsoft is no saint on data collection. I use Firefox and encourage others to do so. But I'd recommend Edge over Chrome because I consider tracking prevention so necessary for safe browsing.

Microsoft's data collection and use seems primarily to be focused on telemetry for product improvement. They obviously do it in Edge too. I find it less malicious than ad targeting, but I'm strongly opposed to mandatory telemetry. And I think telemetry-driven development is a mistake that should be avoided. It dehumanizes software support and still provides incomplete information, while also violating the privacy of your users.

I've heard this blocked-from-analytics traffic be called "shadow traffic".

https://blog.parse.ly/post/9616/shadow-traffic-why-your-traf...

I agree. This was probably a much needed product 8-10 years ago, and you'd had a huge market. Unfortunately, I feel your time is ticking and you're way too late.

Our next steps as a company are to deploy our reporting and AI-backed alertings into any data-source. Google was/is the biggest in the space, so that made sense as a V1. Our vNext will connect to much more.

Our startup uses a combo of Google Analytics, Stripe, and our own database for important metrics. Any plans to be able to pull directly from databases (we use postgres)? Thanks, seems like a cool product.

That would be great, not sure where that fits in our roadmap, but I'd love to be able to do it.

i just got to say... i love reading the view source code of websites and finding SO references :) What would we do without SO?

//https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1634748/how-can-i-delete...

You're absolutely right! But hey, I appreciate that at least they cite their sources!

This looks really useful, especially for small companies who need simplified metrics monitoring out of google analytics.

Have you considered adding a hobbyist plan or 1 month trial for startups or small projects to try before buying?

Not affiliated with the OP, but at the bottom of the homepage it says:

Free Tier Available. Free plan for under 2.5K visitors, or trial us with no credit card needed

Thanks! Yes we do - feel free to drop me a message on the website chat and I can sort you out

Have fun with this until google makes it impossible to use.

I don't follow. What do you expect would happen? Change to the GA API? Or they try to shut it down b/c "GA" in the name.

Does this work for anything other than Google Analytics?

Right now we also support Google Search console and Google Ads. Our vNext will include much more, such as Facebook, Segment, Zapier and other data sources.

Anything on this list? https://developers.reverseeagle.org/replace/google-analytics...

Are you running on StarThinker from Google?

This shiny piece of software engineering at their Github account is currently commoditizing the infrastructure F500 companies would outsource to SaaS and agencies because they didn't do tech.

Last year more than half of the big companies out of Europe started moving to a brand new in-house data driven marketing team. Vodafone and Adidas are already fully operational.

It's written in Python and it seems to operate like Airflow with DAG recipes but simpler without coding.

Plug & play realtime dash-boarding in Data Studio that can visualize a ridiculous amount customization of all the data Google services produces.

https://datastudio.google.com/gallery?category=marketing

StarThinker sends out custom reporting via email of all Google ads services which even has a custom DAG rate limiter recipe named floodlight.

StarThinker supports currently more API's out of the box than you, even Smartsheets API has a custom recipe.

You can spin up a cluster with working UI in the cloud within 8 minutes.

https://google.github.io/starthinker/

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