One Tag to Rule Them All: Introducing the New Google Tag | Hacker News Reader

One Tag to Rule Them All: Introducing the New Google Tag

simoahava.com

48 pointssdoering31 comments

Google seems to be obsessed with new analytics products almost as much as new chat apps. Google Analytics, Universal Analytics, Google Tag Manager, Global Site Tag, Google Analytics 4, Google Tag… they keep forcing me to add/swap out tracking scripts on the websites I maintain when I don’t even want them there in the first place.

The web works without them. What specific benefit does having them provide that you could not do without? I have always thought that having slightly less precise user metrics should not matter a ton for a site focused on providing quality content and services. I could be wrong, and I would love to hear peoples stories of a tangible, overwhelming benefit they had where they started without such tracking, and then turned it on. Because a bit more useful doesn't cut it for me.

Google Analytics is outclassed by many other tools, but it has two features that make it essential (along with its brethren, Google Ads tracking) for most enterprises.

One is the Search Console integration, which is the only way to see what Google search queries led people to your site.

The second is Google Ads conversion tracking and remarketing, which is de facto required to advertise with Google because it can easily 10x your Return On Advertising Spend, which is a key metric for digital marketing teams.

Without those two features, Google Analytics would be easy to drop. Many big companies already have other first- or third-party analytics tools they prefer. Many simply don't trust Google enough to send any commercially sensitive data, except where necessary to optimise ad spending.

10x less spent fits my criteria. I have never used google ads because they don't matter for my niche, but that makes sense. My next project might need to go that route, so starting my research now. I would much, much rather find another way to generate traffic.

You pretty much need it for Google Ads. And many businesses need Google Ads to make money.

i hate all the google trackers too but google has a big name and brand awareness, lots of clients and teams expect to be using google's analytics tools especially when they're running google ads and are using many other google services

i try to steer people away when possible but unfortunately it's not always a possibility / worth the fight

The expected answer :)

You're conflating products (Google Analytics, Universal Analytics, Google Analytics 4) with tags (Google Tag Manager, Global Site Tag, Google Tag). However I will agree that the naming of those tags is atrocious and almost designed to create confusion. I see people confuse GTag and GTM often enough, and the "Google tag" won't help matters.

Isn't that kind of like, "duh"?

They sell ads. The buyers of those ads want their ads on sites that have eyeballs on them. How do you prove how many eyeballs are looking? Analytics. If you write your own tool to generate those analytics, then even better!

Right, but I don't care about google or what they need. I care about it from the site owner's perspective.

The site owner wants that monthly Google Adsense check which is most likely the main thing paying for their hosting and employees.

It's almost like google is full of ex-spooks who saw the value of a surveillance system of the entire internet.

sure. you can go that route. or the more believable version is their analytics systems helps them justify their pricing to their customers. the fact that their customers accept first party analytics is an absolute god send to G.

G: We price our ads based on the number of visitors to a site.

Buyer: How do you know how many visitors a site gets?

G: Through the analytics we gather from each site

Buyer: How do I verify that your numbers are accurate?

G: ...

Articles like this do a great job showing me just how little I know about the modern web. The level of detail/effort/ubiquity that goes into the modern advertising behemoth is truly impressive.

And depressing. It's too much like the Paperclip Maximizer AI. You create a utility function that tells corporations to maximize advertising revenue above and beyond any other consideration, you get corporations that do just that. But despite the fact that we have had many years to change the incentives, we have not, and with Google's side hobby of making AI we could very well end up funding the creation of an actual Paperclip Maximizer in the process.

I wonder what the performance penalty is like, when trackers like this one inject themselves into every event generated by a browser.

This is a bit confusing, and, every time I go back to do something with it, it changes. The documentation isn't clear and StackExchange/Medium often don't list the versions very well.

Old companies often die of bureaucracy - due to their own power and incumbency, they just keep making money, hiring people, doing stuff.

But in this era, the people are 'smart' and now we have the web which allows for infinite churn.

Everything I go to touch has 'changed' - from my own iPhone, Google Play Console etc.., to the packages in my build, in addition, the layers of complexity are so bad much of this requires specialization.

I think we need to start to recognize the cost of churn and complexity because right now we're externalizing it.

When you release V12, you can't just forget that V11 exists. V12 only exists in the context of V12.

For some reason, very smart people have a hard time with this I suggest it maybe organizational.

Python v2->v3 was a bit of a disaster and I would argue, largely avoidable; I'd like to know why they went so wrong ...

Can anyone really get excited about google doing something new these days?

Very thankful that I do not work in marketing or analytics.

Is it hard to block? Or randomize?

*.googletagmanager.com has been in my DNS blacklist for about as long as I knew its existence.

Right. It is not, however, on Privacy Badger's blacklist. And it takes quite a few clicks to put it there in the latest version of Privacy Badger. Did Google pay off the EFF, or what?

There are websites that actually break when GTM isn't loaded because they use it to load/inject their benign JS (along with trackers).

That might be the EFF's reasoning, although I personally doubt it.

I'm blocking Google Tag Manager, and nothing important seems to be breaking.

* CNN - OK

* Fox News - OK

* New York Times - OK

* Reddit - OK

* Discord - OK

* Bing - OK

* YouTube - OK

Major clickbait sites:

* eatthis.com - OK (20 trackers blocked)

* inverse.com - OK (20 trackers blocked)

* knowyourmeme.com - OK (22 trackers blocked)

So, there's little if any problem with blocking Google Tag Manager.

I use Privacy Badger and some SPAs just render a blank page unless I turn it off.

There's usually a competing site with the same product or service to use instead. I get about a 2% site fail rate with heavy blocking, and I'm OK with that. I've had third party cookies blocked for a decade, and that causes a lower fail rate than it used to.

i thought google tags was like apple tags :P and opened the page to read about this new hardware .

I was half-expecting

  <google>

to be introduced into HTML, and was curious what exactly it would do. :)

In a parallel universe, HTML would have transitioned to GAML — Google Analytics/Ads Markup Language.

I suspected that was the long term vision for AMP.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19866584

Right? I thought it was a way for Google to track real-world stuff. But I guess the internet IS real-world now.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com