Google Analytics 4 was frustrating, so we built our own analytics service
requestmetrics.com
requestmetrics.com
One of the more baffling choices they made was to have “today” and “yesterday” as options on the user reporting tab, even though it can take up to 48 hours to process the data and my dashboard always shows zero users for “today”. Took a while to figure out what was going on there…
Meanwhile the real-time reporting works reasonably well but is limited to a 30 minute window. Some real head-scratching choices were made here.
The whole UX drives me mad.
The only way I'm able to use GA4 in any way is with their search box + autocomplete, you can sometimes get a decent query result, then you click the three dots next to the tiny line chart, export as CSV and you get the data.
And for events, I think they want you to pay for BigQuery, so you only get some kind of aggregate count, which is useless. It'a too confusing to figure out if I'm wrong about that.
This is what you get when you hire developers to make people click ads.
In this case, perhaps, yes, the developers don't care and just do what the PMs tell them to do.
And it's all a shame because Google already acquired a great data science/viz tool, Looker, and that's a perfectly fine place to do data analytics/science rather than forcing it in Analytics.
(Note: It _may_ be compliant for future updates of the directive coming in a couple of years, but iirc that isn't out yet.)
The whole "cookie" topic is a dark pattern mostly pushed by ad providers as a friendly word to bypass having to say "may we track everything you do?".
So if it tracks data points that can be used to clearly identify a visitor, or marks the visitor in a way that can be used to personally identify them later, it will need the users consent, regardless of where and how this is stored.
And there was NEVER a requirement for a "cookie banner" in its text. Consent under it can be given in any other way that are not as intrusive, but it was the industry who chose the stupid banner and invasive analytics. Also notice that under both GDPR and ePrivacy Directive, consent is not required for cookies/etc with a legitimate purpose. Examples of those have been given under the ePrivacy Directive from almost the beginning, but more explicitly in the "Opinion 04/2012 on Cookie Consent Exemption" which is from 2012 and predates cookie banners.
[1] Here's an example of asking for consent to store a cookie that doesn't involve a banner: https://www.williamgrant.com . It's in the age-check modal.
I was answering to a claim that cookie banners are required by the ePrivacy Directive. There is no requirement for banner anywhere there or in GDPR. They were invented by the advertisement industry, and almost all the time are found to be non-compliant.
Go to https://gdpr.eu/ and tell me what their cookie banner says.
But not every access, or cookie, will require consent.
Analytics is literally the cornerstone of Google's business model. Did Google just get too complacent at the top?
What Google Fi UI do you use on a regularly basis?
This is the real obstacle to analytics.
Maybe I'm just cynical, but I read this as the outcome of "What's the best way to market this thing we built in an already saturated market with a lot of well made free and open source solutions?"
your analytics in 1998 did not...
Wondering if Apache log files are GDPR complient or not.
> Network and Information Security as Overriding Legitimate Interest
> stopping ‘denial of service’ attacks
Storing logs with IPs is no problem at all.
For instance, you can use this stored IP address to help identify whether your user has had their account breached, and prompt for extra verification before letting them log in. You can also do a full browser fingerprint for this purpose, this is all covered under legitimate basis.
However, once you use any of this data to market to the user then you are in breach of the GDPR as you did not have a consent basis for it. The storage was never a problem, it's the use of it that becomes a problem.
Unless you are a huge company or have a significant amount of customers in the UK/EU it's probably okay to ignore the GDPR.
You have the right to log IP addresses only if they are used for the two purposes you listed, otherwise you will need explicit consent.
Cf: https://www.cnil.fr/sites/default/files/atoms/files/recomman... (in French, though)
You can freely collect data as a legal requirement, or for "legitimate interest" purposes such as fraud prevention. But you can't use the data you just collected for analytics without proper consent.
There is meant to be a sense of proportionality, but as many things with privacy laws it's subject to interpretation and intentionally left vague.
I wouldn’t be surprised if they lose over 50% of GA users with this. Why? Why is it good for google? I don’t get it.
GA4 also reports on combined app+web data whereas UA did not.
Another distinction is that GA4 has better support for muti-touch attribution, e.g. all of the user ad touchpoints, for ad traffic, whereas UA was primarily last click, or first click if you look at the user acquisition reports.
I have reviewed many Google Analytics alternatives. You can read about them here: https://algustionesa.com/google-analytics-alternatives/
One thing to note is that many Google Analytics alternatives suffer from data accuracy issues.
They record and count analytics data differently from how Google Analytics does.
Therefore, before fully transitioning to Google Analytics and being surprised by a drop in visitors, it's advisable to use any analytics alternative alongside it first.
Clearly Request Metrics should make it on your list ;)
During my years of experience using Google Analytics, I had very limited faith in Google Analytics accuracy. For example, bots routinely poisoned the referrer logs.
So holding them as a benchmark of accuracy seems off the mark for me.
I have the strong suspicion, that nobody has really great bot detection to this day.
Even with Google Analytics, I mostly used the data for rough trend analysis over longer periods, rather than react to every little 5% blip in the data.
For example, it was useful for observing the shift to mobile at differing pace for different types of websites. And that allowed for prioritizing website redesign projects during the 2010s.
And I’m also pretty puzzled at the criticism in your article of Matomo for being too close to how to Google Analytics works, while simultaneously holding Google Analytics as the gold standard to be compared against. That seems rather inconsistent to me.
Plausible has a really simple interface, and we're able to embed the dashboard within the Drupal admin interface too so they don't even need to log in to a separate service to see their stats.
I wonder what went wrong, but i'm so happy to not trapped in that hellscape anymore.
I remember it could take my team a week to even find the page something was on, or figure out the grotesquely convoluted methodology or naming scheme they had come up with for some simple task from 100 versions of their docs.
They can’t be adaptive and innovative, they need to follow their UI guidelines, so sometimes it ends up being a mess.
Yes, the Google Ads interface is getting worse and worse, i never understand which hierarchical level I am on, its crazy…
Hence, a long time ago we built web analytics, the Wide Angle Analytics. We actually support processing Personal Data when requested.
When building it, we spent more time on compliance than on technology.
What is wrong with PHP? Most hosting companies support it by default or come with LAMP images, so installation is often trivial.
I would pick a different stack today mostly due to wanting to try other stuff out, and not so much because something was broken about it. Website still loads faster than 99% of the internet today, and I'm happy with it.
Normally the analytics platform should be hosted on a separate server for performance and security reasons.
For example, the demo dashboard of uxwizz.com runs on PHP/MySQL on a $5/mo VPS and it's faster than most analytics platforms, even those running on big cloud infrastructures, because for the low-traffic use-case the simpler the solution and technology, the better.
One nice thing about it is that there are some pages on my site that I never bothered to add Google Analytics to, but Cloudflare adds their tracker automatically to every page. It couldn't be easier, which is great as analytics is not something I want to spend any time on.
... but if I wanted to run my own platform I wonder what other people are using.
Where maxmind is $0.0003 per query. And my CloudFront concept is $0.0000015 per query.
The database is updated daily, there is no quality compromise, it is a database so unlimited lookups and it is licensed under CC-BY-SA 4.0 so it permits commercial use with attribution. It is a subset of our paid city level data. If you want city level data, we have the free tier on the API permits 50k lookups per month.
By the way, I already pinged you on Twitter about the database. :/
There really isn't much to learn from this article apart from that feeling about "we did it in-house instead and it does 60% of what the dumb original solution would do. Also we need to maintain it all ourselves now.":
> Not invented here (NIH) is the tendency to avoid using or buying products, research, standards, or knowledge from external origins. It is usually adopted by social, corporate, or institutional cultures. Research illustrates a strong bias against ideas from the outside
Or is it simply that the concept of "an American company processing data on visitors to a European website" is completely illegal now, and the courts haven't gotten around to spelling it out that bluntly yet?
(in all honesty though I would probably do the same thing - GA is not my favorite thing in the world)