Why You Must Store Your Own Analytics Data

1. Segment

I recall reading a blog post by Andreas Klinger (Product Hunt) talking about analytics and what stuck with me was "there is no silver bullet". I've seen this blindness by a lot of people (myself too) and its hard to swallow but unfortunately true. Just run MixPanel, Google Analytics, Localytics etc all side by side and they give you totally different data.

Segment is a great choice. I really didn't know much (and still don't) about analytics so I went with it after finding GA flakey and not wanting to sprinkle the iOS code with multiple SDKs. Support from them has been great and timely and it hasn't cost a penny for all the major integrations I've used - e.g. MixPanel, GA. Just the other I flicked on Localytics and it just worked. Sounds like I work there! Anyways, you owe it to your future sanity to try it out!

Obviously it adds an additional cost to some otherwise free services. However, the plans are set up so when you have to start worrying it, it's probably a good sign!

2. "Building dashboards is a much harder engineering and design exercise than most people appreciate."

YES! Sites like Geckoboard make it look super easy and all the tools you get with MixPanel are great, but sometimes things just aren't quite right. Funnelling data from MixPanel where if you have a property that can be True, False or Undefined, it only allows you to filter by True or False in some cases.

Also, if you have too many pageviews, Google Analytics only gives you a sample instead of the full data.

I like piwik. It isn't that hard to set up your own analytics with piwik or another tool.

Having used 3rd party analytics tools including GameAnalytics for Unity, I can attest to this. Many analytics platforms horde your data and won't give you database access, and you're restricted to their (usually incomplete) tool set. Much better to have the raw data yourself so you're never restricted.