February 22, 20206 yr Hi, I was wondering how important your web analytics is to you? What platforms do you use and why? I'm guessing the top answer will be Google Analytics, and if so why? Apart from that it's free and the most well-known tool, Is there any specific reasons? Any tools and data that you really like? If you use something else, why do you prefer that to Google Analytics?
February 23, 20206 yr Where clients ask for analytics I always recommend self hosted Matomo over Google Analytics, the main reason being privacy. Matomo allows fully anonymous data gathering, the data is stored on the clients server so they have full control. On the other hand using GA you end up feeding the surveillance monster that is Alphabet and its various businesses and you cannot guarantee data is private.
February 24, 20206 yr I'm not directly involved with Analytics in current and any former roles however most places I've worked at have dedicated teams and most of those places use Google Analytics It must be decent given they have very experienced engineers working in that area and the companies being as large as they are have a vested interest in that data and improving conversion rates. Edited February 24, 20206 yr by rbrtsmith
February 24, 20206 yr Author On 2/22/2020 at 5:56 PM, fisicx said: https://clicky.com Once you have used it you will never want to go back to GA. I've heard of Clicky before. What it is that you feel it has the edge over GA?
February 24, 20206 yr Author 19 hours ago, BlueDreamer said: Where clients ask for analytics I always recommend self hosted Matomo over Google Analytics, the main reason being privacy. Matomo allows fully anonymous data gathering, the data is stored on the clients server so they have full control. On the other hand using GA you end up feeding the surveillance monster that is Alphabet and its various businesses and you cannot guarantee data is private. That is true!
February 24, 20206 yr Author 3 hours ago, rbrtsmith said: I'm not directly involved with Analytics in current and any former roles however most places I've worked at have dedicated teams and most of those places use Google Analytics It must be decent given they have very experienced engineers working in that area and the companies being as large as they are have a vested interest in that data and improving conversion rates. Sounds like you have worked for big companies with that capability. Personally I'm surprised that so many companies use GA, as their data can not only be misunderstood but also very misleading.
February 24, 20206 yr 42 minutes ago, Neil@creative said: I've heard of Clicky before. What it is that you feel it has the edge over GA? Quality and depth of data. And a far lower impact on site performance.
February 24, 20206 yr Something I have noticed is that many clients just ask for GA "because everyone else uses it". Few (if any) ever bother to evaluate anything else. For most sites GA is complete overkill when all they need is an idea of visitor numbers, my CMS counts page views anyway which a lot of clients are perfectly happy with, I can even show them page views totals on each front end page and create simple custom reports for them if they need that. And of course with GDPR analytics should be opt in so data numbers will always be on the low side compared to reality.
February 25, 20206 yr 14 hours ago, Neil@creative said: Sounds like you have worked for big companies with that capability. Personally I'm surprised that so many companies use GA, as their data can not only be misunderstood but also very misleading. Can you describe how the data is misleading? Like I say we employ experts in this field and didn't choose GA because others are using it, we do extensive research into any choice of platform be it content management, Ecommerce management, CI/CD and so on. Analytics is no exception. I agree with BlueDreamer that GA can be overkill for small projects but with GDPR you can still have high numbers, there are workarounds that don't involve the storing of cookies - you can programatically trigger events and detect which user they come from with a bit of server-side work.
February 25, 20206 yr Hi there, I would say here is that you don’t have to use just one tool. In fact, it is better to have a range of tools so you can view your data from multiple perspectives. But when I start thinking on software solutions for any online platform to be analysed, the first option I can think of is Google Analytics, of course.
February 25, 20206 yr 3 hours ago, rbrtsmith said: Can you describe how the data is misleading? Like I say we employ experts in this field and didn't choose GA because others are using it, we do extensive research into any choice of platform be it content management, Ecommerce management, CI/CD and so on. Analytics is no exception. I agree with BlueDreamer that GA can be overkill for small projects but with GDPR you can still have high numbers, there are workarounds that don't involve the storing of cookies - you can programatically trigger events and detect which user they come from with a bit of server-side work. I think the issue mainly comes from the client-side code and client events. There's a good chance an ad blocker will remove the script entirely. Ad blockers are a lot more popular than people think (https://www.businessinsider.com/30-of-all-internet-users-will-ad-block-by-2018-2017-3/), and browsers have even started building in ad blocking by default. While you can replicate some events on the server, many of the click and scroll events will simply never get triggered. There are workarounds, but it's a lot of work for the average person to do, but some companies may invest further in doing them if they feel it's important.
February 25, 20206 yr I always tell clients who use analytics that the numbers are always representative and not necessarily 100% accurate. As Jack said browser privacy tools like adblockers prevent data from being collected.
February 25, 20206 yr Author 14 minutes ago, BlueDreamer said: I always tell clients who use analytics that the numbers are always representative and not necessarily 100% accurate. As Jack said browser privacy tools like adblockers prevent data from being collected. Absolutely and unfortunately even with those figures they are quite often misunderstood and misleading. Bounce rate, session duration and location are 3 big metrics that can lead people that don't fully understand Analytics in the wrong direction.
February 26, 20206 yr 21 hours ago, Jack said: There are workarounds, but it's a lot of work for the average person to do, but some companies may invest further in doing them if they feel it's important. That's exactly what we have done, we dispatch events like clicks and so on manually, which is straightforward with React, maybe less so if you have a WordPress+jQuery setup. So with that we get a fairly accurate representation. Edited February 26, 20206 yr by rbrtsmith
December 23, 20205 yr It is a fantastic tool to know where are we standing with own website such as traffic are coming from location, organic, direct, referral or any other resources.
March 23, 20215 yr On 12/23/2020 at 4:48 PM, Web Panel Solutions said: It is a fantastic tool to know where are we standing with own website such as traffic are coming from location, organic, direct, referral or any other resources. Yes, I second you. Web Analytics help us in understanding our business thoroughly. Web Analytics also help us in finding out whether your marketing strategy is working and gives you the benchmark data and you can see how you are doing in comparison with your competitors.
March 24, 20215 yr Author On 2/25/2020 at 7:28 AM, rbrtsmith said: Can you describe how the data is misleading? Like I say we employ experts in this field and didn't choose GA because others are using it, we do extensive research into any choice of platform be it content management, Ecommerce management, CI/CD and so on. Analytics is no exception. I agree with BlueDreamer that GA can be overkill for small projects but with GDPR you can still have high numbers, there are workarounds that don't involve the storing of cookies - you can programatically trigger events and detect which user they come from with a bit of server-side work. Sure, let's take average session duration. This would imply that this is the average amount of time that someone spends on a website. However Google does not count the length of time someone spends on the last page of a website, which is highly likely to be the time they spend the most time on. Also if somes site has a very high bounce rate, then the time spent will be counted as 0 even if they spend a long time reading an article. In short average session duration is completely misleading. Google have been very misleading with the term bounce rate. For years they pushed the idea that this was the number of people who view a single page. When you talk to the average person that is what they still think it is. Up until recently you could still find articles on Google support still pushing this idea. They have removed all wording suggesting this now and clarified that bounce rate is based on sessions. But for anyone who was orginally mislead this could be huge. One other one I can think of off the top of my head is location. Google uses ip address to calculate the location of each user, and although most of what they have isn't bad, they mix mobile data in with their results. Mobile data is virtually impossoble to calculate so what they end up using is the location of the mobile networking company. For someone looking at their results, if they see that there is a large amount of people viewing their site from one location, this could mislead them into targeting that area. Really Google should exlude that data, because it's useless and could guide people into making bad marketing decisions.
July 27, 20215 yr 9 hours ago, Alington said: This is one of the most important details that I pay attention to. What part of your analysis is important?
July 27, 20215 yr 5 hours ago, fisicx said: What part of your analysis is important? I'm afraid that you may never find out...they've been banned for spamming elsewhere on the forum. 😆 I'm sure was a really important detail though...
August 11, 20214 yr On 2/22/2020 at 11:26 PM, fisicx said: https://clicky.com Once you have used it you will never want to go back to GA. Is it really better than GA?
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