Google Analytics: Stop feeding the beast

Re:Google Analytics: Stop feeding the beast by mqrs on Thursday February 25, 2021 @07:29PM (#26270174)

If you’re just using analytics to look at how effective UI designs are in making business conversions, couldn’t you still measure that by checking the backend and looking for a spike in activity towards the API endpoint that the UI invokes? Couldn’t you measure effectivity with a spike or drop in sales? I mean, good UX doesn’t so much rely on Google Analytics but on a UX engineer’s depth of knowledge about human psychology.

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Re:Google Analytics: Stop feeding the beast by dntrkv on Thursday February 25, 2021 @09:29PM (#26270844)

> couldn’t you still measure that by checking the backend and looking for a spike in activity towards the API endpoint that the UI invokes?

You could have multiple UIs hitting the same endpoint. Also, why limit yourself with such crude metrics?

> good UX doesn’t so much rely on Google Analytics but on a UX engineer’s depth of knowledge about human psychology

UX in theory, and UX in application are two different things. You could have the best models of how users will interact with your site, but until you deploy and measure, you have no idea what will happen.

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Re:Google Analytics: Stop feeding the beast by mqrs on Thursday February 25, 2021 @09:44PM (#26270903)

You can still parameterizethe API calls if you want to attribute user activity to a specific flow, and that way you wouldn’t be “feeding the beast” that is GA.

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Re:Google Analytics: Stop feeding the beast by viraptor on Thursday February 25, 2021 @10:31PM (#26271112)

How you mark/report the events is different from where you report them. You could use any one of self-hosted solutions on your own domain instead of GA without changing much the way you report back.

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Re:Google Analytics: Stop feeding the beast by klmadfejno on Thursday February 25, 2021 @08:59PM (#26270694)

What you're suggesting is analytics.

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Re:Google Analytics: Stop feeding the beast by mqrs on Thursday February 25, 2021 @09:40PM (#26270888)

Yes but it’s not necessarily Google analytics.

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Re:Google Analytics: Stop feeding the beast by slavak on Friday February 26, 2021 @01:49AM (#26271996)

There's plenty of alternatives to Google Analytics, including open-source software you can self-host so it doesn't share your users' private data with a third party. You don't need to roll your own just to avoid GA.

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Re:Google Analytics: Stop feeding the beast by JGM_io on Friday February 26, 2021 @02:13AM (#26272110)

For example?

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Re:Google Analytics: Stop feeding the beast by rghb1989 on Friday February 26, 2021 @06:44AM (#26273793)

https://posthog.com/ is one i've been playing around with lately.

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Re:Google Analytics: Stop feeding the beast by XCSme on Sunday February 28, 2021 @08:24PM (#26298803)

You can find here a huge list:

https://github.com/onurakpolat/awesome-analytics

https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted/blo...

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Re:Google Analytics: Stop feeding the beast by healeycodes on Friday February 26, 2021 @05:03AM (#26273156)

I use https://www.goatcounter.com and recommend it.

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Re:Google Analytics: Stop feeding the beast by _a9 on Friday February 26, 2021 @02:49AM (#26272303)

Matomo

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Re:Google Analytics: Stop feeding the beast by KSteffensen on Friday February 26, 2021 @07:22AM (#26274044)

The article suggests some

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