It’s free, it’s very easy to setup and understand, and there is a lot of documentation out there on how to integrate it into different popular systems like Wordpress. It’s definitely invasive, but it’s hard to deny that it’s easy to integrate.
not as easy as doing nothing though… it’s free and easy to crawl around on all fours… that can be invasive too if you crawl under someone’s desk… but this still leaves the question why.
Because a lot of the time when you’ve just made a site you want to see if anyone’s looking at it, or maybe what kind of browsers are hitting it, or how many bots, or whatever, so you set up analytics. Then time passes, you find out what you wanted to find out, and you stop caring if people are looking at the site, but the tracking code is still there.
I’d compare it to CCTV cameras in shops. You visit the shop (the website) voluntarily so the owner can and will track you.
We can agree that this is a bad thing under certain conditions, but as long as it’s technically trivial it will be done. No use arguing what is, you’d need a face mask or TOR to avoid it.
That said, I’d also prefer if it wasn’t Google Analytics on most pages but something that keeps the data strictly in the owner’s hands. I can wish for it to be deleted after a while all I want but my expectation is that all the laws in the world won’t change that to a 100% certainty.
End-user-facing SaaS products are one thing. On a site I run on infrastructure that I run myself I can just look at the httpd logs¹ and doing so is way faster than looking at GA², but if I also bought a dozen other random SaaS products then the companies that run those won’t ship me httpd logs, but they will almost always give me a place to copy-paste in a GA tracking <script>. If I have to track usage on microsites and my main website, it’s nice if the same tracking works for all of them.
It has some useful features. I believe offhand that, if you wire up code to tell it what counts as a “conversion event”, GA can out the box tell you things like “which pages tended to correlate positively and negatives with people subsequently pushing the shiny green BUY NOW button?”
There’s a populace of people familiar with it. If you hire a head of marketing³, pretty much every single person in your hiring pool has used GA before, but almost none of them have scraped httpd logs with grep or used Piwik. (Though I would be surprised if they didn’t immediately find Piwik easy and pleasant to use.) So when that person says that they require quantitative analysis of visitor patterns in order to do their job⁴, they’re likely to phrase it as “put Google Analytics on the website, please.”
(¹ GA writes down a bunch of stuff that Apache won’t, out the box. GA won’t immediately write down everything you care about because you have to tell it what counts as a conversion if you want conversion funnel statistics.)
(² I have seriously no idea whatsoever how anybody manages to cope with using GA’s query interface on a day to day basis. It’s the most frustratingly laggy UI that I’ve ever used, and I’m including “running a shell and text editor inside ssh to a server on literally the opposite side of the planet” in this comparison. I think people who use GA regularly must have their expectations for software UI adjusted downward immensely.)
(³ or whatever job title you give to the person whose pay is predicated on making the chart titled “Purchases via our website” go up and to the right.)
(⁴ and they do! If you think they don’t, take it up with Ogilvy. He wrote a whole book and everything, you should read it.)
The book is “Ogilvy on Advertising”. It’s not long, the prose is not boring and there are some nice pictures in it.
The main thing it’s about is how an iterative approach to advertising can sell a boatload of product. That is, running several different adverts, measuring how well each advert worked, then trying another set of variations based on what worked the first time. For measurement he writes about doings things like putting different adverts for the same product up, each with a different discount code printed on it, and then counting how many customers show up using the discount code that was in each of those adverts. These days you’ll see websites doing things like using tracking cookies to work out what the conversion rate was from each advert they ran.
Obviously the specific mechanisms they used for measurement back then are mostly obsolete now, but the underlying principle of evolving ad campaigns by putting out variations, measuring, then doubling down on the things you’ve demonstrated to work is timeless.
Ogilvy also writes a little bit about specific practical things that he’s found worked when he put them in adverts in the past, such as putting large amounts of copy on the advert rather than small amounts, font choice, attention-grabbing wording, how to write a CTA, black text on white backgrounds or vice-verse, what kinds of photos to run and so on. Many are probably still accurate because human beings don’t change much.
Many are plausibly wrong now because the practicalities of staring at a glowing screen aren’t identical to those of staring at a piece of paper. If you’re following the advice to in the first bit of the book about actually measuring things, then it won’t matter much to you how much is wrong or right because you’ll rapidly find out for yourself empirically anyway. :)
Hypothetically, let’s say you’ve done a lot of little-a agile software development: you might feel that the evolutionary approach to advertising is really, really obvious. Well, congratulations, but not all advertising is done that way, and quite a lot of work is sold on the basis of how fashionable and sophisticated it makes the buyer of the advertising job feel. Ogilvy conveys, in much less harsh words, that the correct response to this is to burn those scrubs to the fucking ground by outselling them a hundred to one.
For me it was probably ego-stroking to find out how much traffic I was getting. I’ve been blogging for more than a decade and not always from hosts where logs were easily accessible.
What gets me is why people care about how many hits their blog gets anyway. If I write a blog, the main target is actually myself (and maybe, MAYBE, one or two other people I’ll email individually too), and I put it on the internet just because it is really easy to. Same thing with my open source libraries: I offer them for download with the hopes that they may be useful… but it really means nothing to me if you use it or not, since the reason I wrote it in the first place is for myself (or again, somebody who emailed me or pinged me on irc and I had some time to kill by helping them out).
As such, I have no interest in analytics. It… really doesn’t matter if one or ten thousand people view the page, since it works for me and the individuals I converse with on email, and that’s my only goal.
So I think that yes, Google Analytics is easy and that’s why they got the marketshare, but before that, people had to believe analytics mattered and I’m not sure how exactly that happened. Maybe it is every random blogger buying into the “data-driven” hype thinking they’re going to be the next John Rockefeller in the marketplace of ideas… instead of the reality where most blogs are lucky to have two readers. (BTW I think these thoughts also apply to the otherwise baffling popularity of Medium.com.)
Apparently, the InternetArchive allows uploads too (ref). For people that don’t have the space/bandwidth to host video themselves, it might be an alternative.
Regarding YouTube, PeerTube looks like a very interesting alternative, since it neither puts too much pressure one one’s own server if one were to include a video in a popular article, but it also integrates well into platforms supporting the ActivityPub protocol (e.g. Mastodon, GNU Social, …)
I wanted some comments on my blog recently without using disqus and preferably without needing a server at all as the blog is already static. I ended up putting together a prototype that uses AWS lambda to handle comment submissions and generate a static json index file which can be read by some javascript.
At some point, I wanted to do something similar. The only sore point is it was unclear for me if you can prevent lambdas from running in parallel. Otherwise, you have a small race condition when you regenerate the JSON index file. It’s solvable by using Dynamo as a distributed lock. Or by not doing anything: as long as you have comments flowing (which is likely if you have a race condition), the index will become correct at some point.
I got around the issue of needing locks (wanted to be completely server-less and essentially free to run) by having the index generation regenerate the entire index rather than update the existing one, but there is another race condition with my solution.
The way it works at the moment is:
Have a lambda function write new comments to a bucket with a flake id as the filename (so they’ll be roughly time ordered)
Have a second lambda function to generate the index file that will execute when certain events are fired on the bucket (file created, deleted, updated)
The race condition I hit is because of S3’s eventual consistency - when the generation function runs the newly created comment might not show up in the file list. My solution would be to kick off the generation function on a delay, but this has not been implemented.
And of course, if you’ve many many comments the index generation will slow down, but this works fine for my use case.
Zappa makes all of this really easy to manage, I wouldn’t want to use lambda without this tooling.
Nowadays, RSS feeds are far less popular they were before. I am still baffled as why a technical audience wouldn’t use RSS, but some readers prefer to receive updates by mail.
I use RSS (and atom) feeds heavily to keep track of blogs, webcomics, and software updates. Does anyone here prefer to receive update by mail?
I forward my RSS feeds to a dedicated email account. This gives me a nice way to get native apps, read tracking, etc on all my devices. Also makes sharing feed items work nicely.
Does anyone know if there’s a simpler alternative to Google Analytics which only shows hit counts? For my site, all I’d love to know is which pages have been viewed how many times. I really don’t care about anything else.
I wish Netlify would provide some sort of basic log analysis of static sites, telling me the view count of each page.
You can host a 1x1 pixel on Amazon S3 and enable logging for the associated bucket. Add a query string to identify the current page. A simple transformation on the logs (to remove original URI, keeping only the one in query string) and you should be able to use GoAccess.
Disqus has stopped me from commenting on other people’s sites before (for a number of reasons). My blog is small, so I care about every comment, and I don’t want to force people to use disqus.
Rolling your own isn’t crazily hard, you just have to put in some basic protections so that if your system does get abused it’s self-limiting and you can deal with it when you have time.
Reminded me I’ve had Google Analytics code up on my blog since forever for no benefit for me whatsoever. Off it goes!
Kudos for removing it but I am curious how Google Analytics ends up running on so many sites to begin with?
It’s free, it’s very easy to setup and understand, and there is a lot of documentation out there on how to integrate it into different popular systems like Wordpress. It’s definitely invasive, but it’s hard to deny that it’s easy to integrate.
not as easy as doing nothing though… it’s free and easy to crawl around on all fours… that can be invasive too if you crawl under someone’s desk… but this still leaves the question why.
Because a lot of the time when you’ve just made a site you want to see if anyone’s looking at it, or maybe what kind of browsers are hitting it, or how many bots, or whatever, so you set up analytics. Then time passes, you find out what you wanted to find out, and you stop caring if people are looking at the site, but the tracking code is still there.
I’d compare it to CCTV cameras in shops. You visit the shop (the website) voluntarily so the owner can and will track you. We can agree that this is a bad thing under certain conditions, but as long as it’s technically trivial it will be done. No use arguing what is, you’d need a face mask or TOR to avoid it.
That said, I’d also prefer if it wasn’t Google Analytics on most pages but something that keeps the data strictly in the owner’s hands. I can wish for it to be deleted after a while all I want but my expectation is that all the laws in the world won’t change that to a 100% certainty.
End-user-facing SaaS products are one thing. On a site I run on infrastructure that I run myself I can just look at the httpd logs¹ and doing so is way faster than looking at GA², but if I also bought a dozen other random SaaS products then the companies that run those won’t ship me httpd logs, but they will almost always give me a place to copy-paste in a GA tracking
<script>. If I have to track usage on microsites and my main website, it’s nice if the same tracking works for all of them.It has some useful features. I believe offhand that, if you wire up code to tell it what counts as a “conversion event”, GA can out the box tell you things like “which pages tended to correlate positively and negatives with people subsequently pushing the shiny green BUY NOW button?”
There’s a populace of people familiar with it. If you hire a head of marketing³, pretty much every single person in your hiring pool has used GA before, but almost none of them have scraped httpd logs with grep or used Piwik. (Though I would be surprised if they didn’t immediately find Piwik easy and pleasant to use.) So when that person says that they require quantitative analysis of visitor patterns in order to do their job⁴, they’re likely to phrase it as “put Google Analytics on the website, please.”
(¹ GA writes down a bunch of stuff that Apache won’t, out the box. GA won’t immediately write down everything you care about because you have to tell it what counts as a conversion if you want conversion funnel statistics.)
(² I have seriously no idea whatsoever how anybody manages to cope with using GA’s query interface on a day to day basis. It’s the most frustratingly laggy UI that I’ve ever used, and I’m including “running a shell and text editor inside ssh to a server on literally the opposite side of the planet” in this comparison. I think people who use GA regularly must have their expectations for software UI adjusted downward immensely.)
(³ or whatever job title you give to the person whose pay is predicated on making the chart titled “Purchases via our website” go up and to the right.)
(⁴ and they do! If you think they don’t, take it up with Ogilvy. He wrote a whole book and everything, you should read it.)
what’s that book?
The book is “Ogilvy on Advertising”. It’s not long, the prose is not boring and there are some nice pictures in it.
The main thing it’s about is how an iterative approach to advertising can sell a boatload of product. That is, running several different adverts, measuring how well each advert worked, then trying another set of variations based on what worked the first time. For measurement he writes about doings things like putting different adverts for the same product up, each with a different discount code printed on it, and then counting how many customers show up using the discount code that was in each of those adverts. These days you’ll see websites doing things like using tracking cookies to work out what the conversion rate was from each advert they ran.
Obviously the specific mechanisms they used for measurement back then are mostly obsolete now, but the underlying principle of evolving ad campaigns by putting out variations, measuring, then doubling down on the things you’ve demonstrated to work is timeless.
Ogilvy also writes a little bit about specific practical things that he’s found worked when he put them in adverts in the past, such as putting large amounts of copy on the advert rather than small amounts, font choice, attention-grabbing wording, how to write a CTA, black text on white backgrounds or vice-verse, what kinds of photos to run and so on. Many are probably still accurate because human beings don’t change much.
Many are plausibly wrong now because the practicalities of staring at a glowing screen aren’t identical to those of staring at a piece of paper. If you’re following the advice to in the first bit of the book about actually measuring things, then it won’t matter much to you how much is wrong or right because you’ll rapidly find out for yourself empirically anyway. :)
Hypothetically, let’s say you’ve done a lot of little-a agile software development: you might feel that the evolutionary approach to advertising is really, really obvious. Well, congratulations, but not all advertising is done that way, and quite a lot of work is sold on the basis of how fashionable and sophisticated it makes the buyer of the advertising job feel. Ogilvy conveys, in much less harsh words, that the correct response to this is to burn those scrubs to the fucking ground by outselling them a hundred to one.
For me it was probably ego-stroking to find out how much traffic I was getting. I’ve been blogging for more than a decade and not always from hosts where logs were easily accessible.
What gets me is why people care about how many hits their blog gets anyway. If I write a blog, the main target is actually myself (and maybe, MAYBE, one or two other people I’ll email individually too), and I put it on the internet just because it is really easy to. Same thing with my open source libraries: I offer them for download with the hopes that they may be useful… but it really means nothing to me if you use it or not, since the reason I wrote it in the first place is for myself (or again, somebody who emailed me or pinged me on irc and I had some time to kill by helping them out).
As such, I have no interest in analytics. It… really doesn’t matter if one or ten thousand people view the page, since it works for me and the individuals I converse with on email, and that’s my only goal.
So I think that yes, Google Analytics is easy and that’s why they got the marketshare, but before that, people had to believe analytics mattered and I’m not sure how exactly that happened. Maybe it is every random blogger buying into the “data-driven” hype thinking they’re going to be the next John Rockefeller in the marketplace of ideas… instead of the reality where most blogs are lucky to have two readers. (BTW I think these thoughts also apply to the otherwise baffling popularity of Medium.com.)
Also, it’s invasive, sure but it’s also fairly high value even at the free level.
You get a LOT of data about your users from inserting that tracking info into your site.
Which leads me into my next question - what does all this pro-privacy stuff do to such a blog’s SEO?
(I know, I know, we’re not supposed to care about SEO - we’re Maverick developers expressing our cultural otherness and doing Maverick-y things…)
Oh, it totally tanks SEO.
Alternately, the SEO consultants that get hired by biz request to have GA added anyways and they force you to bring it in. :(
Google will derank pages what don’t have Google Analytics?
Apparently, the InternetArchive allows uploads too (ref). For people that don’t have the space/bandwidth to host video themselves, it might be an alternative.
“I opted for a simpler solution: no analytics. It also enables me to think that my blog attracts thousands of visitors every day.”
Love this sentence :)
Regarding YouTube, PeerTube looks like a very interesting alternative, since it neither puts too much pressure one one’s own server if one were to include a video in a popular article, but it also integrates well into platforms supporting the ActivityPub protocol (e.g. Mastodon, GNU Social, …)
I wanted some comments on my blog recently without using disqus and preferably without needing a server at all as the blog is already static. I ended up putting together a prototype that uses AWS lambda to handle comment submissions and generate a static json index file which can be read by some javascript.
Runs for free and works well enough for low traffic sites: https://github.com/joealcorn/chatter
At some point, I wanted to do something similar. The only sore point is it was unclear for me if you can prevent lambdas from running in parallel. Otherwise, you have a small race condition when you regenerate the JSON index file. It’s solvable by using Dynamo as a distributed lock. Or by not doing anything: as long as you have comments flowing (which is likely if you have a race condition), the index will become correct at some point.
Thanks for sharing the code!
I got around the issue of needing locks (wanted to be completely server-less and essentially free to run) by having the index generation regenerate the entire index rather than update the existing one, but there is another race condition with my solution.
The way it works at the moment is:
The race condition I hit is because of S3’s eventual consistency - when the generation function runs the newly created comment might not show up in the file list. My solution would be to kick off the generation function on a delay, but this has not been implemented.
And of course, if you’ve many many comments the index generation will slow down, but this works fine for my use case.
Zappa makes all of this really easy to manage, I wouldn’t want to use lambda without this tooling.
I use RSS (and atom) feeds heavily to keep track of blogs, webcomics, and software updates. Does anyone here prefer to receive update by mail?
To be honest, I’d be open to both email and RSS. I use RSS for on-the-go reading and email for more prose.
I forward my RSS feeds to a dedicated email account. This gives me a nice way to get native apps, read tracking, etc on all my devices. Also makes sharing feed items work nicely.
Does anyone know if there’s a simpler alternative to Google Analytics which only shows hit counts? For my site, all I’d love to know is which pages have been viewed how many times. I really don’t care about anything else.
I wish Netlify would provide some sort of basic log analysis of static sites, telling me the view count of each page.
If you have access to your web-server logs, Goaccess may be a good candidate. It’s quite easy to use and not really intrusive.
I actually don’t since I’m on Netlify. Otherwise this would be an ideal solution.
Most of the static websites are hosted on either Github Pages or Netlify and (as far as I know) neither of those allow you to see the access logs.
You can host a 1x1 pixel on Amazon S3 and enable logging for the associated bucket. Add a query string to identify the current page. A simple transformation on the logs (to remove original URI, keeping only the one in query string) and you should be able to use GoAccess.
I think what you’re looking for is a web counter from the 90’s :)
I don’t! But this sounds like a good service for someone to provide. Something SUPER lightweight. Could even eventually show it on https://barnacl.es
back in the days https://www.awstats.org/ was a thing
It still is. I know quite a few customers who still use awstats.
I roll my own comments on my blog and I’ve just had a conversation with another person considering doing the same:
http://halestrom.net/darksleep/blog/030_comment_blog_systems/
https://rubenerd.com/feedback-on-static-comments/
Summary:
That google font tool is nice. Finally I can get rid of the last google dependency on my site.