4 hours ago by cddotdotslash
Isn't this a good thing? One part of Google made a tool that evaluates performance and they're not giving any preference to their other tools, despite also being made by Google.
If they hadn't objectively penalized you, everyone would be complaining that Google gave preferential treatment to their own products.
3 hours ago by onion2k
It's a good thing that Google don't give preferential treatment to their own products.
It's a bad thing that Google's own analytics product isn't good enough to still get 4x100 in Google's own perf tool. It means that people will give up and accept lower scores because it's "impossible" to be perfect. That harms everyone who uses the web.
2 hours ago by jefftk
Why will people think it's impossible and give up, when competitors like Simple Analytics demonstrate that better performance is possible?
(Disclosure: I work for Google, speaking only for myself)
13 minutes ago by cknoxrun
There is a common fear (and I have to admit I irrationally feel this fear) that your ranking will be impacted negatively by not using Google Analytics. Maybe not intentionally, but perhaps because Google knows less about your site.
34 minutes ago by tyingq
I know there's a case for these additional stats being less than useful, but SimpleAnalytics doesn't appear to provide the same statistics that GA does. It's a pretty big hurdle for some people to give up on funnels, time on page, bounce rates etc.
If there's an analytics platform with a closer feature match to GA, but with good page speed scores, that might be more convincing to them.
2 hours ago by jmcan
Maybe small business owners doing this themselves will give up because they don't know about these other analytics services. But I agree I don't think a marketer would give up and settle for a lower score, but I definitely can see a marketer being frustrated with the lack of feedback in order to get a perfect score.
3 hours ago by tyingq
It is funny that AMP pages could have GA without being penalized.
4 hours ago by whatever_dude
Tangent: I find GA to be mostly useless nowadays for any website used by a more tech savvy community. When comparing the GA results to server logs and a separate JS logging script, and already discounting for bots, it's clear GA is only counting about 10% of my visits.
Too many people blocking that script. I have about 20 different sites using it that I manage in some form bit cannot couch for it anymore.
4 hours ago by marcus_holmes
The scary thing about this is that marketing folks still seem to consider the results from GA as somehow valid. With the result that non-techy demographics get counted more, and therefore marketers assume that non-techy people are more interested in their stuff. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Fighting this fight at the moment:
marketing folk - "we're seeing more responses from old people than young people, we should focus on that market"
technical folk - "Are we allowing for the fact that older people are less likely to be blocking GA and therefore most of those untracked clicks are likely to be younger?"
marketing folk - "well, no, but we don't have any information on those, so we can't make any decisions about them."
technical folk - "but we know GA is blocked by ad-blockers. And we know that ad-blockers are used more by younger, more tech-savvy people. And we know that approx 60% of the visits to our site are not registering on GA. So... can we include that in our analysis?"
marketing folk - "...."
technical folk - "...."
marketing folk - "I don't know how to change the pretty graph that GA produces to include that."
3 hours ago by taurath
If the marketing people are only running online ad campaigns, then they often believe they can disregard people running adblockers. For non-online campaigns they use bigger product metrics, I've seen. GA is not always the end-all be-all, but for online ad tracking they use that.
I'm also personally shocked at how FEW people relatively end up using ad blockers. Its a night and day difference
2 hours ago by hluska
And don't forget what I call 'the hell path':
Marketing folk - "Wait...if we're getting more responses from old people than young people and old people are more likely to run adblockers than young people, let's increase our spend on Google Ads because only people without adblockers will see them."
Technical folk - Get into woodworking.
Edit - If the technical folk push back, that's when marketing folk will say that 'the law of really big numbers' means that 40% of a big market is still worth a lot. Trust me, woodworking....:)
3 hours ago by undefined
4 hours ago by throwaway3699
This is why I proxy GA visits directly through my server. Full accuracy but less privacy issues as my clients don't require JavaScript and I can anon the IP myself. I'm surprised more people aren't doing this.
3 hours ago by ezekg
I'd rather use something like Plausible Analytics behind my own domain than go to extra effort just to use Google.
2 hours ago by throwaway3699
This is also blocked by many lists. All I want is accurate reporting, so there's no incentive to go with that over Google, especially if Google can keep our data safer than Plausible can.
4 hours ago by lowpro
Have you written on how to do this/followed a guide somewhere?
2 hours ago by throwaway3699
The Google Analytics Measurement Protocol documentation was used. We created a middleware which sends data to GA as a POST request (much like our regular logs middleware)
3 hours ago by a13n
Ublock still blocks this
3 hours ago by rendall
I think OP meant that the info coming to the server gets sent directly to GA. IP Address, etc.
3 hours ago by jsmith99
Only if it's DNS level (just a CNAME). Ublock can't detect it if it's really proxied through the server itself.
2 hours ago by swiley
Someone needs to remind Mozilla that most of their users are likely blocking telemetry.
3 hours ago by 101008
Hi. I have a few content websites that may not be used by a tech savvy community, but by young people. Is it there a way to implement a GA alternative in a few minutes to compare by how much the stats differ? I suspect GA is not counting all my visitors.
an hour ago by a1369209993
Yes: https://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.4/logs.html#accesslog (for apache, obviously) or the equivalent for whichever flavor of httpd you're using.
Consult `man 1 grep` for information on how to query it.
22 minutes ago by yjftsjthsd-h
> Consult `man 1 grep` for information on how to query it.
Or something like goaccess to get nice charts.
4 hours ago by mobilio
Using GA isn't bad because there are two ways to run it.
First is when GA script is on <head> section. This is mostly popular, but making CWV scores little bit low.
Second is when GA script is anywhere on page, but not on <head>. Like before </body> or in <body>. This doesn't hurt your CWV scores.
2 hours ago by tyingq
They are using your latter example, here's the page: https://blog.simpleanalytics.com/with-ga-script
It is hurting the score. The GA script is NOT in the <head>.
2 hours ago by spicybright
that's kind of weird, I would think you'd want to measure things like time to dom load, if someone clicks off before that, etc.
Maybe for performance reasons?
20 minutes ago by earthboundkid
That's why I use https://github.com/jehna/ga-lite/. It saves a roundtrip and is quite small.
10 hours ago by youngtaff
Lighthouse / PSI scores are irrelevant to search ranking.
Data from the Chrome UX Report (CrUX) is going to be used in results ranking as part of the page experience update - this comes from real-world usage of Chrome
GA affecting Lighthouse scores may be a good storyline for Simple Analytics (and there are plenty of reasons not to use GA) but you can still use GA and pass all the core web vitals
4 hours ago by shadowfaxRodeo
Google may not be using Lighthouse to perform the tests, but it is understood that Google use performance metrics as an SEO factor.
It's understandable that Simple Analytics would use Lighthouse to measure performance and extrapolate from there. I'm not sure how else they could do the test — as presumably they don't have access to Google's data.
4 hours ago by wereHamster
I don't think it's too far fetched to think that Google will somehow tweak CrUX numbers to counteract the performance drop caused by GA. For example, on a small percentage of users block GA and send the collected CrUX numbers with a special tag to the mothership, and then using only those when ranking sites.
3 hours ago by londons_explore
Possibly, but what they care about really is "What experience will users have when they visit a site". The GA script loading time is totally part of that, so why discount it from the measurements?
5 hours ago by prophesi
The Chrome UX Report itself uses PSI, and all of its metrics are based on page performance, so I wouldn't say it's irrelevant.
4 hours ago by nindalf
> this comes from real-world usage of Chrome
Measured by what metric(s)? Core Web Vitals.
3 hours ago by robinj6
This has frustrated me so much, as I spend a lot of time optimizing web performance. Gtag.js is pushed by analytics, however after loading it then async loads analytics.js. It is very inefficient, especially for sites that do not much more than track page views. It is the worst scoring factor on sites I optimize because there’s very little you can do about it without hacks.
3 hours ago by JohnTHaller
I like the idea of Simple Analytics but that pricing model is out of reach open source projects like PortableApps.com. Separating out by page views is tough when I only need a single user and don't care about support. $600 a year for up to a million page views per month and "contact us" for more means it'd probably be at least a couple thousand dollars a year.
3 hours ago by neltnerb
Honest question -- why do you need analytics on an open source project like the one referenced? What information could they possibly get from it that matters to what they're doing?
I've used GA once on an open source focused blog, and the information was entirely "interesting" but I didn't get anything useful out of it other than a vague "hey people are visiting" picture that really changed nothing about what I was doing.
Has analytics changed to be more useful? Who cares what countries people are visiting from? I feel like people don't question their need for analytics as much as they should and just automatically do it.
2 hours ago by mcao
You can use an open-source alternative like https://umami.is/
4 hours ago by josefresco
I really wish Google would split Analytics into two products. One for "advanced" website operators and one for "simple" users, aka business owners aka real people, not professional data analysts.
The problem is that most of my clients don't care enough about their stats to pay $19/month. So they opt for the "free" option (Google Analytics) which is now being positioned for the high-end market.
11 minutes ago by mywittyname
GA offers GA360 for "advanced" users who need integration with Ads, Videos, GCP, Salesforce, etc.
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