Ask IH: What's wrong with Google Analytics?
Ask IH: What's wrong with Google Analytics?
Hello, recently I've relaunched my SaaS [1] which is 90% based on Google Analytics API. When I'm trying to market it or talk with different people about it, many of them are either running away from Google Analytics or recently replaced it with another software.
I don't see any objective reasons to do that, apart from today cliché, that Google is evil. Am I missing something big?
I haven't run away from google analytics yet, but if I start a new project I plan to use something else.
My current and general stance at the moment is to become less reliant on the dominant forces of the likes of Google and Facebook. And tbh, when I use Google Analytics, I just don't need all the features it provides.
Where possible I will be supporting and using open source or indie hacker type projects.
I guess it all depends on which features you need. GA is battle tested, and its benefits and weaknesses are well known. But if you don't need 90% of the features it provides, indie hacker projects might be a great solution. However, sometimes, when you want some functionality from analytics, there is just no better free alternatives apart from GA (if we don't count on the other commercial solutions)
Google analytics is really convoluted and totally missing some small, but really needed features (outbound links as example).
I generally leave GA only in projects to retarget their audience later. But by default I use clicky.com
How many people? How do you know this isn't just a vocal minority? In particular, I would be very cautious about what other developers say especially if they're not your target market. I would be incredibly surprised if more than a small number of people are actually moving away from Google Analytics as a a default analytics solution for websites.
You might be right, and maybe I'm just talking with the wrong people (IH/HN/Reddit/PH audience)
If you talk to marketing folks, they mostly use GA as part of their tool set. The audience you mentioned above are devs and such and part of the anti-google/more privacy set. So it just depends who your audience is and reach out to them.
Also, what does your site do that the built-in GA alerts not cover?
Good question. Well, it's about 50% the same and the rest 50% are real-time alerts, statistically significance alerts, webhooks, custom notification email, and customizable reports. Something, what Google hasn't bothered to implement into their alerts system that could be useful
I didn't want to deal with gdpr issues, so I tried fathom (small open source tracking with anonymization). It didn't quite work out so I hacked together a different server for the fathom client. Was kinda fun, but I can see some features I'd like to have but don't have time to build.
It's not totally cliche. I'm not part of the "Google is Evil" crowd, but that's definitely a ton of data they're collecting. It sucks to want the benefits of GA or the FB pixel knowing how much data they get about your visitors. I'd probably still give in if I were really trying to grow traffic.
Yes, GDPR avoidance for the fewer headaches is a valid point.
About the data collection, probably it would be a bit naive to think that all the information you get from a visitor is stayed in your private GA "bucket" and never used again by any other Google service. I believe, this is the main issue, people do not want that their data would be shared across multiple sites/entities? Because otherwise, why you should be angry that particular website tracks its own users to provide a better service/understand the audience better?
Who is your ideal customer? I'm going to guess it isn't developers who hack together their own analytics servers for fun. 😅
I love hacking stuff, and I love analytics (not google one, in general, I've built at least a few large custom analytics systems), so I welcome any other hacker to join if only he/she would find my project useful. Just for them, I still have a free tier 🙂
But of course, every SaaS ideal customer is (at least) someone, who can pay. 9 times out of 10 it's not a solo developer. So for me, for now - Startups & SMBs.
However, that anti-Google movement seems to be affecting everyone 🤔
Do you have any concrete examples of medium or large companies moving a way from Google? Or looked at stats on what analytics solution companies go with including indies?
I think you have to be very careful of being in a filter bubble and try to ground your feelings by finding concrete figures e.g. BuiltWith says Google Analytics is the most popular analytics solution and is used by the majority of top websites:
https://trends.builtwith.com/analytics/Google-Analytics
https://trends.builtwith.com/analytics
Is 30 million websites a big enough market for you to target?
I think outside of developers, most people do not have strong emotions about Google or Google Analytics. Most people will go with the default choice and not think very hard about it as they have more important things to worry about. That's likely who you should target, not developers who have too much time on their hands.
Sean, thank you for the cold-minded thoughts. Builtwith data confirm that you're right, I must be in a bubble 😄