Google Analytics 4 Has Me So Pissed off, We Constructed Our Personal Analytics Service | Google Analytics was the go-to analytics instrument. It set the usual, all of us realized on it, and all of us used it. However Google Analytics 4? It’s a nightmare. I’ve …
Google Analytics was the go-to analytics instrument. It set the usual, all of us realized on it, and all of us used it. However Google Analytics 4? It’s a nightmare. I’ve tried to determine it out for weeks and it’s simply…complicated.
What’s Mistaken with Google Analytics?
Google Analytics was a present horse that we didn’t look within the mouth. It was free, so we didn’t query it. However we paid for it otherwise: by letting Google see person information from our web sites and promote it to advertisers.
Then alongside got here GDPR and Google needed to play good with privateness legal guidelines, so that they birthed “Google Analytics 4”. Now, they’re herding us all onto this new platform by July 1st.
“This property will cease processing information beginning July 1, 2023”
The issue? It’s a dumpster fireplace
Google Analytics was easy, answering questions like “the place’s my site visitors coming from?” and “what content material do guests get pleasure from?”. Now, It’s a maze. You want a decoder ring and a grasp’s diploma to know it.
I’ve a grasp’s diploma! I’m a software program developer. I studied enterprise and arithmetic in class, and I wish to assume I’m a reasonably good man. But when I can’t determine it out in half an hour with the docs, then I’m sorry, however “it sucks”.
What about Assist? Ha! What assist? I’ve despatched three queries their means and obtained nothing greater than regurgitated docs in return. We don’t pay them cash, and they also don’t actually need to assist.
So what will we do? I truthfully don’t have the time or the power to turn into an knowledgeable within the new Google Analytics. Nor ought to I’ve to be. Analytics is a software observability tool, and observability instruments ought to do the pondering for me. Inform me what’s attention-grabbing, don’t make me ask.
“High-quality, I’ll Make My Personal Analytics”
High-quality! So we’ll construct our personal.
We began gathering our personal information in our Kibana logging stack. It was okay, however it wasn’t splendid. It’s like utilizing a screwdriver to hammer in a nail – it will get the job accomplished, however it’s not fairly proper. I didn’t need to re-learn my dashboards each time I wanted one thing. I didn’t need to determine the right way to make a question or what the KQL syntax was.
We had this superior web performance and API observability platform with Request Metrics. Why not add a web analytics tool that we might love: easy solutions, straightforward filtering, and detailed session breakdowns?
The issues that I might go to Google Analytics usually to be taught, like session rely, touchdown pages, and bounce charges, are front-and-center on the principle dashboard. No digging for solutions. We expose content material, geographic, and session info at a look.
Google Analytics at all times made filtering really feel like quantum physics. With our Quick Filtering, it’s as straightforward as pie to drill down on chrome customers, European customers, excessive engagement customers, you identify it.
One of many largest limitations of Google Analytics was that you simply couldn’t see the main points. When you discovered an attention-grabbing person session, you couldn’t actually see the specifics of what occurred. Right here’s the place Request Metrics leaps previous GA and shows a full transcript of the session: each web page, efficiency metric, person engagement, JavaScript error, and so on and so on and so on. You’ll be able to see precisely what occurred.
Service and Assist That Exists
We consider service is the center of SaaS. You want somebody who can information you, somebody who really is aware of how the system works. With us, you get certainly one of our engineers on the road. We’ll assist you to make the instrument do what you want, and if it doesn’t we will put it on our to-do record.
Higher for Privateness, Too
Guess what? Request Metrics isn’t promoting your information to advertisers. We believe in user privacy. We don’t want to trace guests throughout domains or determine delicate demographic data. We’re GDPR compliant out of the field, and we don’t drop any cookies. These consent banners had been a horrible person expertise anyway.
Request Metrics analytics is offered now for all customers, so that you by no means need to really feel dumb over Google Analytics once more. Plans start at just $10/mo (as a result of you are our buyer). Prepared to offer it a attempt? Start your free trial today.