Google Analytics - do we really need/use it?

philwareham · 2017-11-13 13:06:54

More aimed at the devs – but do we really need Google Analytics on the official Textpattern sites any more? Although it can help see popular content it’s a pretty outdated concept I feel (especially since we respect ‘do not track’, so a fair portion of hits to those sites are never tracked anyway – meaning stats are fairly useless).

Google Search Console fulfils all the data we need regarding popular content (via referrer) anyway, and our site and GitHub track actual downloads of Textpattern itself – surely the only important stat at the end of the day.

jpdupont · 2017-11-13 15:57:28

Essential for SEO ??? Some test sites remove points if there is not a statistics tool in the page …

philwareham · 2017-11-13 16:13:50

jpdupont wrote #307811:

Essential for SEO ??? Some test sites remove points if there is not a statistics tool in the page …

I don’t really care about SEO tool scores, they are mostly meaningless. I am more interested in removing a large script (analytics.js) that has a stupidly short cache time and doesn’t give us any useful info anyway (since we don’t pay for AdWords).

Bloke · 2017-11-13 16:44:20

I’ve never used GA. I had a brief dance with Piwik but in the end didn’t see the point as analytics slows sites down for no real gain.

Mind you I don’t see the point of AdWords / Pay Per Click either, preferring the power of the written word than artificially boosting one’s rank for a 1% or (2% if you are very lucky) conversion rate.

Off with its head, imo.

michaelkpate · 2017-11-13 16:59:31

philwareham wrote #307806:

More aimed at the devs – but do we really need Google Analytics on the official Textpattern sites any more?

Speaking as a non-dev, I would assume that you, Phil, as the website guy, would be the one who cares most. And since you don’t, it seems pretty pointless.

philwareham · 2017-11-13 17:03:11

michaelkpate wrote #307815:

Speaking as a non-dev, I would assume that you, Phil, as the website guy, would be the one who cares most. And since you don’t, it seems pretty pointless.

Ha! Well it was more aimed at Robert and Stef really. Probably Robert mostly as I don’t know if anyone else looks at the stats.

Anyway, I’ve opened issues on forum and .com site repos. If Robert doesn’t respond in a couple of days with an opinion I’ll remove GA.

colak · 2017-11-13 17:35:04

philwareham wrote #307816:

Anyway, I’ve opened issues on forum and .com site repos. If Robert doesn’t respond in a couple of days with an opinion I’ll remove GA.

+1

maniqui · 2017-11-13 17:35:57

If no one ever takes a look at GA for Textpattern, then it doesn’t make any sense to have it installed. But maybe, in the future, someone else (dev team or not) steps in and wants to take a peek?

It would be useful to have someone (familiar with GA) to take a look at GA data once in a while (twice or thrice a year) and provide some insights to devs (or even to the whole community).

philwareham · 2017-11-13 17:41:46

I can’t see what insights they would give us that we don’t already know via Webmaster Tools from Google, Yandex, Bing.

gaekwad · 2017-11-14 10:33:33

Aside: ad blocker usage is trending up and a number of them block stats like GA.

I have running battles with my clients who insist that they absolutely need GA and other stats stuff for A/B tests, metrics, reporting etc and don’t ever use them. It’s eye opening to have Ghostery running on some sites and watch 20+ trackers loading.

Even my pay-for SaaS accounts package has AdRoll running when logged in. Nothing is safe.

*adjusts tin foil hat*

bici · 2017-11-15 03:39:58

i have killed 5 GA sites from being tracked. i just don’t give a damn about that stuff anymore. It’s all FAKE data anyway ;-)

jakob · 2017-11-15 09:12:00

I can’t comment on the TXP stats, but there are times when web statistics are useful. I have a few clients who do want to know, not on an ongoing basis, but general trends.

I recently went through the GA webstats with a non-profit organisation where we have a directory of members on the site. The organisation is for a decidedly non-tech field where the homepage and publicity material is often not seen as a priority as it is far removed from the very hands-on activities of the members. The results of the most visited pages showed that the members’ directory is the second most actively used part of the site, and the results of the next-visited pages showed that the placement of feature items on the homepage were very effective at directing visiting traffic towards particular topics. Likewise, significant peaks in the visit stats coincided exactly with the organisation’s public activities.

For myself, the technology stats also showed that I can strip out a lot of the old support for IE as even in this field – where you might expect many to still have beige computers sitting in their offices with XP and old IE – visitor stats for oldIE 6-10 and XP/vista etc. now account for < 0.5 % of website visitors. Likewise, the shift from desktop towards phone and tablet visitors is very apparent in the stats, and confirms that the long-postponed responsive redesign of the homepage was a worthwhile exercise.

While this may not seem very groundbreaking to us, it provided very effective confirmation of decisions made by the organisation.

In Germany, GA is only permissible with anonymize_IP. Its biggest problem in my eyes is its complexity, the need to clear out analytics spam, and the work required to distil the relevant results from the stats.

The usefulness of data in future with increasing use of anti-tracking tools is, however, a valid point, and it’ll be interesting to see how that impacts on the reported stats.

Textpattern CMS

Textpattern CMS support forum

#1 2017-11-13 13:06:54