Comment by fizixer | Hacker News Reader

Comment by fizixer | Hacker News Reader

As an outsider of web-backends, is Google Analytics used as a web-service api for doing analytics on your own website? and now with Plausible you can install an analytics engine on your own website/webserver and use it "natively" instead of relying on a big-tech service api?

Is that what's going on? if yes, are big-tech service-api's so popular that indie web-backend engineers use them all over the place? My impression was that most of the backend stuff you do is on the webserver, and part of the work is to survey github open-source projects and install the ones you like (and the ones that are popular) on your webserver.

Wasn't the community shift from php to node.js/npm (or ruby, or python, take your pick) touted as some kind of a mini-revolution, something that'll make your life easier as a backend-dev? Turns out you guys still prefer someone else (in this case, 4-eyes big-tech) does the serious work for you?

I'm really not sure I understand the landscape.

depends on what study you look at, Google Analytics is installed on everywhere from 50% to 85% of all websites on the web. that may not be a big issue if Google wasn't also the largest advertising company on the web.

a blog post that helped "launch" Plausible earlier this year was "Why you should stop using Google Analytics on your website" https://plausible.io/blog/remove-google-analytics

Yeah but I fail to understand when that happened in the past?

Google Analytics appeared in 2005, and as far as I know as a tech person, they never marketed it aggressively.

How did we go from sometime in 2003, when analytics packages (no matter how basic) were downloaded from sourceforge or gnu or whatever and installed on your website ...

to sometime in 2015 when you're working for a small/indie tech company, your website is mostly working and you're thinking of doing analytics on your website and someone suggests to you "you should just use Google Analytics, everyone does it, it's what you do, why would you use something else or write your own" ... ???

Also if Google Analytics is so popular among web-backends, there must be other service-apis that backend-devs use without even a second thought?

i guess the whole web moved in that direction over the years. from keep it simple, self-host everything and reduce all dependencies, to use the cloud and third-party services as much as possible. just check any of the mainstream websites and see how many connections to external services they make.

even in the case of Plausible, we have this self-hosted (free as in beer and free as in speech) product and a hosted cloud (free as in speech) product, and vast majority of people prefer to use our hosted cloud version.

Makes sense. Thank you for your comments.

I think you're a bit confused by what Google Analytics is. It's not a service API, it's got nothing to do with the back-end. You put a snippet of JS on your page, and then the agency that does your SEO can log in to Google to see a dashboard of site traffic. There's no back-end involvement, and back-end developers never need to know that analytics is occurring at all.

In terms of what happened to get us here? Analytics became a marketing and BI function. Your choice of front-end analytics is going to be made by your CMO, not your CTO. I mean, your CTO can decide whatever he wants for logging & application analytics, but the CMO is also going to want an analytics suite. For a variety of reasons, this favors hosted front-end-centric JS-based solutions rather than logfiles.

The other major thing is that the industry consolidated from 2005-2010. There were like a dozen large vendors, but Omniture bought most of them and then Adobe bought Omniture. By 2015 there are basically two that anyone cares about: Google Analytics, and Adobe Analytics, and GA is free which makes it the default. In both cases, they are part of larger "suites" that package other tools, like campaign targeting and A/B testing.

The other things are used without a second thought are Firebase (and Firebase Analytics is now merging with Google Analytics), and Facebook tracking pixels.

Thanks. Very helpful information!

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