Hacker News Reader

Comment by jefftk | Hacker News Reader

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)

View on HN

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.

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.

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.

They could... Google it.

Not everyone has the time, desire, inclination, or capability to articulate the questions required to chart out the "analytics package" space.

Nor does everyone have the luxury of hiring a PM to do it for them.

If the marketer doesn’t have the time, desire, or inclination to work this out I’m not sure it is a problem for anyone but the marketer.

It's very unlikely that swapping Google Analytics for an alternative will be an acceptable solution to a performance issue. Clients like GA. It's "industry standard", it plays well with other marketing tools, and people know it. Performance is understood to be important but not at the expense of understanding what users are doing. Website owners will readily drop a bit of perf in order to keep GA.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com