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Comment by system16 | Hacker News Reader

I've had so many clients insist that Google Analytics is absolutely necessary for their site or app since they need the to know as much as possible about who is visiting.

In most cases these same clients never even look at the analytics as the dashboard is too confusing and generating reports too cumbersome.

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I can confirm that they did not use any of the data collected.

Can you elaborate on this? It's a patient portal. The patient is logged in, so you know who's visiting. They're visiting pages on your site tied to their own accounts, so you know as much as you can about what they're doing. Why do they need Google involved on this? I don't even understand the concept the clients are trying to convey. It's like someone saying, "I need to go to the store to get milk," but you open their refrigerator and it's full of gallon jugs of milk. What am I not understanding?

IP/location, device used to access, browser used, time spent on the site, other demographics and interests data that may not be part of their user profile but is available thanks to Google tracking cookies, etc.

Most (all?) of which could be developed on their own of course, but that costs more than a one liner to set up Google Analytics.

And again, none of this info was ever actually used. They just felt very strongly that they needed it to better understand their users and improve the experience at some far off future date.

Isn’t matomo open source?

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