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Yeah, it was another one of those trojan horse programs. Offer something incredibly useful to website owners; something so compelling that they literally can't say no. An oh, it just happens to track the activity of every web user anywhere in the world.

The alternative offerings at the time were fairly awful compared to what google released.

I also believe (no proof though!) that you don’t need all that micro detail about your users and it is a distraction for a business.

A rough “how many came” is useful. At least to diagnose if the site had problems. Just talk to people and make your thing good!

The reason we built Scale8.com - Time to replace Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager :)

I'm still a fan of Matomo. Very powerful, easy to self-host and you get full control over your data. Never tried their managed services though.