Serious question: what is the value of web analytics for people?
I run a SaaS business and I dropped Google Analytics a long, long time ago. Primarily because of the tracking, but also because I really couldn't see the value of the data.
In the old days, you could at least use the "Referer" (sic) header to know where people came from and what they searched for. But that is long gone, and the only source of that data is Google/Bing search console.
Page visits are a vanity metric: they tell me nothing about my business. The only thing that actually matters for a SaaS are signups and MRR. Measuring your business by page views is like measuring the business performance of a Walmart by counting cars on the freeway nearby. Yes, the numbers are somewhat related, but you can't draw any conclusions.
I made it a point not to include any third-party JavaScript on my site, but even if I were to make an exception for these analytics, I can't really see the point, unless you are running an ad-driven site where pageviews are king.
This seems contrarian just for contrarian sake, given how much literature there is about this, and the fact that it's almost self evident. Tracking impact of your changes, seeing if your users are getting lost after changing something, understanding where they spend the most time, etc.
Say for example, if all your users start spending 30% more time in your reset password page after you pushed out some changes. How would you know? What could be causes of that? Could something be broken with the login? Apply this to everything.
Not having analytics is literally not caring about what they do in your product, so you're either never changing the product and 100% confident it'll always work, or you're probably giving them a worse experience than you could.
How you do this tracking is another story, but there's ethical ways to do it.
> Tracking impact of your changes, seeing if your users are getting lost after changing something [...]
The change of adding obnoxious tracking of course accounts for some user loss itself, which it cannot measure.
On some of those "modern" websites, that show me a whitescreen without JS, I check my uBlockOrigin and see the domain of that website and some Google shit? Tab closed. No thank you, I will go elsewhere.
normal people will not see the tracking. It's when laws force the cookie banners that it starts to become an item in people's minds, because that cookie banner is annoying.
Laws don't force the cookie banners, laws force requiring consent for personalised tracking. Banners as we know them are malicious compliance. There's a difference.
I'm a bit confused. You're claiming what I'm saying is false, but you're just referring to someone advising something as a precaution? Do you have a primary source for a legislation mandating cookie banners? (Also, is there a cookie banner on apple.com?)
There is no "disproportionate punishment" under GDPR in practice, unless you're doing something egregious, and even then (see Facebook). I'm very familiar with the UK regulator, they publish their enforcement actions [1]. I'm not aware of a single case of a cautionary letter, much less "disproportionate punishment", that they sent over a cookie banner on its own. Are you?
Besides, you correctly hinted at the incentive structure. Your lawyer might advise you to slap a cookie banner just because because they have zero incentive not to, they don't care about your users' experience. You might care though. Personally I consulted multiple external DPOs and lawyers, as well as primary sources, before forming my opinion.
I take my legal advice from lawyers, not the internet. They are the ones defending us in court if need come.
Their position was simple: my team uses 3rd party analytics tools (no ads or anything) so IPs will be passed and cookies will be stored. We don’t control them, we don’t know what kind, if they can be considered personal info or not (GDPR is intentionally vague - classic bad law). So we need to be extra careful since our regulator is not a sane one like the UK’s. Thus: follow the common practice - cookie banner. End of story.
> We don’t control them, we don’t know what kind, if they can be considered personal info or not
If I were you, I'd consider changing my lawyers. This is explicitly forbidden by GDPR (art 28), you have to know what your contracted data processors are doing, and you have to have processes in place to assure data subjects rights (eg remove their data from your contracted third parties on request). Cookie banners have nothing to do with this, and you're in breach of GDPR cookie banner or not. If your lawyers didn't stop you from breaching art 28 but recommended slapping a cookie banner "to be extra careful", that's a major red flag.
That “we” was the lawyer’s “we”. But their point stands: tools change and even if we understand and trust their specs and descriptions now, those change too inevitably in the future.
A bad law, an ambiguous law compels you to be defensive and take precautions. Cookie banners are one of many such defenses and everybody seems to be doing it, validating our strategy.
Thanks for your advice, but unless you are willing to defend me in court and put your money where your mouth is, with all due respect, I will consider its value to be exactly how much I paid for it.
GDPR is not in any way ambiguous there, take a look for yourself [1]. Keeping an eye on those changes is a part of your responsibilities as a data controller, it's your vendors' responsibility to inform you of any changes, and it's your responsibility to vet vendors for GDPR compliance. Again, if your lawyers didn't explain this to you (and you haven't read the law yourself), I'd be very cautious of those lawyers.
On the other hand they probably realise there's zero chance for substantial review of your GDPR practices by the regulator (much less seeing them in court), so they can recommend sticking a useless plaster (opt-in has to be specific, and how can it be specific if you collect it for unknown future changes) and keep you in the dark about more substantial requirements.
GDPR is a very good and clearly stated law, you can read through it yourself in about half an hour to an hour, a negligible time investment for such an important piece of legislation. The purported ambiguity is a psyop by people who don't want to comply.
The only way GDPR is unambiguous is if you interpret it in the strictest sense. Which we actually did - you truly have to, in a business-hostile place like the EU.
For example, consider IP addresses as PII. (This is of course not clearly specified by the GDPR). Then analytics processing them needs consent. Thus cookie popup.
Anything else is interpretation unproven in court.
Sales is driven through traffic. No traffic == no sales.
Understanding what drives traffic to your SaaS website is such an important piece of information. For instance, if you write two articles, one describing how to use your product to achieve a certain thing which customers want to do, and another article which compares your product to a competitor product and one of the two articles creates 50x more traffic than the other then you'd certainly want to know this, because then you know what articles give you the biggest return on your time writing them.
Just one of so many examples how web analytics is such an important tool to being a good sales person.
That sounds like a non-example. Why do you need invasive, personalized surveillance for that? Traffic and aggregate data are an entirely different question.
Do you not at least want to know page views ratio to sign ups so you can see conversion rate? Or do you have a different / better way to do things like testing a new design / price.
Only page view? That's not really useful and you already got that with backend logs.
With true analytics, understanding typical session helps you optimising users workflow, making sure relevant features are easily discovered at the right place.
It really helps when you want to work on user experience. You may need metrics such as LCP, INP and CLS with details per type of page, ability to drill down data and get that in real time.
ROI of such script depends on what you do with the data. If that's vanity or not even looked at, you are emitting CO2 for nothing.
>optimising users workflow, making sure relevant features are easily discovered
>work on user experience
These are qualitative improvements which are extremely unlikely to stem from quantitative metrics, especially when the sample size is not significant (which it is for the vast majority of pages in existence).
In around 8 years of web development, mostly focused on consulting and focusing on ecommerce, I've never seen a net gain from using analytics on a site. If the end goal is to produce data for the sake of data, well sure that will work. Rarely does anyone analyze the data though, and I've never seen anyone dig into the validity of the data and ensure that Google Analytics is in fact accurate and reliable for them.
One of the most disappointing client experiences I had was after building a custom shop for a company that was heavily focused on graphic art. We optimized the hell out of their site, getting performance scores of 97+ when every page was image heavy and included a product grid designed for a masonry grid look similar to Pinterest.
A few days before launch they asked us to add their Google Pixel script. The next day they had included 7 or 8 different third party scripts and blown performance scores into the mid 50s. Its their site and they can do what they want with it, but I sure could have saved a lot of dev time if performance didn't matter at all.
Page visits tell you have many people you get. If you then use how many sign ups you get then you have a conversion rate. That’s an important figure. Page visits can also tell you if your marketing efforts have worked. Imagine doing all the marketing work and not knowing if it did anything.
OP clearly stated that signups and MRR are the really important figures for SaaS. Not incidentally, those two metrics also tell you if your marketing efforts are working.
> Not incidentally, those two metrics also tell you if your marketing efforts are working.
No, they don't. They don't tell you if visits are up, if more people heard of you or anything. They just tell you that x number of people signed up. We can guess that marketing is going better but maybe it's the time of year where more people need the service. If signups go down, maybe you just had downtime or something on your page was broken.
If you look at any number in isolation you're never going to get the full picture.
And your MRR can go up without any marketing. You can just do sales.
> No, they don't. They don't tell you if visits are up, if more people heard of you or anything. They just tell you that x number of people signed up.
In my experience, it's extremely cheap and easy to get a load of fake page impressions from bots, or to buy your US-only company loads of pageviews from low-cost-of-living countries, or to expand the top of your sales funnel with weak prospects who'll never convert to sales.
Seems to me only a fool would pat themselves on the back for doing so.
What? Who is honestly doing that? Are you just making random stuff up?
Imma make my analytics look really good when they're crap because??? People buy fake followers because others can see it. No one else is looking at your analytics. And you sure as hell don't want to increase your page views since your conversion rate would tank and that's the most important metric.
>They don't tell you if visits are up, if more people heard of you or anything.
Again, if you don't care about visits, you don't care if they're up. OP said it best: signups and MRR.
People hearing about you: do you seriously believe that website analytics are suitable tools that provide reliable metrics for brand/product awareness, recognition, product-market fit, etc.?
>maybe it's the time of year where more people need the service. If signups go down, maybe you just had downtime or something on your page was broken.
Exactly, seasonality and website uptime / page functionality are important. They should be measured. At the same time, website analytics have nothing valuable to add to these measurements.
>And your MRR can go up without any marketing. You can just do sales.
I think you are circling around it: all those analytics metrics are just a means to justify the existence of useless 'marketers' who have no idea how to actually measure brand visibility, recognition, or any qualitative metric. These 'specialists' can't even fathom (heh) that business seasonality is something that shows up in a north-star metric and have no imagination or technical ability to set up a website monitoring service or a crawler, use a CRM for attribution, etc.
Oh, they did. My bad. OP a god, they can't be wrong. Oh wait, I'm saying OP is a narrowminded and missing out.
> People hearing about you: do you seriously believe that website analytics are suitable tools that provide reliable metrics for brand/product awareness, recognition, product-market fit, etc.?
Why are you bringing up PMF when it comes to analytics. BUT! Yes, can. If your users are using your shit all the time and you got analytics all over your app, you've probably got a better
But remember when I said earlier looking a single stat in isolation is bad? Ssh.
> I think you are circling around it: all those analytics metrics are just a means to justify the existence of useless 'marketers' who have no idea how to actually measure brand visibility, recognition, or any qualitative metric. These 'specialists' can't even fathom (heh) that business seasonality is something that shows up in a north-star metric and have no imagination or technical ability to set up a website monitoring service or a crawler, use a CRM for attribution, etc.
"Useless marketers"...
Anyways, you're complaining about others people useless while you're saying all data except for your north star metrics are useless.
Imo, this is arrogance and ignorance mixed together.
The value of web analytics for our organization lies in the same realm as the value of Plausible over any third party analytics: The Funnel.
We're a membership driven organization, and by "membership" I mean we rely on donations to fund our content creation (Though whether you're a member or not you have the same level of access to our content). We care about raw traffic numbers, because it relates directly to our mission of informing people. It tells us how many people we inform day to day.
So yeah we care about those raw numbers, and those numbers are difficult to get w/out javaScript r/n because caching and the terrible log retention of our hosting providers.
Raw traffic numbers only tell part of the story though. We want to know the path people take from first landing on the site to becoming a donating member so that (in theory) we can do more of the things that promote that behavior in more people. That's The Funnel, and that's where orgs like Plausible are best. They're first party tracking, so the data stays with us. Also since they're first party tracking we can track a person's overall relationship with our site, from the first news story they read to the moment they first hit our donation page 3 years into the relationship or whatever.
We should be able to do that with our GA set up, but one of the reasons I want us to shift to Plausible is for its simplicity.
You got quite a few seo garbage-level nonsense replies. In my experience, you are right, and most tracking metrics have long since become the (vanity) goal to justify the existence of these 'digital marketers'.
It's funny that they spout nonsense about better UX or how you wouldn't be able to do CRO when you'd just laid out two metrics that are actually important and don't require any website analytics to track.
I run a SaaS business and I dropped Google Analytics a long, long time ago. Primarily because of the tracking, but also because I really couldn't see the value of the data.
In the old days, you could at least use the "Referer" (sic) header to know where people came from and what they searched for. But that is long gone, and the only source of that data is Google/Bing search console.
Page visits are a vanity metric: they tell me nothing about my business. The only thing that actually matters for a SaaS are signups and MRR. Measuring your business by page views is like measuring the business performance of a Walmart by counting cars on the freeway nearby. Yes, the numbers are somewhat related, but you can't draw any conclusions.
I made it a point not to include any third-party JavaScript on my site, but even if I were to make an exception for these analytics, I can't really see the point, unless you are running an ad-driven site where pageviews are king.