I was so excited to switch from Webtrends to Urchin and back when I still loved Google I was delighted that they bought it out and made it free. Now I wish Google had never touched them.
It is incredible how out of touch with reality GA has become. Nothing is called what it used to be, and not a single straight report with simple familiar figures. Everything is abstracted to the point of it being useless. I am pretty sure I understand what happens with the GA team today [1]
We run self-hosted Matomo for analytics. One of the bonus points, besides actual sane reports is that Matomo can see about ~40% more traffic due to being invisible to blockers while being fully GDPR compliant and providing full privacy for visitors.
After the switch to Google Analytics the heat map feature was dropped pretty quickly and it was one of the features I really enjoyed. I also think it would have been better for us in the long run to have paid for a service that let us maintain control over our data.
Oh man, what a shift moving from webtrends to urchin. Between that and following the regular "google dance" on the webmasterworld forums what a time to be alive.
egorfine|1 year ago
It is incredible how out of touch with reality GA has become. Nothing is called what it used to be, and not a single straight report with simple familiar figures. Everything is abstracted to the point of it being useless. I am pretty sure I understand what happens with the GA team today [1]
We run self-hosted Matomo for analytics. One of the bonus points, besides actual sane reports is that Matomo can see about ~40% more traffic due to being invisible to blockers while being fully GDPR compliant and providing full privacy for visitors.
[1] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/04/21/dont-let-architect...
PaulStatezny|1 year ago
Would you be willing to elaborate?
davidwinters|1 year ago
cqqxo4zV46cp|1 year ago
fellowniusmonk|1 year ago