I don't get it - it is a nice sentiment, but the crux of the argument seems to "go with your gut." The reason web analytics has been so popular is that you can actually improve your product significantly without as much subjectivity. Before web analytics, going with your gut was the only option. It turns out, threading events through a funnel that show you lost 90% of your users because your button doesn't show up on certain screen sizes is a meaningful capability. The question from there is how far do you go with it, but I don't think it makes any sense to both reject it and go on to propose such a fuzzy, underdefined alternative as "you'll gain intuition about if you're making connections."

Having built a number of apps, I don't know how to gain such intution once the userbase becomes too large to interact with directly enough to grok it. It's very easy to be fooled by a vocal minority of people who complain about your app sucking when the majority are getting value from it. Without data and analytics, it's easy to be pushed around by your most vocal users, because your gut is saying you should listen to them. Sometimes you should, sometimes you shouldn't, but the difference between the two can often be determined by looking at the data to get a bigger, less biased picture of what is actually going on with your app.

I build websites for small business, and since the beginning have used Google Analytics. What used to be a valuable tool that I would eagerly tell my clients to utilize, has now become an overly complex nightmare I loathe to install and rarely recommend to my clients. I recently had a client ask to use StatCounter.com (my reaction: "they're still around?!?") and it was refreshingly simple, much like the original Google Analytics.

I'm sure the new GA is super powerful, but most people just want to see how many "hits" they got, what content is most popular, and where the visitors came from. Google would do well with a simplified Analytics service just for small business.

Once you go down the optimization route, if your Google Analytics isn't super valuable it's an easy bloat to eliminate.

Whatever it is about, I refused to read because of this silly scrolling/paginating

Thanks for all the constructive criticism on the pagination. It's an experiment I'm playing around with on my personal site (which is what they're for right?). Definitely sounds like I should have tested it on a few more devices, lol. Will work on a more readable view.

In the meantime, a few helpers:

- Scrolling "past" the end of the page will move to the next page.

- Left arrow, Right arrow will nav back and forward.

- On mobile, swiping will do the same.

- Space and enter key will nav to the next page.

Articles like this always seem to miss the ways that the big analytics platforms are used in real life by marketing and product teams. If all you are doing is measuring page hits, then Google Analytics is overkill and you should be using one of the privacy focused alternatives. However, if you care about connecting your marketing tactics to larger strategic goals and measuring the impact of your work, a properly configured analytics stack is still really important.

I really like https://www.portent.com/onetrick/ for anyone looking for an intro to how analytics enhances marketing work.

Interesting thesis. When used as intended, web analytics should be only one input to an overall strategy -- not the sole driver for all decisions. But I can see how an organization with KPI's tied to web analytics will lose objectivity -- especially when someone's job performance is tied to the analytics. It's a slippery slope.

I love this quote at the end: "Caring about quality is the heart of craftsmanship. Until you're hooked into those outcomes, micro-optimizing the individual parts is pointless."

Perhaps, as we move towards a web dominated by AI agents, quality will supersede metrics.

I'm not even sure what I just read. I thought it was going to explain why they don't use any analytics anymore and all I got as a 10,000 foot answer that could be summarized as, "Well, because!"

I don't use analytics on any of my services simply because I don't like analytics and people tracking me, so why would I do it to others?

Does it mean I don't track my business metrics? No. I still measure general conversion rates from sign up to payers. I measure things like sign ups per-month. You don't need analytics to track that. Basic metrics combined with a "CHANGELOG" file with dates/releases/fixes is plenty for my solo business. Want to know what I did in January to spike sign ups or more payers? Look at my change log.

This is one of the most obnoxious websites I've ever seen. Why did they need to try to reinvent scrolling instead of just making their point?

I totally thought this was going to be a different article on phantom clicks or botnet visitors.

Been thinking about that case lately, and it makes a much better argument for me in terms of analytics.

I realized that from my own perspective as a private citizen, I'm not sure if there's any way to prove that Google and Facebook are not falsifying my clicks. I face such an information disparity in bargaining. I literally depend on the company for the tools to monitor the company. "How many people downloaded my app? Arbitrary."

Its a bit like trying to win against the NSA inside America, except they can already listen to every phone line (still finding stuff, yet another NSA leak today).

It's just too easily Machiavellian. "We've got so many new user signups, and they all love your videos...post more content like that. All the rest of you are failures, because we can just bury your content and you'll never know."

This sounds more like a case for using analytics intentionally, rather than abandoning it. Which is great! We should do more things intentionally.

One of the reasons I wrote a Perl script to analyse my access logs was to find discussions of my content that I can learn from and participate in. Hard to do that without some sort of analytics!

I agree with the central point, that web analytics lacks rigor. But I don't think it's wholly true that the problem is that our own motivations cause our analysis to lack objectivity. I think the other reason the author gives is the really key one: analytics data tantalises us with the idea that it may be coherent, complete and realistic; in fact it is wildly diffuse and represents only a tiny slice of the lived experience of users.

I wrote a post on a similar topic this week. https://mechanicalsurvival.com/blog/failing-to-visualise-web...

What a godawful page design. Who thought it was a good idea to break and article into pieces you have to swipe horizontally to scroll between and then also scroll vertically to see each page?

Perhaps we shouldn't be taking advice on how to build better websites from an absolute garbage of a website from a usability perspective.

If you don't have any analytics, then how do you know your audience size? Is it 10 people per month? 1000 people? 1,000,000 people?

No offense but I can't accept "it doesn't matter."

Yeah, I don't know. I don't like ads and tracking either, but this post just seems to argue to throw them away without any kind of replacement.

I can kinda agree with the section describing all the problems with tracking, but there is not really an alternative approach presented.

The last paragraphs through in lots of buzzwords and lofty ambitions ("holistic approach") but don't give any indication how to realize those except for "go by your feelings".

I consider myself a good developer with useful debugging skills. I often "went by my feelings" when trying to find the root cause of a bug - however, to be able to do that, I need some information about the program and usually some way to interact and test hypotheses. If I've gathered enough information like this, then I can use experience to make educated guesses about what is going wrong.

Likewise, in the "real world", we always have a minimum of observable feedback that helps us judge our own actions: How people react to what we do, their body language, etc.

This is true both for individuals and for businesses: If you run a small corner store, you'll also be able to get a rough measure of success of your store just by watching how many people make come in and how many it to the counter.

In contrast, on the internet, there is, by default, no feedback at all - if you make a website and upload it to a server somewhere, it's more like running a radio station: Talking to the void, not knowing if hapf the city is listening, or only a handful or no one at all

So in order to get any information about whether what you are doing makes any sense, you need feedback.

I don't think intrusive tracking and surveillance is the only way to get feedback though. I think very basic analytics, such as counting the page hits, referral and "user journey" throughout your site are ok - those aren't very different from counting customers in a physical store.

For more detailed information, I think there should be more approaches to gather active feedback - i.e. give users a way to leave a message, point out issues they see themselves, etc.

It used to be hard to analyse this kind of written feedback at scale, but maybe LLMs could help with that in the future.

Uhh it's a messed up site. I think they need some analytics lol.

That said I feel like so much of analytics this day and age are measuring what we want instead of accurately measuring. In the mess of data we generating conforms already to an existing belief. Everywhere I've worked a product guy or a ux person has an idea and makes use of analytics to prove their point and for some reason their point is always proven... I think analytics are like damned statistics.

When google analytics ended for the version I was using I switched it off from my 21m pageviews per month web site. I now only focus on the metrics that count for me and my business, and I already have that data in my database.

Beyond that, Cloudflare gives me some extra data, which I really don't need but is fun to marvel at from time to time.

Agree. I turned off any analytics and all 3rd party tracking. Found this you can avoid cookie banner.

I only track internal product success metrics and occasionally gather feedback from phone support. You get totally better perspective talking to users.

Analyzing data is limited because you don’t the user mind when is looking for something or clicking.

For those on mobile: scroll right (that is, swipe left) to read the article.

Actual title should be "A case against scroll hijacking."

This site needs analytics if not just to see how much trouble (abandonment) the page scrolling issues cause.

> I have a theory about why businesses lose their soul as they grow.

sighs deeply

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/Cap...

For my no-code website package I built a simple non-tracking analytics tool (I'd rather call it 'visitor stats') and I definitely like to see what language my visitors use on their machine (guesswork for where they might come from), what screen size they have (on all my sites it's steadily more mobile than desktop, which is to be expected nowadays but was an eye-opener for me when I got back as a webdev a couple of years ago), what referring sites they come from and which pages are most visited.

For me personally, the visitor stats of my own websites are a little bit as 'likes' on social media (nice to have for a general idea about my content being liked), but then without big tech in between.

Such a neat website.

Retvrn to grepping access.log

Can't scroll or read the article from my phone...