Heisenberg

I wrote about Google Analytics yesterday. As usual, I syndicated the post to Ev’s blog, and I got an interesting response over there. Kelly Burgett set me straight on some of the finer details of how goals work, and finished with this thought:

You mention “delivering a performant, accessible, responsive, scalable website isn’t enough” as if it should be, and I have to disagree. It’s not enough for a business to simply have a great website if you are unable to understand performance of channel marketing, track user demographics and behavior on-site, and optimize your site/brand based on that data. I’ve seen a lot of ugly sites who have done exceptionally well in terms of ROI, simply because they are getting the data they need from the site in order make better business decisions. If your site cannot do that (ie. through data collection, often third party scripts), then your beautifully-designed site can only take you so far.

That makes an excellent case for having analytics. But that’s not necessarily the same as having Google analytics, or even JavaScript-driven analytics at all.

By far the most useful information you get from analytics is around where people have come from, where did they go next, and what kind of device are they using. None of that information requires JavaScript. It’s all available from your server logs.

I don’t want to come across all old-man-yell-at-cloud here, but I’m trying to remember at what point self-hosted software for analysing your log traffic became not good enough.

Here’s the thing: logging on the server has no effect on the user experience. It’s basically free, in terms of performance. Logging via JavaScript, by its very nature, has some cost. Even if its negligible, that’s one more request, and that’s one more bit of processing for the CPU.

All of the data that you can only get via JavaScript (in-page actions, heat maps, etc.) are, in my experience, better handled by dedicated software. To me, that kind of more precise data feels different to analytics in the sense of funnels, conversions, goals and all that stuff.

So in order to get more fine-grained data to analyse, our analytics software has now doubled down on a technology — JavaScript — that has an impact on the end user, where previously the act of observation could be done at a distance.

There are also blind spots that come with JavaScript-based tracking. According to Google Analytics, 0% of your customers don’t have JavaScript. That’s not necessarily true, but there’s literally no way for Google Analytics — which relies on JavaScript — to even do its job in the absence of JavaScript. That can lead to a dangerous situation where you might be led to think that 100% of your potential customers are getting by, when actually a proportion might be struggling, but you’ll never find out about it.

Related: according to Google Analytics, 0% of your customers are using ad-blockers that block requests to Google’s servers. Again, that’s not necessarily a true fact.

So I completely agree than analytics are a good thing to have for your business. But it does not follow that Google Analytics is a good thing for your business. Other options are available.

I feel like the assumption that “analytics = Google Analytics” is like the slippery slope in reverse. If we’re all agreed that analytics are important, then aren’t we also all agreed that JavaScript-based tracking is important?

In a word, no.

This reminds me of the arguments made in favour of intrusive, bloated advertising scripts. All of the arguments focus on the need for advertising — to stay in business, to pay the writers — which are all great reasons for advertising, but have nothing to do with JavaScript, which is at the root of the problem. Everyone I know who uses an ad-blocker — including me — doesn’t use it to stop seeing adverts, but to stop the performance of the page being degraded (and to avoid being tracked across domains).

So let’s not confuse the means with the ends. If you need to have advertising, that doesn’t mean you need to have horribly bloated JavaScript-based advertising. If you need analytics, that doesn’t mean you need an analytics script on your front end.

This was originally posted on my own site.