
Show HN: GA Insights – Never Log into Google Analytics Again - patrickmccurley
Hey HN!<p>We are Patrick &amp; Chris, bootstrapped co-founders of GA Insights (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ga-insights.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ga-insights.com</a>) - a simple way of getting reports and alerts for your tools inside Slack and Teams. We started as a technical tool to monitor client accounts in Slack, interfacing with Microsoft Azure insights, and then pivoted to supporting business intelligence tools like Google Analytics and Google Search Console.<p>The idea was born out of the angst that we had experienced using disparate tools to monitor our metrics, client &amp; to share information. Google Analytics has an ever-evolving interface that most developers would rather not spend a day getting lost in. We decided to take the primary use cases we had for Google Analytics and provide an engine to process, visualize, and ship to Slack or Teams. This gets us daily or weekly reports on metrics such as page speed, bounce rates, page engagement, and when the cart checkout breaks.<p>Once we started to gain some traction with clients, we extended the capacity to include other data sources like Google Search Console and Google Ads, making it simple for indie businesses and large corporations to extract the value from these reporting surfaces and send them to a channel that we use every day, like Slack or Teams. We use ML to analyze 100s of metric streams to detect anomalies in your data, and are soon expanding into providing root-cause analysis when anomalies occur.<p>Currently, we send 2.6k alerts per week and 3.2K scheduled reports into Slack, Teams &amp; Email. Slack has seen the biggest uptake followed by Teams. We run on Azure, combines NoSQL, Serverless, Redis, Warehousing, and scalable architecture to deal with bursty loads (common in report scheduling).<p>We&#x27;re launching new data sources and integrations rapidly, with Facebook, Stripe, and Zapier next on our docket.<p>Happy to answer any questions you might have.
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eli
I get why it is this way, but it'd be cool if I could hook it up to a >500k
website for cheap or free and you limit the account some other way unless I
upgrade it -- maybe only a couple of alerts or reports per month.

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patrickmccurley
Not sure what we could do here, but feel free to drop me a mail at patrick@ga-
insights.com

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shostack
Awesome. How are you solving for annotations and human-provided context to
augment this data? This is a problem space I've thought a lot about, feel free
to reach out if you want to chat.

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patrickmccurley
Sure - drop me a mail at patrick@ga-insights.com. Happy to chat.

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perlpimp
Would you be creating on premise service - ie analytics data directly from the
site? Seems many browsers now block GA and other trackers.

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ocdtrekkie
Indeed, if this product is dependent on Google Analytics it is probably a
little late: It's a matter of time before browsers are all blocking GA by
default.

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ldthorne
I don't see Chrome going anywhere for a long time, and I don't see Google
blocking its own analytics service within its own browser on its own volition.

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ocdtrekkie
Google may have a hard time continuing to explain away it's refusal to respect
user privacy as the sole browser that doesn't block GA. And if the Chrome team
continues to fight privacy initiatives, Chrome will be replaced by something
like Edge, which is compatible but also actually cares about privacy and
security (these two things are the same, if you aren't prioritizing privacy
you are not a secure browser).

Regulators will also be paying attention to this over the next few years.

I think a startup should be very aware of these risks if building off of GA.

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Shared404
I have a hard time believing Edge is any more private then Chrome, it's just a
question of who gets the data.

I'd love to be proved wrong on this though.

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ocdtrekkie
It's weird for you to believe this, because Chrome is made by an ad company
whose sole goal in existence is collecting data for ad targeting...

Many of Chrome's features are implemented in Edge by replacing Google services
with Microsoft ones. So for many things, Microsoft may be collecting similar
data (though likely not monetizing it at all).

But the key thing is that tracking prevention: It means your browser is
leaking your data around the internet _significantly less_. Not just less to
Google, but less to _almost everyone else on the Internet_. Chrome, by
refusing to implement tracking prevention, is pretty much a leaky ship with
holes in it.

Here's Edge's implementation: [https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-
edge/web-platform...](https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/web-
platform/tracking-prevention)

Here's Firefox's implementation: [https://support.mozilla.org/en-
US/kb/enhanced-tracking-prote...](https://support.mozilla.org/en-
US/kb/enhanced-tracking-protection-firefox-desktop)

Here's Safari's implementation: [https://webkit.org/blog/7675/intelligent-
tracking-prevention...](https://webkit.org/blog/7675/intelligent-tracking-
prevention/)

Chrome has nothing. Google paid some of their staff to write a FUD piece about
how preventing tracking was a privacy risk somehow.

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Shared404
All valid points. Much appreciated.

I was coming from a position of "Why would MS remove anything instead of
redirecting it to themselves", but failed to consider that they would be
adding things themselves to prevent other tracking.

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ocdtrekkie
And don't get me wrong, I agree Microsoft is no saint on data collection. I
use Firefox and encourage others to do so. But I'd recommend Edge over Chrome
because I consider tracking prevention so necessary for safe browsing.

Microsoft's data collection and use seems primarily to be focused on telemetry
for product improvement. They obviously do it in Edge too. I find it less
malicious than ad targeting, but I'm strongly opposed to mandatory telemetry.
And I think telemetry-driven development is a mistake that should be avoided.
It dehumanizes software support and still provides incomplete information,
while also violating the privacy of your users.

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thrownaway954
i just got to say... i love reading the view source code of websites and
finding SO references :) What would we do without SO?

//[https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1634748/how-can-i-
delete...](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1634748/how-can-i-delete-a-
query-string-parameter-in-javascript)

~~~
NTroy
You're absolutely right! But hey, I appreciate that at least they cite their
sources!

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aaln
This looks really useful, especially for small companies who need simplified
metrics monitoring out of google analytics.

Have you considered adding a hobbyist plan or 1 month trial for startups or
small projects to try before buying?

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jacobwg
Not affiliated with the OP, but at the bottom of the homepage it says:

 _Free Tier Available. Free plan for under 2.5K visitors, or trial us with no
credit card needed_

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t0mmyb0y
Have fun with this until google makes it impossible to use.

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pavelmark
I don't follow. What do you expect would happen? Change to the GA API? Or they
try to shut it down b/c "GA" in the name.

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wizzwizz4
Does this work for anything other than Google Analytics?

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patrickmccurley
Right now we also support Google Search console and Google Ads. Our vNext will
include much more, such as Facebook, Segment, Zapier and other data sources.

~~~
wizzwizz4
Anything on this list? [https://developers.reverseeagle.org/replace/google-
analytics...](https://developers.reverseeagle.org/replace/google-analytics/)

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lowdose
Are you running on StarThinker from Google?

This shiny piece of software engineering at their Github account is currently
commoditizing the infrastructure F500 companies would outsource to SaaS and
agencies because they didn't do tech.

Last year more than half of the big companies out of Europe started moving to
a brand new in-house data driven marketing team. Vodafone and Adidas are
already fully operational.

It's written in Python and it seems to operate like Airflow with DAG recipes
but simpler without coding.

Plug & play realtime dash-boarding in Data Studio that can visualize a
ridiculous amount customization of all the data Google services produces.

[https://datastudio.google.com/gallery?category=marketing](https://datastudio.google.com/gallery?category=marketing)

StarThinker sends out custom reporting via email of all Google ads services
which even has a custom DAG rate limiter recipe named floodlight.

StarThinker supports currently more API's out of the box than you, even
Smartsheets API has a custom recipe.

You can spin up a cluster with working UI in the cloud within 8 minutes.

[https://google.github.io/starthinker/](https://google.github.io/starthinker/)

