

The Early Days of Web Analytics - alishiu
http://blog.amplitude.com/2015/06/15/the-early-days-of-web-analytics/

======
mundo
Uhh... this article is kind of awful. It consistently confuses hits with
pageviews. There's no mention of the most popular early open source (Analog)
or closed source (Webtrends) analytics tools. And how can you spend multiple
paragraphs telling the story of how GA came to be the most popular analytics
platform without mentioning that it's a freebie? GA is an add-on to Adwords,
whereas New Relic costs hundreds per month, and Webtrends/Omniture cost
thousands. And why say "New Relic is its nearest competitor..." when New Relic
doesn't even compete with GA? This article is just a shambles.

And where is sessionization? Isn't going through a logfile and associating the
hits with specific users what made the Webtrends founders rich back in the
late 1990s? Nope, it never existed, just like web data warehouses, OLAP, etc.
In this alternate reality, web analytics moved directly from "glorified hit
counters" to "event tracking".

This is not a history of web analytics, it's marketing material for Amplitude,
whoever they are. I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that they're an
analytics vendor and that event tracking is one of their main features.

------
degenerate
I'm using Analytics and occasionally tried other products that promised real-
time data before Google caught up to them, but nothing stood out. I also
trialed MouseFlow and ClickTale thinking that mouse tracking and watching
individual users navigate my site was the way of the future... but the time
required to setup each testing scenario, wait a few hours, and then watch a
handful of users clumsily click around my site didnt' end up being useful
either.

So what good event-driven tracking apps are out there right now? GA is really
too big and cumbersome to setup properly, and it seems nobody else makes it
super easy either.

~~~
exelius
This is easy enough to do with GA if you use custom events. You don't even
really need to set up much on the server side; if you fire the events at GA it
will understand them. I think the real problem is expectations: Google is just
doing statistics on big numbers, and for statistics to tell you anything, you
have to have enough observations.

The real problem is that you need a critical mass of customers -- millions of
uniques per month -- before this type of workflow tells you anything
meaningful. And even then, diminishing returns set in pretty quickly: 80% of
your legitimate users probably fit into 3 or 4 usage profiles that will stand
out, so to identify the 'long tail' traits and market to them individually
requires exponentially more users.

Basically, the type of deep analytics and tracking Google and others promote
are only available to customers with enough data to tease them out. This
generally is enough to exclude small businesses. You can get some basic stats
about your users, but probably nothing you didn't know already. It can help
you highlight glaring problems in your workflow (like a broken checkout page)
but it's not going to give you magic insight.

Nobody makes it super easy because it's just a hard problem :)

~~~
crdb
Scale is a function of what you track, though. Taking e-commerce as an
example: most people will track conversion rate (product purchases / product
page views); most also track cart add rate, checkout rate, etc. But much fewer
will track product _impressions_ \- that is, the event where a search returns
the product in its results, or a category displays it in its catalog, and the
user "eyeballs" it.

You get, rule of thumb, perhaps 1 conversion for 10 views; you also get 1 view
for 10 impressions. So, tracking impressions (and therefore click-through-
rate) decuples the amount of data you're tracking, and allows you to draw
conclusions much faster than by waiting for the (admittedly, stronger) signal
of conversion rate to tell you what you want to know about your product.

The real problems with Google are the ridiculous fees (150k USD/year for
Premium? and I don't even get to talk to an actual Google employee if I have
issues, have to go through reseller?) and the fact that there is a lot of
"secret sauce" that you do not see and that isn't, or is sparsely documented
(compare Google's last click attribution to what you're actually seeing appear
on your raw data as the last click, for a simple example). Google wants you to
use their superior insights; whether or not they are superior, I prefer having
access to the full picture and draw my own conclusions.

------
DatBear
Hah, we just decommissioned a server that had an on-premises urchin
installation on it a couple weeks ago.
[http://i.imgur.com/481dUsZ.png](http://i.imgur.com/481dUsZ.png) is what the
home page looked like right before it left us.

