A 12-step upgrade procedure is insane [1] [2]. It's like they <i>want</i> people to ditch their product. I have an extremely basic setup that took 5 minutes to start using. Why is this not a one-click upgrade?<p>[1] <a href="https://i.imgur.com/uZmfUfJ.png" rel="nofollow">https://i.imgur.com/uZmfUfJ.png</a><p>[2] <a href="https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/10759417" rel="nofollow">https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/10759417</a>
I am a data analyst with 10+ years of experience. I have setup uncountable GA1 - GA3 implementations, eTracker, Matomo, Adobe Analytics from s_code to Appmeasurement and via Adobe Launch, Snowplow and quite a few others.<p>I also have setup three implementations of Firebase and GA4. I can't for the love of god use this tool. It is in my eyes nothing but a mechanism for upselling GCE (esp. Big Query).<p>Answering basic management and marketing questions about marketing goals (or other conversion goals reached) is a PITA. Building basic dashboards with Google Data Studio also.<p>Taken together with the EU data privacy regulators regarding GA I nowadays just recommend clients to just ignore GA. Even if the USP is "but I can see my advertising numbers in there as well".<p>Do they want to push people away from using their product?
Naive question. Sorry. I don’t do web app cloud micro service analytics sort of things.<p>I’m used to quite a bit of verbiage in HN posts about Google ruining the internet with commercialization and ads and analytics and that sort of thing.<p>But the comments here of which I’m a naive observer I guess, seem to be of a “how dare Google change what is an essential part of our tools!”<p>Is this just a case of different HN subcultures taking time to post to each other? Or is it just my lack of understanding of the nuances of which part of modern web apps is good and/or evil?
I stopped using Google Analytics when I realized that it doesn't produce any useful actionable data for me. It's just a feel-good thingy, where I watch the page view numbers and go "oooh".<p>Those page view numbers do have a relationship to my business. But it's like measuring traffic on a highway when your store is next to it. The numbers will be somewhat related, but not actionable in any way.<p>I guess it makes sense if you get paid by page views (ad-supported sites?). But I have a B2B SaaS and I get paid by subscriptions. I rarely care about any of the metrics that GA shows, and I found that many of them are bogus anyway. I could probably wrestle GA into measuring what I need, but why bother, there are easier ways to handle that.<p>A nice side benefit is that I'm not participating in the global people-tracking business and I'm not subjecting my users/customers to that.
> "all while prioritizing user privacy".<p>The way Google mentions "privacy" in the first sentence reminds me of a mining company mentioning "the environment" in the first sentence of their plan to dig a gigantic hole somewhere.<p>A related note: I have concerns with Google's recent nagging of website owners to upload user data to Google, under the banner of "enhanced conversions".<p>The idea is that Google takes the user data and matches with <i>their</i> user accounts. So a user logged into Google who clicks an ad, can be tracked across devices without the need for third party cookies.<p>They expect the upload to happen on the conversion page - such as the thanks page on a website contact form. To me it feels like Google are trying to convince business owners that to be "leaders in your industry" they must help Google fill the void created by third party cookie banning.<p>Site owners are now pushed to upload every contact form submission to Google for the purpose of what is effectively next-gen third party tracking. It bothers me how blatant and obnoxious the spin is around such pressure on businesses to share their customer data with Google, when it wasn't shared before for the purpose of tracking. "Don't worry, it's hashed data" is not good enough, and not the point.
Most interesting part about this for me is the name. I was never aware of there being a GA 3. It seems like every product went from numbered versions to continuous updates like when windows went to 10 and declared there would be no more numbered versions. But now the trend seems to be reversing and everyone wants that yearly numbered announcement with the hype that comes along with it. I wonder if we will start seeing more consumer software and online services hold back features to go in one big release rather than letting them drip out as they are done.
GA4 feels like a huge step backwards. Tons of functionality in the previous version is missing or replaced with smart “insights” (where you have to try to describe your query in plain text, which it will always get wrong). A good time to move on to something better.
I wonder if Google realized that Analytics has become unfathomably complex for non-power users and wants a clean break now.<p>I run a side business[1] that is lucky to not be dependent on search ads. We started using GA 10-ish years ago because it was free and took almost no effort to set up. But over the years it just got more and more complicated to use, to the point where it got hard to act on the results.<p>Last year, I switched to Plausible[2] for data protection reasons. The unexpected side effect was that I suddenly understand every single metric in my analytics tool. As a result, I use it a lot more for actual decision-making.<p>[1] <a href="https://push-conference.com" rel="nofollow">https://push-conference.com</a><p>[2] <a href="https://plausible.io" rel="nofollow">https://plausible.io</a><p>edit: typos
I suspect this is due to slow adoption. The majority of SaaS reporting tools don’t currently have integrations for GA4 last I checked (admittedly been awhile). The particular one I had in mind had it coming in the next year or so, but the lack of a clear date seemed to indicate to me it wasn’t a priority because, well, it wasn’t driving their bottom line. This should grease the wheels.<p>We’ve been creating and including both with gtag(‘config’, ‘ID’) lines for some time now in anticipation of something like this.
This seems kind of insane, so many people are using the old version of Google Analytics and have absolutely no compelling reason to upgrade other than Google forcing them. And it seems GA4 is fairly different in some ways, this is going to be a ton of churn for a ton of people. I guess Google thinks there really is no alternative, they can just force people to do extra work for no gain and they'll grumble and accept it?
Nothing else in the Analytics space gives the right integration between your SEO and PPC. So for example, if I wanted to create an Analytics -based custom PPC audience based on a number of factors such as device, pages visited, events triggered and location (layered) directly into my AdWords campaigns, I'm going to have to use GA. And if I want to use Optimize for my PPC campaigns, then I'm going to have to still use GA. It's all out of the box and it's all "free", compared with the multiple vendors solutions I'd need to make the same scenario work in order to drive sales from web visitors. That's the google lock in right there. Meh.
I honestly don't give a fsck about the new version or why it needs to be a breaking change.<p>All I hear is:<p>> We will begin sunsetting Universal Analytics — the previous generation of Analytics — next year. All standard Universal Analytics properties will stop processing new hits on July 1, 2023<p>Great, plenty of time to replace GA with another analytics solution.
I hate everything about GA4. It's a totally counter intuitive, massively over complex interface. Things that were easy in the old version are now either insanely hard or simply missing.<p>I'm moving my clients to Matomo and they're loving it.
Personal opinion, Google is <i>catastrophically</i> shooting themselves in the foot here, and could lose their market dominance.<p>GA's second-biggest moat (behind being free) is its existing install base. It's already in place on approximately every website on the Internet. And no one wants to <i>change</i> analytics vendors, because that breaks history, which is a no-no. You want to know if your visits are up/down vs last month or last year, you literally cannot answer that unless you are using the same tool this years as you were last year.<p>By forcing a migration to a non-compatible version, Google loses that big advantage. If you're going to lose that <i>anyways</i>, then there's less of a reason to stick with GA. Now you're <i>forcing</i> people to gut-and-replace their existing data collection process, what incentive is there for people to stick with Google? One of the biggest reasons to stay with GA was just killed.<p>The timing is also exceptionally atrocious. Google is, again, forcing people to expend the effort to rebuild their analytics implementations from scratch. Meanwhile court rulings are coming down on a monthly basis enumerating different ways in which Google Analytics violates GDPR. A lot of companies might just brush off these rulings by simply doing nothing, but now they're being forced to actively invest time and effort into Google Analytics. A lot of them are going to be doing an evaluation against privacy-conscious competitors that simply would not have happened if Google wasn't kicking people of their existing platform.<p>The GA4 data model is also completely different from the GA Universal data model, which is an impediment to their fourth-biggest moat, the fact that every piece of BI software in the universe has a GA plug-in. Many of those plug-ins work despite not being actively maintained since 2015; the GA4 ecosystem is smaller and will take some time to recover.<p>(The third-biggest moat is Google Ads integration. I suspect that Google imagines this to be bigger than it really is in practice.)
I have <a href="https://s.mkws.sh/" rel="nofollow">https://s.mkws.sh/</a> as my analytics solution, sh, awk, httpd logs and cron.
Tiny-er dashboards!<p>More confusing controls and useless new marketing terms!<p>Even more useless dat ranges!<p>It's all here!! The tool you don't use, but we do!<p>Looking forward to not using it. :I
As a hobbyist, this bums me out; I no longer will have the data from the day my humble blog made the front page of HN. Wish there was a way to migrate UA data to GA4, but from a bit of digging that doesn't seem possible.
Most of my users are blocking GA these days. I don't put it on new sites anymore. Crawlers from a certain country do execute GA js. This causes stats to vary wildly.<p>Not sure if it will be worth my time to go back and remove the old tags from those sites. Cannot see a reason to upgrade.<p>It was nice to know, but there are more important metrics.<p>The multivariate testing suite was fun at one time. However it isn't as useful when your core users are all blocking it.
Yes, Google finally realized that everyone hated looking at 'pageviews', but loves looking for an event called 'page_view'. Much easier to understand!<p>Honestly though, for a huge segment of their users this hides/obscures the number one metric they look for. I understand that with SPA"s and stuff things are much more event driven, but they're absolutely going to lose some users over this.
I had dozens of (client) websites that ran GA, but then Google, the internet behemoth with some of the greatest engineers in the world, couldn't even figure out how to stop spam from polluting their control panel.<p>It became useless to me and I haven't used it in at least five years.<p>If there's anyone here who still uses GA, can you tell me if they ever solved the problem of referrer spam?
Privacy TLDR;<p>Google Analytics 4 has a few changes that should improve their privacy aspects:<p>IP Anonymization: not GDPR proof<p>Server location: not changeable<p>Use of Cookie Banner: still needed<p>Deleting Individual User Data: improvement<p>Limited Data Storage: slight improvement<p>In short, they say they fix a lot of privacy issues, but they don't really address the real issues like the use of IP addresses and the location of your data. [1]<p>Disclosure: I'm the founder of Simple Analytics. [2]<p>[1] <a href="https://blog.simpleanalytics.com/google-to-sunset-universal-analytics-in-2023" rel="nofollow">https://blog.simpleanalytics.com/google-to-sunset-universal-...</a><p>[2] <a href="https://simpleanalytics.com/" rel="nofollow">https://simpleanalytics.com/</a>
I always thought Universal Analytics was the new product and GA 4 was the old product. That's how naming usually works ... go from numbered releases to continuous rolling releases. Not until a few months ago that I realized it was the other way around.<p>Really poor product planning.
It looks like Google is finally reacting to some of the criticism [0] and changes a few things. I think it's still best to switch out your analytics or abandon it entirely if you don't rely on it. There are plenty of alternatives now [1]. GA is still a complex tool for people working with it full time.<p>[0] <a href="https://pirsch.io/blog/google-analytics-declared-illegal-by-austrian-dsb/" rel="nofollow">https://pirsch.io/blog/google-analytics-declared-illegal-by-...</a><p>[1] <a href="https://european-alternatives.eu/category/web-analytics-services" rel="nofollow">https://european-alternatives.eu/category/web-analytics-serv...</a>
Soon most of this tracking will be baked into the browser itself (as if it isn’t already).
The topics api:
<a href="https://github.com/jkarlin/topics" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/jkarlin/topics</a>
'Their upgrade path is your opportunity' to paraphrase Jeff Bezos, for any of the competing analytics offerings out there.<p>Seems like a good time to make a break from GA and do your part to reduce centralized surveillance on the web.
I see many people don't like this change, so I'm shameless plugging my self-hosted analytics platform if you want to move away from GA: <a href="https://www.uxwizz.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.uxwizz.com/</a>
It makes sense that google is attempting to adapt to new laws but they do it so slowly that it’s quite concerning for the future. Also the market has become much more competitive and there is plenty of alternatives to chose from at very fair prices.
Well shoot.<p>Any way to export historical, basic data like what you'd find in the "Audience > Overview" tab?<p>I should have expected this from Google, but damn, losing years and years of historical data is going to really hurt.
Seems like an (short term) opportunity for someone to build a product that pulls existing Google Analytics data via their API and stores it in a database to allow for viewing historical analytics data.
Are there any competitors out there that can import historical data from Google Analytics? I've not checked, can you even export your historical data from GA?
Google Analytics 4 is a web analytics service that allows you to track traffic and engagement on your websites and apps. This documentation contains implementation instructions and reference materials aimed at developers.