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Glad I’m not alone in this. It’s rare that an interface makes me feel as dumb and frustrated as GA4
One of the more baffling choices they made was to have “today” and “yesterday” as options on the user reporting tab, even though it can take up to 48 hours to process the data and my dashboard always shows zero users for “today”. Took a while to figure out what was going on there…
Meanwhile the real-time reporting works reasonably well but is limited to a 30 minute window. Some real head-scratching choices were made here.
Exactly. I'm currently building in-house analytics (thanks Clickhouse) due to GA4 as well.
The only way I'm able to use GA4 in any way is with their search box + autocomplete, you can sometimes get a decent query result, then you click the three dots next to the tiny line chart, export as CSV and you get the data.
And for events, I think they want you to pay for BigQuery, so you only get some kind of aggregate count, which is useless. It'a too confusing to figure out if I'm wrong about that.
Agree on all points.
It's extra frustrating because GA exposes some metrics that are hard to get elsewhere like traffic sources, organic search, accurate user metrics, live geo location, etc. The only reason I keep it activated (alongside a more flexible alternative) is because it's free.
The whole UX drives me mad.
A great example of a product built without love.
This is what you get when you hire developers to make people click ads.
There has never ever been a better time to jump ship from GA. All of your historical GA data will NOT be viewable in your GA4 property. The biggest moat they had was millions of sites with multi year page view data for easy trend comparisons. The moat is now broken and they don't care. GA4 and the forced migration is being handled so bad the only explanation is they would rather nobody use GA anymore.
Yep, I just setup Umami (https://umami.is/) yesterday and added it to some properties alongside GA to see how it goes. It's a very simple interface with everything I really need for web analytics so I'm enjoying it so far. I self-hosted so if it sticks around the only thing I might look at is having a replica running for it (already put a high frequency backup in place).
People who don't think the forced change to Google Analytics 4 is a big deal may want to consider talking to actual business users of the current Google Analytics (because Google clearly isn't). GA4 is clearly aimed at data scientists. Even as someone who owns data teams it is a frustration to use. Try it for yourself, count the steps necessary to determine many page view counts a certain page is receiving in current "Universal Analytics" vs. the new GA4. That is if you can even figure out how to do it in GA4.
And it's all a shame because Google already acquired a great data science/viz tool, Looker, and that's a perfectly fine place to do data analytics/science rather than forcing it in Analytics.
Because it stores data on a user's computer, isn't using localStorage to track sessions still considered to be a "cookie" for ePrivacy Directive purposes? To that end, I don't think it's not "no cookie banner" compliant for the law as it exists today.
(Note: It _may_ be compliant for future updates of the directive coming in a couple of years, but iirc that isn't out yet.)
just to point it out, laws like GDPR do not mention "cookies" anywhere. It's regulating how you may or may not retrieve and store ANY data that makes an individual identifyable.
The whole "cookie" topic is a dark pattern mostly pushed by ad providers as a friendly word to bypass having to say "may we track everything you do?".
So if it tracks data points that can be used to clearly identify a visitor, or marks the visitor in a way that can be used to personally identify them later, it will need the users consent, regardless of where and how this is stored.
Correct, access to Terminal Device will likely require consent. Local Storage is such access.
But not every access, or cookie, will require consent.
Just from a UX perspective, the quality of Google products seems to have tanked in recent years. Android, Sheets and Maps seem like they're still best-in-class. Maybe Gmail is still ok too (I don't know, I don't use it). But almost everything else has started to feel completely unusable to me. Even Google Fi is starting to suck.
Analytics is literally the cornerstone of Google's business model. Did Google just get too complacent at the top?
Maps drives me nuts, the data is truly glorious but I hate the interface
> Google Fi
What Google Fi UI do you use on a regularly basis?
Trying to visit this URL gives: “Safari can’t open the page. The error was: The URL was blocked by a content blocker.”
This is the real obstacle to analytics.
"I tried the most used thing for A. Had an issue with it, so we built our own."
Maybe I'm just cynical, but I read this as the outcome of "What's the best way to market this thing we built in an already saturated market with a lot of well made free and open source solutions?"
GA4 is a dumpster fire. Countdown timer to the forced switch from UA to GA4 -> https://thoughtmetric.io/topics/ga4-countdown-timer
Put Request Metrics on your list to credit the post :)
I recently gave google analytics 4 a shot. I actually had the thought that I had more access to information, and my analytics were better in 1998. Its a disaster.
Because google analytics 4 sticks to the gdpr...
your analytics in 1998 did not...
The only thing keeping me from immediately jumping ship from GA is that it's free.
Can someone explain what the rationale is behind this move by google? Theoretically people working at google are fairly smart. But they are forcing a switch to a product that is an order of magnitude worse.
I wouldn’t be surprised if they lose over 50% of GA users with this. Why? Why is it good for google? I don’t get it.
GA4 has several advantages over UA to account for the evolving privacy landscape. For one, it supports user modeling in ways that are GDPR compliant, and you simply cannot count these users in UA. Apple and the leading browsers have made changes with cookies that have necessitated product changes, but not using fingerprinting as suggested elsewhere.
GA4 also reports on combined app+web data whereas UA did not.
Another distinction is that GA4 has better support for muti-touch attribution, e.g. all of the user ad touchpoints, for ad traffic, whereas UA was primarily last click, or first click if you look at the user acquisition reports.
I am also frustrated with Google Analytics but one thing it does very well (that I can't seem to find elsewhere) is counting unique unregistered visitors. If I had to guess this is done with some advanced fingerprinting - but I'd be curious if anyone has found an alternative for these metrics.
its a simple 2 year cookie for every browser. it's not that complicated.
Google Analytics 4 is not ready for prime time.
I have reviewed many Google Analytics alternatives. You can read about them here: https://algustionesa.com/google-analytics-alternatives/
One thing to note is that many Google Analytics alternatives suffer from data accuracy issues.
They record and count analytics data differently from how Google Analytics does.
Therefore, before fully transitioning to Google Analytics and being surprised by a drop in visitors, it's advisable to use any analytics alternative alongside it first.
> One thing to note is that many Google Analytics alternatives suffer from data accuracy issues.
They record and count analytics data differently from how Google Analytics does.
During my years of experience using Google Analytics, I had very limited faith in Google Analytics accuracy. For example, bots routinely poisoned the referrer logs.
So holding them as a benchmark of accuracy seems off the mark for me.
I have the strong suspicion, that nobody has really great bot detection to this day.
Even with Google Analytics, I mostly used the data for rough trend analysis over longer periods, rather than react to every little 5% blip in the data.
For example, it was useful for observing the shift to mobile at differing pace for different types of websites. And that allowed for prioritizing website redesign projects during the 2010s.
And I’m also pretty puzzled at the criticism in your article of Matomo for being too close to how to Google Analytics works, while simultaneously holding Google Analytics as the gold standard to be compared against. That seems rather inconsistent to me.
Author here.
Clearly Request Metrics should make it on your list ;)
I work with a lot of non-profit Drupal clients and we've switched them from GA to Plausible Analytics because of GA4. It's not free, but it's cheap enough that they're willing to pay in order to not deal with all this bullshit.
Plausible has a really simple interface, and we're able to embed the dashboard within the Drupal admin interface too so they don't even need to log in to a separate service to see their stats.
We support selected FOSS and non-profits with a free plan at Wide Angle Analytics, in case you would like to explore alternatives.
The GA4 interface along with Ads and some of the Cloud interfaces are so bizarrely complex it's comical.
I wonder what went wrong, but i'm so happy to not trapped in that hellscape anymore.
I remember it could take my team a week to even find the page something was on, or figure out the grotesquely convoluted methodology or naming scheme they had come up with for some simple task from 100 versions of their docs.
I think the main problem is the way their Material UI concepts are defined and the need for them to use these constraints for all of their products.
They can’t be adaptive and innovative, they need to follow their UI guidelines, so sometimes it ends up being a mess.
Yes, the Google Ads interface is getting worse and worse, i never understand which hierarchical level I am on, its crazy…
there are many other analytics products besides GA?..
Have you ever noticed the large number on your content blocker indicating how many things were blocked? Most of those are analytics.
Yea the market is rammed full of privacy based analytics tools. I guess the market is pre-validated but it is probably a lot of work to break out in that market.
Not everyone can build or host their solution. And most hosted solutions outright prohibit processing personal data, throwing users and customers under the bus.
Hence, a long time ago we built web analytics, the Wide Angle Analytics. We actually support processing Personal Data when requested.
When building it, we spent more time on compliance than on technology.
What analytics tools do people like here?
I've been pretty happy with plausible analytics. They have a hosted solution as well.
I just enabled Cloudflare web analytics on my site rather than try to figure out Google's new thing. All I care about is tracking visit trends and referrers, and that's actually way easier in Cloudflare's UI so I'm happy.
One nice thing about it is that there are some pages on my site that I never bothered to add Google Analytics to, but Cloudflare adds their tracker automatically to every page. It couldn't be easier, which is great as analytics is not something I want to spend any time on.
Both self-hosted and hosted Plausible are a good choice.
Not sure how it compares, I set up self hosted matomo (originally named piwik) and it's been running without issue since 2013 or so. https://github.com/matomo-org/matomo. Only useful if what you're running is on php. Probably would've picked a different stack today.
Request Metrics, obviously!
Fathom and plausible are nice.
I hope one day when Google forces us to migrate to Google Next Analytics Product™ my org will finally get fed up and switch to something stable. I’m philosophically opposed to analytics in the first place and would really like to never have to think about it again.
Check out maxmind.com for a cool IP geocoding database if you’re rolling your own analytics.
A very typical example of the NIH syndrome.
There really isn't much to learn from this article apart from that feeling about "we did it in-house instead and it does 60% of what the dumb original solution would do. Also we need to maintain it all ourselves now.":
> Not invented here (NIH) is the tendency to avoid using or buying products, research, standards, or knowledge from external origins. It is usually adopted by social, corporate, or institutional cultures. Research illustrates a strong bias against ideas from the outside
Shout out to my little service which tracks time on page: https://watch.ly/
Is the problem that Google's existing customer base doesn't want the restrictions of GDPR, so Google is tying itself into knots trying to achieve the impossible?
Or is it simply that the concept of "an American company processing data on visitors to a European website" is completely illegal now, and the courts haven't gotten around to spelling it out that bluntly yet?
Change is hard I guess. A 15 + year old product, based on pageviews, that known no bounds in regards to tracking, getting replaced by a new hit-based one that is not perfect, but at least takes GDPR into account. It actually hooks up to BigQuery easily and that can get hooked up to Looker Studio. And it's free. BQ is just a few bucks a month). You can even personalize the main menu. Don't need e-commerce? Just delete it from the menu! Need custom stuff? Build it easily in 'Explore' and place it in the main menu. But, yes you do have to learn the new interface. (edit; typo)
https://xkcd.com/927/ comes to mind
(in all honesty though I would probably do the same thing - GA is not my favorite thing in the world)