Please Stop Using Google Analytics

it's no secret that Google loves to kill their projects we've probably all lost something Google made that we miss dearly I know I'll never be the same as when they deprecated Google Play Music and no YouTube music is not a fair replacement trust me we're not here to talk about Google's user-facing services and the usual products getting gutted for no seemingly good reason we're here to talk about something that has been a standard for a long time it's it's a standard that's falling apart seems like they want to kill it themselves but as they continue to fail to we need to move on as industry I'm here today to talk about Google analytics an absolute disaster of a project that both pushed analytics and tools for data forward meaningfully for an industry and haven't really made much progress since the big thing that has been hurting Google analytics is the move away from the old version V3 otherwise known as universal analytics UA was focused on moving away from its just a website we sent analytics from and towards this concept of many platforms like mobile or even things like video game consoles and TV apps that can also report events to Google analytics the dashboard did not keep up with these changes and more and more our attempts to actually see the data in Google got worse and worse on top of that Google started having issues with compliance due to gdpr in Europe and even though every country didn't ban them many of them did Google analytics is currently illegal in Austria France Italy Denmark Finland Norway and Sweden God that's terrifying on top of that the move from Universal analytics to ga4 has been a bit of a disaster so much so that Google's ads le as on has actually come out and publicly apologized for it some advertisers have noticed things are changing this is the conversion swapping piece of the setup assistance migration all words that mean something to someone hel migration advertisers that had UA properties linked with their Google ads account were notified of this in the option to opt out of the setup assistant yada yada they tried to automate the move it did not work because these products are like entirely different and as a result they apologized we understand some advertisers may be caught off guard with these changes being made now and apologize for the confusion the updates are aimed at mapping UA conversion to Google Analytics four conversion settings forbidding and avoid duplicate measurement good luck they tried it didn't go great nobody's happy with Google analytics anymore the problem here was that with universal analytics it wasn't good still and it's not like we had this great product and then they made this new worse version it's that they had an okay product that we were using cuz it's what we already had and it was already set up and then they forced us to migrate to something new and if you're going to move away from Google analytics V3 moving to V4 is not that much less work and if you already have to move off of universal analytics why would you move to another Google product that isn't great that's going to get defecated analytics is an important enough part of your business that I'm hesitant to put them anywhere that I don't have some level of ownership of which is why the two analytics tools I recommend instead are both open source the first tool I recommend that I genuinely really love is a tool called plausible plausible is an open source privacy focused alternative to Google analytics if you're trying to track which buttons users are clicking and which behaviors they're doing or even just the concept of a user as a whole plausible is probably not for you but if you want to see how many visits your blog is getting plausible is the quickest and best solution by far as I mentioned before it's entirely open source so you can trivially self-host it if you choose to but their pricing is so cheap I don't care their free tier is super generous too I don't know if they have it mentioned here anywhere but like a million page views for 70 bucks sure I don't care and again you can deploy yourself if you really want to it's super minimal it's really nice you get behaviors like showing you what your top sources of traffic are and just basic core analytics if you don't want to set up a bunch of stuff like make custom dashboards or track events manually you just want to see people going to your website and how many are there and what they're doing plausible is a great solution but plausible is not what I reach to most of the time anymore often throw it on stuff like a Blog and I'll often even make the analytics public so people can see how many people are going to like the create T3 app site or my own personal blog but when I'm building the analytics for my products and things that I really care about and I'm going to be manually creating events for and making dashboards for and all of that I still want an open- Source tool and the one I have found to be the best by a lot is post hog I will disclose that post hog recently joined as a sponsor of the channel I reached out to them because I've been loving the product and using it for all the analytics for upload thing and I'm actually lucky enough to be the first Creator they've partnered with for a sponsorship ever I'm hyped the product is phenomenal they're open source they have a bunch of really cool stuff but what I'm focused on mostly is the product analytics although session replay being baked in is really cool too you can see what buttons users clicked you can see their console logs and bunch of other random stuff to help debug problems I still reach for tools like log rocket or highlight when I want deep session replay with error management Source maps and all the other things you need to debug but generally the product analytics here is dope it's open source you can host it yourself but it's also comically cheap if you don't want to you get a million events a month for free and if you start paying it's 0.31 cents per event and they have volume discounts too once you get to Crazy Event numbers so yeah our bill and we're over Eventing a lot for upload thing we just broke the free tier for the first time and I think it cost me like eight bucks it's nothing even the session recording is super cheap where it's half of a cent per recording and you get 15K recordings for free I'm really really happy with the post hog product and I haven't even talked about the dashboards yet first I should show you what the setup looks like quick if we go to the docs framework guides next this is what all of us are going to be doing they have a next demo app already made and a pretty quick to get started set of what you have to do you throw in your environment variables they have a Pages router as well as an app router example so we're going to go here this is what I'm doing nowadays and they even showed you how to do custom stuff like Auto tracking of the URL when it changes so this is a post hog page view component which yeah it would be kind of nice if they included this themselves but this gives you the customization to change how tracking Works entirely maybe you don't want to track signed out users you now have the code that determines how it gets tracked right here but again this is a little bit more Hands-On compared to something like plausible where you just drop in the JavaScript and ignore it moving forward but with this you can get way more data you can get specific events you can even log things on the server side too when something like stripe hits your web hook or uploads thing completes an upload and having that type of power in your Analytics tool is really nice and the fact that they make it this convenient where you're just including things in your JavaScript player it's dope and here they also specify the server side because they have a separate post hog node package for server side analytics which is dope if you want to trigger like do they have an example with a post here the example they used here is with get server side props which is not my favorite thing in the world but if you're using like post endpoints and routes with either page router or app router it's really trivial to make calls to your Antics client. capture session user email loaded blog article URL I know it's a small thing the fact that they recommend event names that are readable strings it's really nice because we've been bullied by other providers of events Solutions and analytics for specifically using names like this they sent us an email saying our names suck and we should do a meeting with them no my analytics should be readable and post hog leans into that their goal is to give you the things you need to actually understand what your users are doing and what isn't isn't working and the quality of experience I've had with them has been dope most analytics tools get blocked by ad blockers which is obnoxious because analytics is albeit a type of tracking they're very useful for us when debugging and figuring out user issues and at the very least I think something like Sentry should be allowed through most ad blockers sadly the developers creating these ad block Solutions don't agree and they lean in hard on blocking every URL for services that are doing anything vaguely identifying which means if you have a user that has an ad block and they go to your site using post hog the default way those analytics will probably never make it to you but with next it's relatively trivial to rewrite something on your url to go somewhere else and they actually provide guides on how to do this in three different ways next rewrites or on a middleware level or on like the versal level directly all of which make it trivial to make sure those events get to you in the first place that's enough of this I want to show you guys a dashboard specifically I want to show you guys my dashboard so here are current analytics for upload thing we have had a bit over 30,000 apps created and we are about to break 500,000 file uploads and building dashboards like this is Trivial I can go make a new dashboard quick or I'll just make a new insight insights are the individual charts usually you have a query that determines what data is there and then you can draw out your chart from that so I'll create a new insight page view count sure and now just by default we have page views total count I can filter out internal in test groups I can filter in many other ways so I can filter out that's a filter group I don't want a filter group I guess I do a filter group add filter ID or want to find an easy signed in check there's a lot of different ways to do this I want to show cool user ID so I can do user ID is not set and now this will be all of the users where the user ID is not set and we'll see we get like 2700 page views and if I turn that off quick I switch it to is set we'll see a very different number my face doesn't cover it so here I'll just do page view total account where user ID is not set versus page view where userid ID is set and now I have a chart comparing user IDs not being set with ones that are this is dope I don't know if yall have used other analytics tools but setting these things up is not normally trivial and having all these nice drop- down menus that actually know the properties on your events making it this easy to quickly do these types of things is dope and I can name this to signed out page views and signed in page views and now I have this really handy chart where I can compare signed in and signed out users I can change this from last seven days to last 14 days I can change grouping from daily to weekly to hourly this is so useful and someone just mentioned in chat it has SQL yes they're using click housee SQL which is a common like data analytic standard for SQL it's all open source a couple other products use it too you can actually write queries in here with their SQL syntax to get data which is dope really useful and they have a bunch of other stuff in here too like it's not just Trends and basic charts they have funnels they have retention they have user paths where you can track individual user stories all the stuff that I used to spend hours upon hours dealing with in stuff like amplitude or even mix panel I found to be much faster to do in post hog I've yet to use most of their other features they're not that interesting to me surveys actually okay surveys is interesting to me I was considering building a survey tool so I am actually excited to try out theirs but generally speaking the insights alone is enough of a reason for me to highly recommend post hog and I'm very lucky to have them as a channel sponsor making it possible for me to talk about these things more enough about me and my analytics Solutions though what about you are you a victim of the Google analytics curse are you looking for other Solutions do you feel as strongly as I do that you should go open and source with your analytics because now that these are options I can't go back this such a relief knowing that both post hog and plausible can be self- deployed if I ever have issues with them or the companies ever struggle but right now they're both really promising bets and I recommend them wholeheartedly if you want to make sure you don't lose your data when you start tracking these things I'll pin a video in the corner all about that and if you've already seen that or you're not interested there's a video below it that might be more your thing thank you guys as always really appreciate yall peace nerds

Channel: Theo - t3․gg

Views: 91,953

Keywords: web development, full stack, typescript, javascript, react, programming, programmer, theo, t3 stack, t3, t3.gg, t3dotgg

Id: 6xXSsu0YXWo

Length: 10min 59sec (659 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 05 2023