Comment by adamiscool8
8 months ago
I don't think this article makes a good case for why you should.
>The more of us who incapacitate Google's analytics products and their support mechanism, the better. Not just for the good of each individual person implementing the blocks - but in a wider sense, because if enough people block Google Analytics 4, it will go the same way as Universal Google Analytics. These products rely on gaining access to the majority of Web users. If too many people block them, they become useless and have to be withdrawn.
OK - but then also in the wider sense, if site owners can't easily assess the performance of their site relative to user behavior to make improvements, now the overall UX of the web declines. Should we go back to static pages and mining Urchin extracts, and guessing what people care about?
But I like it better when they have to guess. If it's something we care about enough, we'll let them know.
If the analytics brought us to this, of what use are the analytics?
> if site owners can't easily assess the performance of their site
I would be more than happy to opt in to performance metrics or other reports if only I could have some level of trust that improving the UX is all it's gonna be used for. I want to live in a world where that is the everyday normal, and where the non-consensual collection and sale of personal data is a high-profile public scandal with severe legal consequences.
Effective and accessible UX design is a solved problem. It’s a matter of education of front end developers, not of A/B testing your users to death.
Belt and suspenders approach is to attach analytics to the most important events on the server side and combine with the session.
If the frontend automatic js is blocked, it doesn’t matter.
Analytics can have good uses, but these days it's mostly used to improve things for the operator (more sales, conversions, etc) and what's best for the website isn't always the best for the user. And so I block all that.
> Should we go back to static pages and mining Urchin extracts, and guessing what people care about?
Yes absolutely do this please.
Why even bother with the effort of analytics only to ignore the answers? I'm honestly not sure I've ever seen a website improve.