The most annoying problem with analytics on your website?
Hi, side hustlers! I'm a freelancer currently residing in Barcelona and I'm in a process of researching the startups and their main needs in analytics.
Q:
What are you expecting to get from your website analytics and what is the biggest obstacle on the way to get it?
I'm excited to be a part of this community and looking forward to hearing more about your startups!
Not on my website, but seen this in bigger projects:
You need to send absolutely damn every little insignificant detail of the user, product, if it rained yesterday, position of the moon relative to Jupiter, four magic spells from Harry Potter, an image of a Poodle and a Japanese emoticon with every analytics request just because the analytics system cannot integrate to whatever data source that actually contains that information.
For example I've seen webshops that send all data from the product that the user is viewing plus a summary of the product's reviews, plus a number of times the product was mentioned in social media plus if the shop had a discount that week on DHL delivery over $100 orders.
All this data should be easily retrieved from according systems, but the analytics platforms lack easy ways to do it. I should only send the product page's URL (which contains the product id) and other info should be retrieved from other systems, not tunneled through the frontend.
As a developer this is a huge frustration. And it causes frustration in analytics team too because the more integrations we do on the frontend, the more stuff potentially/eventually breaks down, and the more analtics gets screwed up.
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I think it's rather hard to combine analytics with the increased uptake of ad- and tracking blockers. I'd like to have analytics on my web site that's non-privacy intrusive, where the users are anonymous in the eyes of the analytics-company, but where I can still get the benefits of knowing their browser information, screen resolution, navigation path, etc...
A good server-side analytics provider would be great to have. For example at the CDN level.
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I'd pay for a small JS library that sends data to my own server. It's a bit of a time investment to go through all browser APIs to see what information can be collected and to generate a uuid for that user (on my site only). At my server I could anonymise the identity and send the device data/navigation paths forward.
I've been using Fathom self-hosted. It strips all the PII client side so you are just storing aggregate user stats and you don't have to worry about GDPR, etc.
https://usefathom.com
I am using mixpanel, pretty happy with it, few notes though: their free tier limitations is not optimal for startup (in my opinion) and their integrations guides are good but not perfect. Pretty sure there is a room for improvement;)
Thanks for your answer! Do you mind me asking: is there a particular reason why chose the Mixpanel over GA for your business?
MixPanel is better suited for “event” based analytics and its cleaner and easier for me to build funnels and user journeys. GA is fine but requires more tuning to make same to what MP does. Fun fact in YC there is a recent video on product and the founder of twitch there talks about using MP over GA
Hey! I have an e-shop of sport goods and I think that my analytics is pretty much ok, I mostly know how to track every metric needed. Although, I was struggling for a long time with segmenting my audience. By that I mean that I can't really define what people from specific countries did on my website, only a vague picture of visitors coming. But I think it can't be done with such precision!
Good luck
Thanks for replying! By the way, of course you can track what people from specific countries or even cities did on your website: it's all in the Segments of GA dashboard, you just have to create a new segment properly and then the sky is the limit!
I would suggest using secondary dimensions here, as segmenting by city would very quickly exceed the '4 segment per report' limit.
However, I the feedback by Dale nicely illustrates one of the issues that many businesses run into: the data is there, but the knowledge/people to get it out (in the right way) isn't.
Thanks for your addition, it's true :)
Also, do you think it's a real problem for most of the businesses currently or is it something the majority of them didn't discover as an issue and opportunity yet?
Ok, thanks! I'll look into segments more thoroughly..
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