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.
The problem with rolling releases is that there’s no way to say “I’m using the API as it was at version 3”. The last few years I’ve been increasingly thinking about software versions where the major version is part of the dependency name. So product Foo@1.2.3 is really “Foo1” at version 2.3. Foo1 is what you’re depending on, and so long as the semver guarantee holds, you should be able to incorporate rolling releases of Foo1’s versions. But because Foo2 (Foo@2.0.0) has a different API, it’s a different dependency and should be treated as if it were separate object in the dependency tree. And generally Foo1 and Foo2 should be able to sit, live and work side-by-side.
The fact that Foo1 and Foo2 are both called "Foo" is an artefact of how humans write software, but its meaningless to the computer. Foo2 usually has all the features of Foo1, but because the API is programmatically incompatible, when it comes to the dependency tree, they should be totally separate items.
You see forms of this all over the place. Eg, HTTP APIs are usually /api/v1/ not /api/v1.2/. Debian's apt repository has packages for 'llvm-10', 'llvm-11', 'llvm-12', and so on. I used to think this was silly; but now I think it might be the only way to do that in a coherent way.
The semver spec implies this, but doesn't say it outright. And that leads to lots of overcomplicated tooling!
I'm going to try being even more clear:
"Package Foo v1.2.3" should usually be spelled "Package Foo1, v2.3"
For example, the migration from react 17.x.x to react 18.x.x is actually a change from depending on package react17 to depending on react18. React17 and react18 are two different packages which have been designed by the same team, and happen to have similar APIs in order to make migration easier.
If I designed npm today I'd make "react16", "react17" and "react18" all be essentially different packages (under a namespace). They should probably only share their lists of authorized authors.
You can see this confusion all over the place. For example, when setting up peerDependencies in a nodejs project, there are suggestions[1] to use a version like `"chai": ">= 1.5.2 < 2"`. This is because chai v1 and chai v2 are essentially different packages. You want to say "chai v1 should be a peer dependency". But its unintentionally awkward to say that clearly. And with the current nomenclature, there's no way to express a dependency on both chai1 and chai2 - despite them being different, incompatible packages.
Even though nodejs is obsessed about semver, it still makes a mess of things by pretending as if major versions and minor versions are similar. They are not.
Weird that nodejs.org doesn't say so, but that's usually written `"^1.5.2"` and is by far the most common way dependencies are specified in my experience. Cargo even makes the ^ implicit, and you can just write "1.5.2".
Cargo and Poetry treat different major versions of software as effectively different packages by default. However I've seen pushback against upper version bounds (which putting different major versions under different names is an extension of): https://iscinumpy.dev/post/bound-version-constraints/. I'm not sure how to feel myself.
Interesting. But python's package system makes this actively hard to do. From that article:
> For example, let’s say you support click^7. Click 8 comes out, and someone writes a library requiring click^8. Now your library can’t be installed at the same time as that other library, your requirements do not overlap.
What I'm arguing for is that click^7 and click^8 should be seen as different packages that (like any other packages with different names) can be installed side-by-side without issue. It sounds weird, but it makes this problem goes away entirely.
Nodejs and (I think) cargo both support this. I've never run into errors like this in rust or node.
Another advantage of this approach: Integration tests in all previous versions of a package should pass on the current version of that package. I'd love to see test runners which actually enforce this - which should be pretty easy to do in a language like rust where integration tests are clearly separated.
Sometimes (rarely) it makes sense to allow an integration test for react16 v1.0 to fail on react16 v2.0, but that implies a violation of semver compatibility. So it should be the exception. Not the default.
FYI GA4 was released over a year ago, it seems it hasn't 'stuck' with not many people upgrading, at least with many people I've worked with. It is the default version when you setup a new GA property though.
Would be more interested in sending it bogus data.
Strangling it to death with ad blockers isn't working (or at least is doing less than the self inflicted damage being caused by mismanagement over at Google).
How can we make its output completely wrong, instead of just incomplete?
I'll happily stick a "do not track” header (or the new one) on the bogus requests. In my book, they've been warned to back off at that point, so any bad outcomes from tracking the requests are on them.
> All standard Universal Analytics properties will stop processing new hits on July 1, 2023, and 360 Universal Analytics properties will stop processing new hits on October 1, 2023. After that, you’ll be able to access your previously processed data in Universal Analytics for at least six months.
How are you reading "All standard Universal Analytics properties will stop processing new hits" as "everything will keep working fine" and "you’ll be able to access your previously processed data [for six months]" as a guarantee no data will be lost?
Because everyone's going to update their properties so analytics keep working. It's not like when a new chat product comes out and splinters your contacts into multiple chat products.
It's like when, e.g., Heroku sends me an email saying I need to move apps off of a stack they're retiring. They're not killing off my app; I just need to run the command or agree to a maintenance window so it keeps working after a certain date. If I for whatever reason refuse to do anything, I can't seriously claim they're shutting me down. Especially with a long notice period.
"Doing so will allow you to build the necessary historical data and usage in the new experience, preparing you for continuity once Universal Analytics is no longer available."
That doesn't seem to indicate your old data comes with.
This has been coming for a couple years already. I agree there are some organizations that probably didn't take GA4 seriously until this week, but I don't know how many of them were really delving into their historical analytics to begin with.
Anyway, I don't mean to take away from your moment to hate on Google. :) It's just not a classic Google discontinuation like when they eventually shut down Stadia or whatever.
The first announcement of the date. We all knew it was coming; I figured it would be many years in the future. I still think so, actually... I think Google is bluffing, because nobody is taking up GA4. Some are implementing it, in tandem with UA, but very few are using it.
Nobody wants to move to GA4. It has nothing UA doesn't, and UA has lots of features GA4 doesn't. If they're sunsetting UA next year, there's no way it'll have improved enough by then to be a fully functioning replacement. It has a cleaner structure than UA, because it's dropping a decade of cruft, but that doesn't really help when it just doesn't do as much.
The people that are moving to GA4 are running both UA and GA4 in parallel, so that they'll have a history set when UA shuts off. Those are companies that are paying attention. I would be surprised, by the 2023 date, if even 25% of the UA installations have switched to GA4. (Of course, all the larger companies will have.)
Side note... I looked into Shopify a month or two back. They have a drop in UA implementation that is almost as easy as clicking on a checkbox. Not only do they not have a wizard for implementing GA4, they say it's not even possible for you to add manually. No due date was given. A lot of sites have UA built in as the assumed forever default.
I am a Google Analytics consultant. Let me make this very clear: There are different products and everything will be lost.
This is not an "upgrade." This is "replace product with a different product in the same space." Old GA data is incompatible with GA4 data, and there is no way to bring data from one into the other. Google is discontinuing Google Analytics, and applying the Google Analytics brand to Firebase Analytics.
Nothing carries over. Configuration, implementation, goals, user permissions, historical data, nothing. It all has to be re-built from scratch.
I'm confused, you say that no data will be lost, then someone replies to you and says all data will be lost, and then you agree with them? What am I missing.
Seriously? They're shutting down Google Analytics? Deleting all data six months later? The replacement is a completely different product with the same name but no migration path, and wasn't even the default option less than two years ago?
The Google deprecation team has really outdone themselves this time. I really would have thought they'd deprecate Gmail before Google Analytics! I've got to imagine there are legal reasons behind this, because no product team could sincerely believe that this is a good idea for the product, right?
> Seriously? They're shutting down Google Analytics? Deleting all data six months later? The replacement is a completely different product with the same name but no migration path, and wasn't even the default option less than two years ago?
Yes. That's what the original post and the entire discussion here is about.
Personal opinion, Google is catastrophically shooting themselves in the foot here, and could lose their market dominance.
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 change 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.
By forcing a migration to a non-compatible version, Google loses that big advantage. If you're going to lose that anyways, then there's less of a reason to stick with GA. Now you're forcing 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.
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.
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.
(The third-biggest moat is Google Ads integration. I suspect that Google imagines this to be bigger than it really is in practice.)
It’s an interesting argument, but in my view, one that sailed 2-3 years ago when they force-migrated everyone to firebase analytics, which fairly drastically changed our data views given as it was so heavily geared to revenue generating click businesses (as opposed to B2B SaaS).
At that point we instituted a big program to move to Amplitude (which we’ve been fairly happy with, but probably won’t be perfect until we get our own data overlays through eventually getting a data lake etc etc) - now the move BACK to GA … II would never touch GA again or consider it for a new project
> 2-3 years ago when they force-migrated everyone to firebase analytics
No, this is the same migration. This is my point: you weren't actually forced to migrate until now. The migration has been optional up until this announcement, and many people haven't. What your team did 2-3 years ago, the majority of organizations have been putting off. But now they can't anymore.
Wow, is that right. We had some weird little projects that were web based that we didn't do anything with that we could still view through analytics.google but I felt that the mobile stuff was GOOOONE unless we did something.
So they've basically said 'GA is closing unless you want to pay 120k/pa so move to firebase - GA is now Firebase Analytics' to now 'Firebase Analytics is Google Analytics again, but that thing we said you had to do you now have to definitively do?' ?
100% - I jumped right on it when they said that, did a few hours of hurried research, then discovered that it wasn't actually possible to use Firebase for what we use GA for. Figured we just had to wait until they hit feature parity so I've been checking the status of things a few times a year ever since.
...and there's been very little movement. We can still create "universal analytics" properties, we still can't do the same stuff in Firebase, and the GA4 "Measurement Protocol" is still in beta.
I think our eventual move is going to be to a non-Google product.
You’re right, there was so much feature asymmetry we couldn’t justify sticking around - we would have lost any valuable insights into user behaviour. Firebase analytics just seemed like a ‘made for ads and influencers’ analytics tool. What a monumental cockup by the team that decided that it was important to lose that pool of users. Because of that shift we actively avoided making any choices re any of the other Google cloud or firebase tools.
There’s heaps of good ones around now - our shift to amplitude was a good one but I know there are a lot of other really simple and free ones about too
It sounds like you were working on app tracking rather than web tracking, so your timeline makes more sense. The various GA SDKs for different platforms stopped working a few years ago, forcing a move to firebase-which-is-now-GA.
On the website side of things, which is GA's core user-base, Universal Analytics has remained supported up til this announcement.
Glad to hear you’ve been happy with Amplitude. We’ve been doing a lot RE helping customers federate data to data lakes/warehouses. If I can ask- what data lake you using and what data from Amplitude are you looking to get into it? (Raw dump of analytics data or something else?)
Hi,
Thanks for your interest, you've got a great product there and it's been really cool seeing it evolve.
We're actually not currently using a data lake. We were initially on the startup plan which was fantastic (the ability to do templated reports etc is a big one for us) but currently we couldn't justify the cost of a full subscription at that point (and now we are just making do until we can complete our next round at which point we will re-look at the whole situation)
We love that you have an API and used fivetran to ETL to (for want of something cheap + low BI tool costs) BigQuery where we were hoping to be able to attach Data Studio to it to achieve our objectives.
This may not have been the right approach.
We couldn't spare anyone from our dev team to take the time to work out the transforms/queries required to make it useful in Data Studio so we spent some time contracting the work out, but that fell over because they were on lend from a mate's startup and I think just never moved out of the blocks. Also maybe we were using the incorrect tools.
Essentially we were looking to get a fair proportion of our data out, in order to create data views for our clients on their usage (... platform in bio, but hospital analytics stuff - no patient info, all operational efficiency). This was fulfilled really nicely by Templates but in the reports we now generate (... a bit laborious but using a offshore contractor who takes all the pain out of it) we are also able to put benchmarking averages against their peer hospitals etc in which wasn't something it was immediately obvious we could achieve with Templates. Ultimately we want those individual dashboards available for the Hospitals to view, as well as be able to return things like views per period for their content on our dashboard, which we know we can also achieve through the API
Yea, as a first-time Google analytics user I recently had to navigate the GA4 vs UA products (the blogging platform I used only supported UA, but every new guide is for GA4). When it came to instrumenting my actual product, I just used Amplitude and try very hard to not have to open my GA4 dashboard (really, just to see traffic attribution). Can't believe _this_ is supposed to be some pillar of their legendary money making machine...
The only reason I've ever installed GA on any website was to get higher rankings on the Google ad sales pages to get better CPCs (including Reddit). That moat might be bigger than you think.
I think you’re right, and I think we should consider the possibility that Google doesn’t want to maintain market share dominance of basic web analytics anymore. Because what do they get for it, in a world where large-scale cookie data pooling is increasingly difficult and in some cases illegal?
> 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.
This is precisely why they're doing it with urgency though. These rulings are based on Universal Analytics. GA4, along with their Consent Mode (still in beta) is supposed to be designed to work entirely without cookies and IP addresses.
You might want to check out Simple Analytics as well. From a privacy perspective this is actually a good shout. We classified it as follows:
Matomo looks more like Google and the data is yours. Plausible and Simple Analytics are more similar to one another in the sense that they only collect privacy-insenstive data.
The main difference is that plausible still operates in a 'grey-area' by anonymizing IP addresses for 24 hours. This can be considered fingerprinting.
The thing is that "GA alternative" is a broad question, as GA has A LOT of features and it's also lacking many features, it depends on what you're looking for and what's your use case.
I honestly don't give a fsck about the new version or why it needs to be a breaking change.
All I hear is:
> 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
Great, plenty of time to replace GA with another analytics solution.
I ditched analytics entirely when I realized they didn't tell me anything I didn't already know. Stat dashboards are skinner boxes that get in the way of doing the work of trying new things, getting feedback, and using it for the next thing.
While it might be a bit hyperbolic to suggest that analytics don't tell you anything new, I've seen vanity metrics toted around on more than one occasion as if it meant anything actionable or otherwise unknowable. I think this is more common than the other way around. It's like the ol' conundrum where an A/B test is performed on a design change, and the B version results in more "engagement" with the site; what they fail to openly mention is that so-called engagement may just be the frustration of the user trying to bypass your crummy design update.
IMO, the best analytics for many businesses is customer acquisition and revenue as well as customer feedback. If you aren't adequately responding to those inherent analytics then you shouldn't yet be using The Google's form of black magic.
You've seen vanity metrics? That's throwing the baby out with the bath water. You just haven't seen the value it brings. Analytics isn't black magic and it won't run your business for you.
Some people think the existence of vanity metrics or stupid tests means that the entire concept is bullshit. That is their problem, and reveals more about their limited perspective than it does about whether or not analytics is important.
I started back in the '00s with server-side stat tools like AWStats and never learned anything new from checking them. Why would I keep wasting time? My subjective experience tells me they're useless for me, and this is a common enough experience.
That doesn't mean everyone will have the same experience, but it does mean most people probably don't need to feed into Google's ability to track everyone just to look at their stats and say "yep, that's where I'd expect a person to come from."
If knowing where your traffic comes from and what it does on your site has no value to you then I'm not going to try and convince you otherwise. You can try and ask your users who either won't respond to you or potentially give you incorrect or misleading responses, if you want analytics, you know, in order to make business decisions.
Your website has GA4 installed on it, you might want to remove that.
if the primary issue here is data loss...isn't part of the solution to also find a way to take more ownership over the data, regardless of what you're using for analytics?
i.e. instrument a standard spec with something like www.Rudderstack.com and write it to your warehouse/datalake + whatever analytics tool you want.
That way if you ever want to move off your analytics tool (or a solution providing the data spec), you still own the data for whatever you replace it with.
By sending the data to the WH, also lets you own any proprietary data you create - like the custom PPC model referenced in this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30707913
Look, not to rag on your employer's product too much - I'm sure it works for some people. But the first thing I checked was the pricing: $750/month just to get some graphs in grafana (and support, if you're a business and care about that kind of thing), and SSO is in the "contact us" enterprise tier.
It's compliant if you show a cookie banner on your website. It not really privacy-friendly as you are still setting cookies on your users devices.
There is one point from the Google announcement that I fully agree with and that is that the future of analytics is cookieless by design (only google won't be a part of this)
Edit: I am asking because I know that there are better alternatives than matomo. But there still needs to be some alternative for 'oldschool' hostings with LAMP stack.
On the other hand the paid version is no fuss, affordable and works great. Its much cheaper than fiddling with how to selfhost it. Not sure what bugs would be in paid that are not in the self hosted one. It´s same thing.
Bugs aren't in their code. It's the way they've configured their server that hosts the .js. Their headers are fucked up so some browsers will never load the .js correctly, and you'll never know about it. So your stats will never be remotely true.
We're building the most comprehensive, but still easy-to-use analytics tool out there. Specifically useful for SaaS businesses that want to collect and unify marketing, product engagement, sales, and subscription revenue data.
I've seen tons of similar analytics products pop up in the last year and have avoided them all for having out-of-country data storage (and usually less functionality, etc). With how volatile data-related laws have been in the EU the past few years, IMO it feels risky to try to store anything there, let alone view it as a feature!
I'm not sure how you get to that conclusion. Data privacy laws are among the strongest in the world here. It is a selling point because of that, but also because there are laws against sending user data to non-EU countries.
It feels risky to have my data stored anywhere else other than the EU. Feels like my data is just up for grabs anywhere else with no clear privacy protection. Imo EU is the best place to have your data.
I think you're putting your finger on why it is a selling point. You're avoiding them because they're out of country, and that makes sense. For Europeans, the default has been "US hosted data" for a long while, and having options that store data in our jurisdiction is thus a selling point.
Fewer jurisdictions is almost certainly going to be easier, and these options offer that for the European market.
Thanks for the explanation. HN is so notoriously US-centric at times that it didn't occur to me that these services offer the same perks from the other side of the pond.
Your pricing is an order of magnitude too high, given there are better free solutions out there. Would be like me selling a search engine service for $99 a month when Google and Bing exist.
Throwing in another choice: nocookieanalytics.com great interface and very simple. Just what I needed to see which one of my blog posts were famous, (none of them are)
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.
I thought that was just me. Just learned that in this article. I actually was not using some stuff that said they support GA4 because I thought they were legacy. Sounds like a branding fail to replace "universal" with a random number.
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?
aside of cookies not working anymore and the old model becoming illegal in some countries? I think it's compelling enough for people that actually need the data. For you maybe not and that's ok.
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.
It goes along with the philosophy of removing useful data that they've had for at least the last 10 years. Metrics like average position or search impression share in Adwords got removed, along with consistently broadening keyword match types (plus other quiet, but signficant shifts like moving away from second price auctions). The biggest introductions emphasized automated bidding strategies, view through conversions and hyper-optimistic offline conversion attribution tools. Analytics removed organic keyword data years ago and has shifted some focus towards multichannel attribution, but this is the biggest leap. The goal in PR speak is "understanding the customer journey across all channels" but in reality it is more like trying to capture more dollars from brand advertisers (see: big orgs with layers of burecracy with a big budget and 0 accountability) and mask the inefficiency of their platform for others (think lead gen-- Google tested running their own insurance comparison service, but it was more profitable to charge insurers $xx.xx per click instead. Similar situation with OTAs/home services).
They keep adding layers of opacity to mask ever shrinking ROIs while making it easier for anyone to spend more on ads. Eventually they will get to the point where you set a budget and you get what they are willing to provide based on what their "AI" decides is best to maximize their fill rates, auction participants and their earnings per page view. No keywords or managed placements. It isn't like there is an alternative and their inertia isn't going anywhere.
Naive question. Sorry. I don’t do web app cloud micro service analytics sort of things.
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.
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!”
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 think this is a case of people being annoyed that a product that works just fine is being replaced.
I have a handful of personal sites that I've slapped Google Analytics on, and while they're mostly using Google Analytics out of the box, I'd rather not have to spin my wheels reworking some custom events.
Not really, at least you observed something. It is more like a silent majority. And I have been heavily downvoted for pointing this out previously.
Sometimes post 2016 it went all the way to Ads equals evil on HN along with the rest of the internet and social media. Around 2017 / 2018 tracking becomes evil. This is further fueled in 2019 when Apple went on full PR attack ( or one could argue adding fuel to fire ) about tracking and ads. ( They subsequently pulled back and state they are not against ads after industry backlash ). Target advertising ( whatever that means [1] ). And working in FANNG ( before it was called MAAMA ) would become morally wrong for a short period of time on HN.
But there are, legitimate uses for Ads, and legitimate uses for tracking. So every once in a while you see a few people who dare to offer their contrarian view, those that are working in the ad industry, or working as a business that requires the usage of tracking, funnelling and ads for sales. And offer their views that somehow gets the upvote to top post. Assuming the upvote is not gamed in anyway, that means there are a huge number of HN readers that rarely participate in any discussions, but upvoted something that largely go against the common trend on HN.
There are also some sort of political angle to it. Although I tend to think they are separate issues rather than causes.
This idea there is some "silent majority" of pro-tracking and pro-ad HN users doesn't track with reality. Everyone on HN can uovote and votes are how voices get magnified. If that was the case we'd expect the odd pro-ad/tracking comment to always be near the top of the comments section.
The reality is this is adverse selection: those users probably weren't interested in a post about updates to GA, and didn't click it.
I made a new account, wrote a message, upvoted it with my current account.. and no change in points. I never see any message become black or "less grey" after upvote + refresh. It is a no-op for me.
HN likely does something to prevent vote manipulation from using multiple accounts coming from the same IP. That doesn't exclude the possiblity that your account had a flag to desregard votes before. I personally dislike this kind of hidden moderation like shadow banning. I know people will defend them saying that they are needed to deal with spammers but that does not make them any less dishonest when they invitably affect genuine users.
The "evil ads" argument doesn't even look really thought through to me. The way I look at it, there's 3 options:
1. Do everything for free. Rarely tenable.
2. Charge for things. This necessarily puts focus of business on monetization, or at the very least, it frequently pits providing and extracting value at odds.
3. Delegate monetization (a.k.a. ads). Then you can just focus on providing maximum value to your customers and money scales proportionally.
As a builder of things who's not greedy, #3 sounds like positively best option, if it's financially viable and product type makes it possible.
From the consumer point of view, the business model does not even enter the equation. What matters is media pollution: my display, my computing, my rules ! To hell with the publisher's expectations of a social contract binding viewership with acceptance of advertisement. That is of course incoherent with the taste for free resources, but that is not enough cognitive dissonance to stop anyone from setting up ad blockers.
From my vantage point, that's perfectly fine. Block ads, change the fonts, color the site orange if you want. As you say, your display, your rules. I communicate to my users that I myself use an ad blocker on my own property. There's no dissonance there.
My mom asked me to disable ad blocking I've set up on her devices, as she finds them useful.
> That is of course incoherent with the taste for free resources
Except it's not. Most content that I consume - like your comment here - is created by individuals that do not get paid no matter how the platform that the content is shared on is monetized. It's absurd to say that there would be no content without monetization and when people have content to shere there will be ways to share that content even when ads illegal or blocked by everyone. However as long as ads are accepted by the public at large, ad-laden sites will be more profitable and thus also have more resources to crush any alternatives that provide an ad-free user experience. I'm quite fine with anything that needs ads to survive to disappear as a result of ad-blocking - there will always be something else to fill my time.
False choice. I don't know people who are "all ads are bad". It's "spyware enabling ads are bad" and "ads are too large/frequent/auto playing video/in your face" with a side of "stop eating my cycles and bandwidth".
If companies just put up ads relevant to article as a static image that took up a reasonable amount of space and scrolled with the rest of the content, people wouldn't complain.
Word of advice: don't worry about the prevailing HN mood or opinion about pretty much anything except some extremely niche technical topics. (A nice tell is when a post has almost no comments.) Treat HN as an amusing diversion, not as some source of great truth, insight or foresight.
I guess some of us are forced to use tools and services from companies we don't like, for the sake of our livelihoods? "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." We all gotta draw the line somewhere, you know, and everyone has a price...?
Google is a mixed bag; they used to be a force for real good on the internet, now they're mostly mediocre with a side of evil, riding on their past benevolence. I use their tools here and there, even if I think the internet is overdue for some serious de-googlization.
Facebook is just plain evil. I don't use their stuff in my personal life, but many businesses demand that you set up Facebook ads/analytics for them. I use fake accounts for those.
Amazon is pretty evil too, maybe AWS somewhat less so. I avoid them whenever possible (freelancing, etc., where I get to choose the stack) but oftentimes AWS is baked in to existing stacks and the companies are not interested in switching to anything else.
It doesn't require massive cultural differences, necessarily, but just a degree of moral compromise that most adults have to make in order to survive. Capitalism doesn't easily make for benevolent corporations and moral purity in tech is impossible when like 90% of it is owned by a dozen huge companies.
> Is this just a case of different HN subcultures taking time to post to each other?
Yeah, I think that's exactly it. It happens with a lot of other topics too. It's nice that HN does seem to have more success in keeping people with opposing opinions on the site than some other communities.
Yes, Google finally realized that everyone hated looking at 'pageviews', but loves looking for an event called 'page_view'. Much easier to understand!
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.
Question being how many more do they gain?
Especially in the mobile app space maybe - if you have a game where you upgrade your sword with gems and attack your neighbor, which if those actions would be a pageview?
That’s fair! I do think you could trigger events for that kind of thing in Universal Analytics though. Seemed to have plenty of affordances for use in apps as well. I still question whether going for a ‘clean break’ is the best idea. Obviously products have to improve, but I’m surprised to see them imperil their massive user base this way.
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.
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.
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".
The idea is that Google takes the user data and matches with their user accounts. So a user logged into Google who clicks an ad, can be tracked across devices without the need for third party cookies.
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.
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.
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.
A 12-step upgrade procedure is insane [1] [2]. It's like they want 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?
Bingo. Their target market is the managers and decision makers who don't have time or knowledge to do anything other than look at the Magic Quadrant and tell their team which to implement.
I find it amusing someone actually had to take the effort to classify those and find a way to differentiate what constituted "very low effort" vs. "low effort" or how many meetings were involved.
I honestly wonder if it's deliberate to shake out all the free tier customers who can't afford a migration. It's a plausible approach if they are shifting strategy to deep-pocketed enterprise customers.
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.
It became useless to me and I haven't used it in at least five years.
If there's anyone here who still uses GA, can you tell me if they ever solved the problem of referrer spam?
Interesting -- I got quite a bit up until 3 or 4 years ago, but it's essentially vanished for me. Not sure which cases they've cleaned up, and which ones they haven't I guess.
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.
We’ve been creating and including both with gtag(‘config’, ‘ID’) lines for some time now in anticipation of something like this.
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.
I'm moving my clients to Matomo and they're loving it.
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[ 0.18 ms ] story [ 309 ms ] threadThe fact that Foo1 and Foo2 are both called "Foo" is an artefact of how humans write software, but its meaningless to the computer. Foo2 usually has all the features of Foo1, but because the API is programmatically incompatible, when it comes to the dependency tree, they should be totally separate items.
You see forms of this all over the place. Eg, HTTP APIs are usually /api/v1/ not /api/v1.2/. Debian's apt repository has packages for 'llvm-10', 'llvm-11', 'llvm-12', and so on. I used to think this was silly; but now I think it might be the only way to do that in a coherent way.
I'm going to try being even more clear:
"Package Foo v1.2.3" should usually be spelled "Package Foo1, v2.3"
For example, the migration from react 17.x.x to react 18.x.x is actually a change from depending on package react17 to depending on react18. React17 and react18 are two different packages which have been designed by the same team, and happen to have similar APIs in order to make migration easier.
If I designed npm today I'd make "react16", "react17" and "react18" all be essentially different packages (under a namespace). They should probably only share their lists of authorized authors.
You can see this confusion all over the place. For example, when setting up peerDependencies in a nodejs project, there are suggestions[1] to use a version like `"chai": ">= 1.5.2 < 2"`. This is because chai v1 and chai v2 are essentially different packages. You want to say "chai v1 should be a peer dependency". But its unintentionally awkward to say that clearly. And with the current nomenclature, there's no way to express a dependency on both chai1 and chai2 - despite them being different, incompatible packages.
Even though nodejs is obsessed about semver, it still makes a mess of things by pretending as if major versions and minor versions are similar. They are not.
[1] Last couple paragraphs of https://nodejs.org/es/blog/npm/peer-dependencies/
> For example, let’s say you support click^7. Click 8 comes out, and someone writes a library requiring click^8. Now your library can’t be installed at the same time as that other library, your requirements do not overlap.
What I'm arguing for is that click^7 and click^8 should be seen as different packages that (like any other packages with different names) can be installed side-by-side without issue. It sounds weird, but it makes this problem goes away entirely.
Nodejs and (I think) cargo both support this. I've never run into errors like this in rust or node.
Another advantage of this approach: Integration tests in all previous versions of a package should pass on the current version of that package. I'd love to see test runners which actually enforce this - which should be pretty easy to do in a language like rust where integration tests are clearly separated.
Sometimes (rarely) it makes sense to allow an integration test for react16 v1.0 to fail on react16 v2.0, but that implies a violation of semver compatibility. So it should be the exception. Not the default.
From top of mind it used to be Urchin Analytics, then Google analytics, then universal analytics and now GA4.
But these Windows go to 11?
And promotion and bonuses! This is the major impetus for these efforts.
Strangling it to death with ad blockers isn't working (or at least is doing less than the self inflicted damage being caused by mismanagement over at Google).
How can we make its output completely wrong, instead of just incomplete?
I'll happily stick a "do not track” header (or the new one) on the bogus requests. In my book, they've been warned to back off at that point, so any bad outcomes from tracking the requests are on them.
That seems to be what they're doing?
It's like when, e.g., Heroku sends me an email saying I need to move apps off of a stack they're retiring. They're not killing off my app; I just need to run the command or agree to a maintenance window so it keeps working after a certain date. If I for whatever reason refuse to do anything, I can't seriously claim they're shutting me down. Especially with a long notice period.
"Doing so will allow you to build the necessary historical data and usage in the new experience, preparing you for continuity once Universal Analytics is no longer available."
That doesn't seem to indicate your old data comes with.
Anyway, I don't mean to take away from your moment to hate on Google. :) It's just not a classic Google discontinuation like when they eventually shut down Stadia or whatever.
Nobody wants to move to GA4. It has nothing UA doesn't, and UA has lots of features GA4 doesn't. If they're sunsetting UA next year, there's no way it'll have improved enough by then to be a fully functioning replacement. It has a cleaner structure than UA, because it's dropping a decade of cruft, but that doesn't really help when it just doesn't do as much.
The people that are moving to GA4 are running both UA and GA4 in parallel, so that they'll have a history set when UA shuts off. Those are companies that are paying attention. I would be surprised, by the 2023 date, if even 25% of the UA installations have switched to GA4. (Of course, all the larger companies will have.)
Side note... I looked into Shopify a month or two back. They have a drop in UA implementation that is almost as easy as clicking on a checkbox. Not only do they not have a wizard for implementing GA4, they say it's not even possible for you to add manually. No due date was given. A lot of sites have UA built in as the assumed forever default.
This is not an "upgrade." This is "replace product with a different product in the same space." Old GA data is incompatible with GA4 data, and there is no way to bring data from one into the other. Google is discontinuing Google Analytics, and applying the Google Analytics brand to Firebase Analytics.
Nothing carries over. Configuration, implementation, goals, user permissions, historical data, nothing. It all has to be re-built from scratch.
The Google deprecation team has really outdone themselves this time. I really would have thought they'd deprecate Gmail before Google Analytics! I've got to imagine there are legal reasons behind this, because no product team could sincerely believe that this is a good idea for the product, right?
Yes. That's what the original post and the entire discussion here is about.
I imagine you'll hear a lot of that in the near future
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 change 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.
By forcing a migration to a non-compatible version, Google loses that big advantage. If you're going to lose that anyways, then there's less of a reason to stick with GA. Now you're forcing 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.
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.
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.
(The third-biggest moat is Google Ads integration. I suspect that Google imagines this to be bigger than it really is in practice.)
At that point we instituted a big program to move to Amplitude (which we’ve been fairly happy with, but probably won’t be perfect until we get our own data overlays through eventually getting a data lake etc etc) - now the move BACK to GA … II would never touch GA again or consider it for a new project
No, this is the same migration. This is my point: you weren't actually forced to migrate until now. The migration has been optional up until this announcement, and many people haven't. What your team did 2-3 years ago, the majority of organizations have been putting off. But now they can't anymore.
So they've basically said 'GA is closing unless you want to pay 120k/pa so move to firebase - GA is now Firebase Analytics' to now 'Firebase Analytics is Google Analytics again, but that thing we said you had to do you now have to definitively do?' ?
...and there's been very little movement. We can still create "universal analytics" properties, we still can't do the same stuff in Firebase, and the GA4 "Measurement Protocol" is still in beta.
I think our eventual move is going to be to a non-Google product.
There’s heaps of good ones around now - our shift to amplitude was a good one but I know there are a lot of other really simple and free ones about too
On the website side of things, which is GA's core user-base, Universal Analytics has remained supported up til this announcement.
We're actually not currently using a data lake. We were initially on the startup plan which was fantastic (the ability to do templated reports etc is a big one for us) but currently we couldn't justify the cost of a full subscription at that point (and now we are just making do until we can complete our next round at which point we will re-look at the whole situation)
We love that you have an API and used fivetran to ETL to (for want of something cheap + low BI tool costs) BigQuery where we were hoping to be able to attach Data Studio to it to achieve our objectives.
This may not have been the right approach.
We couldn't spare anyone from our dev team to take the time to work out the transforms/queries required to make it useful in Data Studio so we spent some time contracting the work out, but that fell over because they were on lend from a mate's startup and I think just never moved out of the blocks. Also maybe we were using the incorrect tools.
Essentially we were looking to get a fair proportion of our data out, in order to create data views for our clients on their usage (... platform in bio, but hospital analytics stuff - no patient info, all operational efficiency). This was fulfilled really nicely by Templates but in the reports we now generate (... a bit laborious but using a offshore contractor who takes all the pain out of it) we are also able to put benchmarking averages against their peer hospitals etc in which wasn't something it was immediately obvious we could achieve with Templates. Ultimately we want those individual dashboards available for the Hospitals to view, as well as be able to return things like views per period for their content on our dashboard, which we know we can also achieve through the API
Which is an abstraction that tries to handle old GA use-cases and the Segment/Amplitude style use-cases but does neither well.
This is precisely why they're doing it with urgency though. These rulings are based on Universal Analytics. GA4, along with their Consent Mode (still in beta) is supposed to be designed to work entirely without cookies and IP addresses.
I'll in the process of looking alternatives as GA4 is a step back. I suspect alternate analytics companies are going to love Google for this decision.
Oh yes! https://twitter.com/MarkoSaric/status/1504121261915574273
Matomo looks more like Google and the data is yours. Plausible and Simple Analytics are more similar to one another in the sense that they only collect privacy-insenstive data.
The main difference is that plausible still operates in a 'grey-area' by anonymizing IP addresses for 24 hours. This can be considered fingerprinting.
The thing is that "GA alternative" is a broad question, as GA has A LOT of features and it's also lacking many features, it depends on what you're looking for and what's your use case.
All I hear is:
> 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
Great, plenty of time to replace GA with another analytics solution.
IMO, the best analytics for many businesses is customer acquisition and revenue as well as customer feedback. If you aren't adequately responding to those inherent analytics then you shouldn't yet be using The Google's form of black magic.
That doesn't mean everyone will have the same experience, but it does mean most people probably don't need to feed into Google's ability to track everyone just to look at their stats and say "yep, that's where I'd expect a person to come from."
Your website has GA4 installed on it, you might want to remove that.
Any suggestions or recommendations? I'd be keen on trying something new.
i.e. instrument a standard spec with something like www.Rudderstack.com and write it to your warehouse/datalake + whatever analytics tool you want.
That way if you ever want to move off your analytics tool (or a solution providing the data spec), you still own the data for whatever you replace it with.
By sending the data to the WH, also lets you own any proprietary data you create - like the custom PPC model referenced in this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30707913
full disclosure - Rudderstack employee
There is one point from the Google announcement that I fully agree with and that is that the future of analytics is cookieless by design (only google won't be a part of this)
Edit: I am asking because I know that there are better alternatives than matomo. But there still needs to be some alternative for 'oldschool' hostings with LAMP stack.
[1]: https://matomo.org/faq/new-to-piwik/how-do-i-use-matomo-anal...
They also have a nice Fediverse presence and quite open about what they do even down to their user stats.
We're building the most comprehensive, but still easy-to-use analytics tool out there. Specifically useful for SaaS businesses that want to collect and unify marketing, product engagement, sales, and subscription revenue data.
I've seen tons of similar analytics products pop up in the last year and have avoided them all for having out-of-country data storage (and usually less functionality, etc). With how volatile data-related laws have been in the EU the past few years, IMO it feels risky to try to store anything there, let alone view it as a feature!
The fear is that you would now have to adhere to those "strongest laws" by hosting your data there.
Fewer jurisdictions is almost certainly going to be easier, and these options offer that for the European market.
Really poor product planning.
They keep adding layers of opacity to mask ever shrinking ROIs while making it easier for anyone to spend more on ads. Eventually they will get to the point where you set a budget and you get what they are willing to provide based on what their "AI" decides is best to maximize their fill rates, auction participants and their earnings per page view. No keywords or managed placements. It isn't like there is an alternative and their inertia isn't going anywhere.
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.
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!”
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 have a handful of personal sites that I've slapped Google Analytics on, and while they're mostly using Google Analytics out of the box, I'd rather not have to spin my wheels reworking some custom events.
Not really, at least you observed something. It is more like a silent majority. And I have been heavily downvoted for pointing this out previously.
Sometimes post 2016 it went all the way to Ads equals evil on HN along with the rest of the internet and social media. Around 2017 / 2018 tracking becomes evil. This is further fueled in 2019 when Apple went on full PR attack ( or one could argue adding fuel to fire ) about tracking and ads. ( They subsequently pulled back and state they are not against ads after industry backlash ). Target advertising ( whatever that means [1] ). And working in FANNG ( before it was called MAAMA ) would become morally wrong for a short period of time on HN.
But there are, legitimate uses for Ads, and legitimate uses for tracking. So every once in a while you see a few people who dare to offer their contrarian view, those that are working in the ad industry, or working as a business that requires the usage of tracking, funnelling and ads for sales. And offer their views that somehow gets the upvote to top post. Assuming the upvote is not gamed in anyway, that means there are a huge number of HN readers that rarely participate in any discussions, but upvoted something that largely go against the common trend on HN.
There are also some sort of political angle to it. Although I tend to think they are separate issues rather than causes.
[1] https://www.ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2021/8/27/understand...
The reality is this is adverse selection: those users probably weren't interested in a post about updates to GA, and didn't click it.
Not anti-ads and tracking doesn't mean those are pro-ads or pro-tracking.
>If that was the case we'd expect the odd pro-ad/tracking comment to always be near the top of the comments section.
It often takes lots of courage to post something contrarian. That is why it rarely happens.
I don't believe that's true. I'm pretty sure it's a no-op for me.
I made a new account, wrote a message, upvoted it with my current account.. and no change in points. I never see any message become black or "less grey" after upvote + refresh. It is a no-op for me.
https://i.imgur.com/ettYnxX.png
1. Do everything for free. Rarely tenable.
2. Charge for things. This necessarily puts focus of business on monetization, or at the very least, it frequently pits providing and extracting value at odds.
3. Delegate monetization (a.k.a. ads). Then you can just focus on providing maximum value to your customers and money scales proportionally.
As a builder of things who's not greedy, #3 sounds like positively best option, if it's financially viable and product type makes it possible.
My mom asked me to disable ad blocking I've set up on her devices, as she finds them useful.
Except it's not. Most content that I consume - like your comment here - is created by individuals that do not get paid no matter how the platform that the content is shared on is monetized. It's absurd to say that there would be no content without monetization and when people have content to shere there will be ways to share that content even when ads illegal or blocked by everyone. However as long as ads are accepted by the public at large, ad-laden sites will be more profitable and thus also have more resources to crush any alternatives that provide an ad-free user experience. I'm quite fine with anything that needs ads to survive to disappear as a result of ad-blocking - there will always be something else to fill my time.
If companies just put up ads relevant to article as a static image that took up a reasonable amount of space and scrolled with the rest of the content, people wouldn't complain.
When asked, more than 90% of people opt out of tracking and ads [1]. No idea what silent majority you're talking about.
> But there are, legitimate uses for Ads, and legitimate uses for tracking.
Yes, there are, and they are very limited use cases.
[1] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/05/96-of-us-users-opt-o...
- Google - Facebook - JavaScript - Anything web after 1994 - Crypto - Paying for things
It's kind of an anti-tech comedy club.
Google is a mixed bag; they used to be a force for real good on the internet, now they're mostly mediocre with a side of evil, riding on their past benevolence. I use their tools here and there, even if I think the internet is overdue for some serious de-googlization.
Facebook is just plain evil. I don't use their stuff in my personal life, but many businesses demand that you set up Facebook ads/analytics for them. I use fake accounts for those.
Amazon is pretty evil too, maybe AWS somewhat less so. I avoid them whenever possible (freelancing, etc., where I get to choose the stack) but oftentimes AWS is baked in to existing stacks and the companies are not interested in switching to anything else.
It doesn't require massive cultural differences, necessarily, but just a degree of moral compromise that most adults have to make in order to survive. Capitalism doesn't easily make for benevolent corporations and moral purity in tech is impossible when like 90% of it is owned by a dozen huge companies.
Yeah, I think that's exactly it. It happens with a lot of other topics too. It's nice that HN does seem to have more success in keeping people with opposing opinions on the site than some other communities.
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.
Just take a look at https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/9267735?hl=en
More confusing controls and useless new marketing terms!
Even more useless dat ranges!
It's all here!! The tool you don't use, but we do!
Looking forward to not using it. :I
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.
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".
The idea is that Google takes the user data and matches with their user accounts. So a user logged into Google who clicks an ad, can be tracked across devices without the need for third party cookies.
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.
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.
> 5. Activate Google Signals very low effort (If applicable; very low effort)
https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/10759417
[1] https://i.imgur.com/uZmfUfJ.png
[2] https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/10759417
And I hope they do.
It became useless to me and I haven't used it in at least five years.
If there's anyone here who still uses GA, can you tell me if they ever solved the problem of referrer spam?
At minimum they need a disavow tool.
We’ve been creating and including both with gtag(‘config’, ‘ID’) lines for some time now in anticipation of something like this.
I'm moving my clients to Matomo and they're loving it.