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Ask HN: Google Analytics sucks What do you use?

5 points by amukbils ↗ HN
Google Analytics has many flaws: - Not being able to identify what a specific user is doing and what journey they took is one of them. - The very confusing UI/UX is the other. - Lack of trust in attribution (due to lack of transparency on how the attribution happened).

My question is: is anyone else facing these issues with GA? What do you use to get a better picture of your product's usage?

13 comments

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mattbillenstein
Small startup, but I find https://getanalytics.io/ + Google BigQuery + Metabase a nice all-around solution.
amukbils
Thanks. Seems still not easy to get the kind of abstract reports I'm looking for.

Did you steer away from GA for the same reasons?

mattbillenstein
What sort of abstract reports?

I think GA just doesn't have enough features for fine-grained tracking - still useful if you're participating in their ad ecosystem.

amukbils
Well if i want to know what the journey of a specific user is. How they progressed over time. Or an aggregate of that. pretty tedious to do that now in GA
XCSme
I made my own, and it's self hosted: https://uxwizz.com

Let me know if you have any questions.

amukbils
Cool! How's it been going (business wise)?
XCSme
It's going ok, but could be a lot better. I work full-time on it and barely earn enough for a living at the moment.

I need to focus A LOT more on marketing. The product is already really good, and existing customers really love it, they even send me emails saying how much they like it. I am a developer at heart, so marketing has always been tough for me. I tried various partnerships, and currently I'm implementing some systems to help with that (affiliate system, preparing some influencer marketing, etc.).

amukbils
Pretty cool. That's a challenge many developers face btw. Good luck with that. Moreover, this market is crowded, so your messaging and positioning will require a lot of marketing money to be effective.
XCSme
Thanks!

The market is indeed crowded for analytics platforms, but actually not many focus on the self-hosting aspect.

Positioning is indeed tricky, self-hosting is not for everyone.

vgeek
Matomo has per-user tracking (visits log) across sessions. Attribution won't be perfect, but you can make it tolerable with UTM tags. It can be GDPR compliant without much effort. You can also query the raw data via SQL if you want.

PostHog is pretty popular for product companies now, but who knows how long they will continue with a free offering.

amukbils
I've heard Posthog a few times now ... definitely considering using it. Thanks!
mdotk
Plausible or Microsoft Clarity
meowtastic
I use Umami. It's a plugin on Caprover, which is an open source Heroku like