In 2020, with better alternatives available, using Google Analytics (GA) to track your web usage is nothing short of donating data to a multinational corporation. Aside from only letting you sample 25% of your traffic, GA is a free ticket for them to sell your customers' data to their advertising partners.
Compared to AWS Pinpoint, which is even HIPAA compliant, GA works by asking you to add a tracker to your website that cross examines your customers' habits across all the websites they use to find out everything about them.
And if you think that's okay, you should take your head out of the sand because consumers are demanding it. Please tell me how many of your users like the large cookie agreement popups that they have to dismiss...I-I mean read and accept just to consume your content. Agreements that you're forced to have them agree to because you're using cookie-based trackers like GA.
Tracker blockers are increasing in popularity so consumers can protect themselves against this tracking, reducing the effectiveness of your analytics.
Even if you want to be selling your customers' data, data is the new oil and GA is Deepwater Horizon. As in raking it in, but also about to catch fire and sink. Tools like Pinpoint on the other hand keep the data in your closed system and even allows you to attach more extensive analytics like Kinesis. To train machine learning models on data you've collected would require you to create pipelines between data centres. It's a single click:
Currently, AWS Pinpoint requires you to import Amplify to your project. If you're looking for a tracking-tag solution like for Google Analytics, it's now that simple:
<script
data-id-pool="us-east-1:abcd1234-abcd-1234-5678-abcd12345678"
data-pinpoint-id="1234abcd5678abcd7890abcd1234"
id="aws-web-analytics"
src="https://goatandsheep.github.io/aws-web-analytics/dist/aws-web-analytics.js"
type="text/javascript"
></script>
This is thanks to an analytics package I built that uses Amplify to connect to AWS Pinpoint. If you're interested in contributing, please visit the project repo.
Oldest comments (8)
lol stop using GA and use AWS
So, what is the point of this post exactly "Stop giving data to Google" and start "giving data to Amazon"?!
The difference is huge. Aws does not siphon off customer data. Google's entire biz is built on doing just that. GA is free because your data gets sold off to advertisers. Aws is paid because it's an actual service for YOU.
I would use an alternative service. I help run a popular ad-based MMO game, and all the current solutions would eat too much into margins.
Thanks for the writeup! For the commenters that are also concerned about AWS, there's always Fathom. It's open source if folks want to run it themselves, but there's also a reasonably price hosted version.
Definitely not as flexible as the AWS Pinpoint strategy, but it's a nice middleground for folks that want some basic traffic analytics without GA.
Self hosted is the only way I would go with something like this.
Another good option IMO is Matomo, which allows you to self-host and maintain control of the data
I use clicky and think it's pretty good. It's got a reasonable privacy policy for users.