After nearly a year of not checking any of my website analytics, I might take a moment to actually reinstall some of them since they broke down a while ago.
What I learned was, I’m not locked in with my analytics. My analytics are locked in with me. I’m not even sure when they stopped functioning, since I didn’t care.
I literally don’t know how many people came to my website in the past six months other than “a lot”. I do know the number of paying members and my overall research revenue, but not the number of visitors to public pages as I used to.
So now that I don’t give a shit about my analytics anymore, I figure I might as well take the time to reinstall them and see what they are.
Feels like a line from Fight Club. Only once we lose something do we begin to care for it. In my randomness I randomly decided that it would be nice to know the number of readers per post again, after having spent a long time of not caring or measuring by accident and apathy.
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"Don't it always seem to go,
That we don't know what
we've got till it's gone?
Pave paradise, put up a parking lot."
- Joni Mitchell
Just don’t use it. Most of us use google tracking blockers. So it’s not accurate anyways.
If I may respectfully suggest, there are self-hosted analytics options.
That will be more accurate because they'll use your domain name and not Googles, that sensible people block
Remove analytics, remove any cookies, remove cookie popup. Your visitors will thank you.
Google analytics is a huge pile of junk. Made for agencies so they can generate (and bill) hundreds of irrelevant reports to their customers.
There's only one metric that counts: how much revenue does your site generate. All the rest is vanity
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I would like to join others on what they said - most of us block analytics.
I tried in the past to self host analytics and this one works fine: https://matomo.org/download/
Easy to integrate them with WordPress.
But unless you sell traffic to your website (ad space) then the only useful metric is revenue.
You could consider hiring an ops person to help you out.
I agree with this sentiment, but Fathom Analytics is a better model than Google for those who still do want to use analytics.
Google keep on changing the product, and seem to increasingly be obfuscating the interface. Or maybe I'm just growing more stupid in my old age
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