The Cobbler's Childern are Barefoot
It would not be the first time technologies from the same firm are incompatible.
Google Analytics crippled by autoimmune disease
You have no interest in using Google Gmail? You're not alone. Google Analytics feels much the same way. Hugh Abbott, a London-based IT consultant, runs Google Analytics on behalf of several clients, generating detailed reports on the traffic hitting their websites. Naturally, there are times when he's interested in sharing …
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Saturday 24th January 2009 15:38 GMT Grant
Maybe just not linked
I know last year I got one of my clients with gmail to see their google analyticts but I had to send them a link google analytics page https://www.google.com/analytics because the analytics link would not appear on their google panels. If the were logged in to their gmail and then went to the link things worked ok.
So does it still work?
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Saturday 24th January 2009 15:38 GMT john jones
cant Spend money on adwords either
anayltics also has another problem
lets say you have regional websites i.e. example.com , example.co.uk and example.eu
you want to spend dollars ($) on example.com while also the marketing dept in uk spend Pounds (£) on the .co.UK website
YOU CAN NOT
only one account is allowed to spend money on adwords campaign at any one time
thats crazy how much money have they thrown away ???
crazy
regards
johnjones
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Saturday 24th January 2009 22:40 GMT James
Not just Google
Facebook has a similar anomaly: if I create an event, I can invite anybody to it by email address - unless that address is associated with a Facebook account, in which case I can only invite that person if they're on my friends list. Presumably Analytics (and Facebook) is identifying these addresses as belonging to user accounts and handling them differently, then in this case there's some bug with the latter process.
@Charlie Clark: "data protection legislation" bans me from knowing the rough location and configuration of my websites' visitors?! I've heard it used as an excuse for all sorts of institutional stupidity, but if it actually says I'm not allowed to analyse the things Analytics collects, the authors need a serious battering with the clue-by-four.
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Sunday 25th January 2009 15:14 GMT Ken Hagan
Re: gmail for business
"Why oh why are companies still using third party email providers for their business?"
Why oh why is anyone still using a free email provider for anything? Hint to the clueless: if you prefix all your email subject lines with "[SPAM]" then that's probably less likely to get you dropped by any half-decent filter.
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Sunday 25th January 2009 16:47 GMT Steve Roper
More on data protection
As a web dev company, we stopped using Google Analytics some months ago as we noticed an increasing percentage of unlogged visits - i.e. people using various blockers to block or deny google-analytics.com. We subsquently developed our own in-house tracking system which is woven into each site's server-side code, and is therefore unblockable without blocking the entire website.
Information we collect from visitors includes: IP address, ISP, country of origin, browser type and version, time of access, pathing information (a list of pages on the site visited by the client in order and time elapsed between page deliveries), and most information submitted by the visitor on various site forms. Credit card, banking and paypal etc. details are not retained after being passed to the appropriate transaction-processing entity, for obvious reasons. All information retained is stored encrypted and provided only to the website owner (our client). Our website owners are advised that they must legally abide by the privacy policy they provide us for publication on their site.
This information provides us, and our clients, with essential statistical and demographic information required for site maintenance, marketing and planning. It provides us with valuable feedback about the ease-of-use and navigability of our sites, which we incorporate into site upgrades and future development projects. Without this information, neither we nor our clients have a business.
So data protection laws and google-blockers notwithstanding, we have a duty to our stakeholders and clients to ensure we can provide accurate information about their site usage. Yes, I am in favour of privacy protection, which is why we only share what we collect with the relevant client on a need-to-know basis. But it is easy to carry this concept into the realm of paranoia, which is why we were forced to go in-house with our tracking.
As with any website - our site, our rules.
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Monday 26th January 2009 04:56 GMT Francis Irving
piwik
If you want something with the ease of use and javascript gathering methodology of Google Analytics, but without potential privacy problems, I highly recommend piwik.
It's an open source remaking of Google Analytics, and it's already very good and improving fast. You have to install it on your own server, but it's just PHP and MySQL so that is pretty easy to do. From then on it is as easy to configure and use as the Google stuff.
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Monday 26th January 2009 11:13 GMT Matt
@Charlie Clark, James & Adam
The DPA does not cover ANYTHING provided by Analytics. The DPA is there to protect individuals' PERSONAL data. There is NOTHING in Analytics, unless you're doing something VERY naughty with your website's data, that could constitute a breach of that. You would probably need to put the users data into the URL itself to breach the DPA - personally, I don't know any developers that would do anything that moronic.
Paris, because she knows all about divulging personal stuff!
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Monday 26th January 2009 12:58 GMT Charlie Clark
@Matt
IP addresses can be treated as personal information particularly on a corporate network. The Data Protection Act certainly does prohibit passing on personal information electronically to third parties. On top of that, of course, is the Google cookie that gets set which is not at all required for the service. I know that the issue is currently under review in Germany with the recommendation to ban the use of Google Analytics likely. One of the companies I work is looking to ban the use of Analytics worldwide. But as I said in my initial post the use is currently only a possible breach of data protection legislation.
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Tuesday 27th January 2009 04:01 GMT Anonymous Coward
@matt
you do realise that the DPA covers the processing of all data, personal data is only a part of that that's treated more securely. And since a court has ruled that an ip address is personally identifiable data, that probably covers a hell of a lot that google gathers.
@ ac
gmail for business, are you insane? you are opening up all of your companies communications to a third party, who have specifically stated that they will scan those communications for commercial purposes!! It may provide more functionality, but falls over badly in the security department, at least internal mail is internal!
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Sunday 8th February 2009 05:53 GMT Anonymous Coward
No good for a civilisation collapse or 'library burning'
People in Businesses tend to use external email accounts because the company email servers is either underpowered, doesn't allow large emails, can be snooped on by IT, or has brain-dead attachment filtering! I've seen it, from both sides!
Anyhow, I filter out Google Analytics, and other tracking sites, in my work and home Firefox (thanks to Adblock Plus and NoScript), because I like privacy and fast web page rendering. If companies want tracking, they should do it via their web server pages or logs!
This topic is closed for new posts.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
