Re: Ian Michael Gumby
> This is California Senate Judiciary Committee not the US Senate
Correct, which we did know, and we've made it crystal clear in the story now. Don't forget to email corrections@theregister.co.uk if you spot anything that may be wrong.
> Why does theregister.co.uk still use Google Analytics?
It's free and useful. It produces easy-to-view summaries of daily, weekly, and monthly traffic, and allows us to compare these year on year, or month to month, and see which regions are growing, and which stories people are most interested in, by views. It also produces a real-time dashboard so we can see the live effect of publishing, tweeting, tweaking headlines, etc.
It's just one source of indications of what works well, and what doesn't, with readers. There are other things we keep an eye on, such as comments, emails, messages, and the effect pieces have on the industry. I'd rather an article forces a company to reverse a bad policy than do mega page views.
However, in an attempt to entice us into paying for Analytics, Google's free version of Analytics becomes somewhat inaccurate after the first 10m page impressions each month, and we regularly smash through that, so we're considering other options, including non-Google paid-for analytics or perhaps rolling our own.
Any stats we quote are from our own internal stats system, which processes logs and isn't set up for real-time analysis. We could make our own form of Google Analytics, but so far we've chosen instead to put our small team of web devs onto other things more directly useful.
> El Reg never has addressed
Well, we do, in a way, in our cookies page - https://www.theregister.co.uk/Profile/cookies/ - in which you can opt out of GA and/or view its privacy policy.
Hope this helps,
C.