Minimal Google Analytics Snippet

Web and SaaS

web analytics snippet

SHOW HN2018

171points
70comments
#223of 2,155 in 2018
Top 11%of 2018 by points

How HN took it

CuriousMostly questions and neutral comments

2 positive, 27 neutral or asking, 1 mixed, 7 critical, out of 37 comments about the project. Thread score -0.12.

Privacy: 0 for, 3 againstPerformance: 0 for, 2 againstIdea: 1 for, 1 againstExecution: 1 for, 1 against

The thread, comment by comment

Each row is a top-level comment and its replies, in HN's order. Select a cell to open that comment on HN.

positive neutral or mixed critical about another commenter or something else the maker

What HN said

What people liked

  • Clever and tiny approach to analytics

    From 2 comments
    • Really good point and I agree. This was intriguing at first glance because who doesn't want less JS on their site?! Of course! However, missing out on other events being tracked,…
      shift8 on HN
    • Now I am intrigued to make a minimal snippet that creates a histogram of loading times.
      LolNoGenerics on HN
  • Works with SPA frameworks

    From 1 comment
    • It's cool that in also works with SPA frameworks. Thanks for sharing. In other surveilance news, I've been adding Matomo[1] for web analytics to my site for the first time. Used…
      gobengo on HN

Objections

  • Loses events and advanced features Google Analytics provides, hurting Google Ads linkage

    From 1 comment
    • Really good point and I agree. This was intriguing at first glance because who doesn't want less JS on their site?! Of course! However, missing out on other events being tracked,…
      shift8 on HN
  • Caching makes the size concern less important than claimed

    From 3 comments
    • I'm not an expert, just curious... But aren't these files cached on most users computers?
      jopsen on HN
    • Both of Google's recommended methods of adding Analytics to a website load Google's JS library asynchronously[1]. Including it has no meaningful impact a site's time to first…
      onion2k on HN
    • Isn't the tag manager and analytics library likely to be cached, thus using zero bytes on average versus the non-zero number of bytes for this library?
      jrockway on HN
  • Bypasses Google's opt-out add-on, a privacy concern

    From 1 comment
    • The snippet seems to circumvent the Google Analytics Opt-out Browser Add-on which many sites mention as a way to disable GA tracking in their privacy policy. So if you use the…
      nwellnhof on HN

Requests

  • Expose an event tracking function

    From 1 comment
    • Will add an option for that as soon as I'm home. Also got many feature requests for exposing an event function. Both of these things shouldn't add any significant size to the…
      davidkuennen on HN
  • Option to anonymize IPs

    From 1 comment
  • Configurable tracked fields

    From 1 comment
    • While you're at it, why not be less invasive and neuter some of the data you send across? Does Google need to know about screen colordepth, language settings and text encodings,…
      RodgerTheGreat on HN

Questions

  • Will the Google collect endpoint change over time

    From 1 comment
    • Very cool, thank you! Would you expect Google's API to change often? My biggest concern with something like this is their /collect endpoint changing and analytics data stops…
      FoxInBoxers on HN
  • Is it a GitHub repo

    From 1 comment

Alternatives named

  • Matomo / Piwik

    From 1 comment
    • It's cool that in also works with SPA frameworks. Thanks for sharing. In other surveilance news, I've been adding Matomo[1] for web analytics to my site for the first time. Used…
      gobengo on HN
  • Fathom

    From 1 comment
    • For the surveillance conscious I can also recommend using Fathom (https://usefathom.com). I’ve been using it for a few weeks now and have only good things to say.
      siddhant on HN
  • Ahoy for Rails

    From 1 comment
    • I can recommend https://github.com/ankane/ahoy for Rails
      masa331 on HN

Category, keywords, summaries and labels on this page were made by AI (Thread Reader v2) and not checked by hand. Each point links to the comments it came from.

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