Analytics.js

Languages and libraries

analytics library

SHOW HN2012

326points
67comments
#31of 1,677 in 2012
Top 2%of 2012 by points

How HN took it

MixedNo clear lean

4 positive, 14 neutral or asking, 3 mixed, 11 critical, out of 32 comments about the project. Thread score -0.16.

Idea: 3 for, 7 againstPerformance: 0 for, 1 againstPrivacy: 0 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

  • Useful library that helps analytics services work together

    From 3 comments
    • Great library! I know that a number of companies have created a wrapper of their own exactly for this purpose. We could contribute integration to https://bitdeli.com for those…
      vtuulos on HN
    • Happy to be supporting this project at http://customer.io . A lot of folks who use other tools want it to be easier to send the same information to everyone. Thanks guys for…
      sudonim on HN
    • Awesome, I was thinking of writing something like this, but you took the idea and made it much more powerful than i was planning.
      spaetzel on HN

Objections

  • Mapping a generic event API onto providers like Google Analytics is lossy

    From 2 comments
    • This is a cool idea for a project! The closest equivalent I'm aware of is Qubit OpenTag (https://github.com/QubitProducts/OpenTag). I'm interested in adding SnowPlow support to…
      alexdean on HN
    • It's going to be really hard to make a generic, non-lossy mapping in a static, stateless JS script. Have you looked at Google's dataLayer as an alternative yet? The setup guide…
      alexatkeplar on HN
  • Script loads provider code even when unused and blocks onload

    From 2 comments
    • How does this script impact the performance of a site? Specifically... 1. It includes code to load up various analytics tools even if you never use them. For example, if I only…
      bluesmoon on HN
    • > It includes code to load up various analytics tools even if you never use them. For example, if I only use GA and Mixpanel, do I really want to serve the bytes for all the…
      Hovertruck on HN

Requests

  • Build step that includes only the providers a site uses

    From 2 comments
    • Thanks for sharing. A useful improvement could be a build step that supplies only the metrics snippets that I want so I don't need to deliver to clients provider code I'll never…
      rossta on HN
    • How does this script impact the performance of a site? Specifically... 1. It includes code to load up various analytics tools even if you never use them. For example, if I only…
      bluesmoon on HN
  • Support for Omniture

    From 1 comment
  • Screenshots showing how examples appear in each analytics app

    From 1 comment
    • This looks awesome! One thing would be nice on the demo/landing site is to maybe add screenshots of how your examples translate in Google Analytics or the others. Like karolisd…
      bluetidepro on HN

Questions

  • How event properties translate to Google Analytics

    From 2 comments
    • For event tracking, how does analytics.track('Purchased an Item', { price : 39.95, shippingMethod : '2-day' }); translate to Google Analytics? _gaq.push(['...? How many…
      karolisd on HN
    • The Google Analytics provider doesn't send properties for events. The only thing the GA API providers that's even close is a "Label" which is just a string. The idea is to get as…
      ianstormtaylor on HN
  • How to call methods before the script finishes loading

    From 2 comments
    • How does this script impact the performance of a site? Specifically... 1. It includes code to load up various analytics tools even if you never use them. For example, if I only…
      bluesmoon on HN
    • For the last question, all of the providers are initialized just like they would be normally, so GA's queue is setup already and it will just be routed the track calls.
      ianstormtaylor on HN

Alternatives named

  • Qubit OpenTag

    From 1 comment
    • This is a cool idea for a project! The closest equivalent I'm aware of is Qubit OpenTag (https://github.com/QubitProducts/OpenTag). I'm interested in adding SnowPlow support to…
      alexdean on HN
  • Piwik

    From 1 comment
  • Snowplow

    From 1 comment
    • We're more of an opensource complement to GA (rather than alternative), but for completeness: https://github.com/snowplow/snowplow
      alexatkeplar on HN
  • Google Tag Manager

    From 2 comments
    • Three words: Google Tag Manager.
      novaleaf on HN
    • There's also Google Tag Manager. It's not itself an analytics script, but it provides a clean way to separate tags from code (one tag to rule them all). In addition, it's…
      Nagyman on HN
  • Open Web Analytics

    From 1 comment

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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