[Guest10928391]

A number of the large ad networks I work with requested Google Analytics data for review when going through my application.

If you ever want to sell your site, having a decade of Google Analytics is valuable.

Yes, you could use a different analytics software or logs for the above. However, since Google Analytics is the standard, it's familiar, trustworthy, and performs equally across all sites. For example, Google Analytics shows I have about 1,000,000 page views a day. I have Apache blocking at least 30 user agents from common types of bots and scripts. Even so, my database logs show about 10,000,000 page views a day getting through to my site. That's a pretty large difference in reporting. This is why if someone is buying or analyzing a site, they want to compare the same source, such as Google Analytics, across all properties they're considering.

[marcus_holmes]

This is a problem I see - that no two analytics engines actually agree on the numbers, and none of them agree with my server logs.

I just flat don't trust GA, on anything. I can't trust it to give me the right numbers, so how do I know the rest of the data is actually correct, and what is the point of slowing my site down to have it?

I'll have a look at Fathom. If its numbers agree with my server logs then I'll think about adding it in. I can see the usefulness, but I'd prefer to just analyse the logs I'm already keeping (and maybe expand them to include user behaviour on the client).

[lucb1e]

If you ever want to sell your site, a decade of data is valuable. But the relevant part is when you start growing. If you have a couple of visitors, just maintain the site for fun (like my personal blog and some handy tools that I and a few others use), the data of that period is not going to be very interesting anyway. Once it starts growing and you start thinking "maybe this site has value for many people", then the analytics is more than -- as your parent comment says -- "well, no, but it's nice to have…". I don't think you're disagreeing: it's valuable if you want to sell, but if it's only nice to have and not necessary, you're probably also not having the kind of site worth selling.

So in conclusion, I support not putting analytics on sites that don't need it. And if it turns out you need it, most of it can be reconstructed from access logs (perhaps not the user's screen resolution, but definitely rough visitor counts). We have enough bloated pages already. But of course, if you already expect that you might need the data later, it's a different kind of site.

[saagarjha]

I can’t imagine selling saagarjha.com ;)