[borisandcrispin]

We used it a lot some years ago when we built a chatbot for FB Messenger. It was a great surprise. FB analytics was very hidden, but once you got there their product was quite good. Simple to use and gave us 95% of everything we needed to know.

The problem was that you obviously needed to use it with Facebook. As we started building a FB chatbot, that was not an issue, but for any other product it didn't make sense.

We considered:

- Mixpanel was way too expensive for us.

- Google analytics is definitely not a product analytics tool.

- Game Analytics was a good tool, but too much focused on games.

Analytics tools can be very expensive and there weren't many good free alternatives that we were aware of.

[esnard]

> - Google analytics is definitely not a product analytics tool.

Can you elaborate on this please? I'm really not used to analytics tools, but GA does look like one to me.

[iamacyborg]

Google Analytics is all about web analytics, so you can see traffic sources, visitors, pageviews, custom events, conversion funnels, etc. Primarily your analysis is going to be around traffic sources and how individual pages are performing.

Product analytics tools are a little different in that they’re much more event based and allow for contact/account hierarchies. Ie you can group (and thus track) separate users under a single business entity. They’re also much more feature based, so you’ll primarily be looking at how features are used as opposed to app screens.

[markdown]

It's basically a spam engine. I had to stop using GA because Google, the billion dollar company with a million software engineers, couldn't figure out how to filter out spam from their product.

[firecall]

It's true.

Out of the box and just installed onto a site the data is garbage.

It provides more value to Google than it does the owner of a site.

[unixhero]

Product analytics tool, is not the same as a web traffic analytics tool. Maybe that is what he meant.

[darkwizard42]

Basically GA is more of a traffic measuring tool. It doesn't do perfect attribution of events and join them easily for you to build up a picture of the journey the customer takes.

Take for example something like Amplitude which lets you instrument and measure conversion or journey that a user takes across your product.

[anticensor]

Did you try Piwik, a free open source self-hostable analytics suite?

[toomanybeersies]

> Piwik

Now renamed as Matomo.