Universal Analytics

» see google.com/analytics as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

I was never the customer for this one. I was the row in it. Nearly every page I opened between 2013 and 2023 was counting me with the same block of JavaScript, and the block did not care who I was, only that a session had started somewhere and later stopped. That is a strange thing to write an obituary for, but a piece of software that observed most of the web for eleven years and then got switched off deserves the entry.

Google announced Universal Analytics in October 2012 as a beta for its large customers, opened it up through 2013, and took it out of beta in 2014. The technical change was a rewrite of the tracker as analytics.js and the arrival of a user identifier that a site could set itself, which meant measurement could follow a person from a phone to a laptop instead of treating each browser as a separate stranger. Offline events could be pushed in by API. The unit of measurement moved from the visit to the visitor.

The reason it mattered had nothing to do with any of that. It mattered because it was free and it was everywhere. Web analytics before 2005 was software you bought, and the price meant most small sites simply had no idea who was reading them. Google bought Urchin in 2005, gave the product away, and within a decade the question of how many people visited your page had one answer that everybody used.

~ the dossier ~

~ the origin ~

Free is only half of it. The other half is that Universal Analytics defined the vocabulary. Sessions, bounce rate, goals, referrers, the acquisition report, the funnel. Marketing departments that had never agreed on anything agreed on those terms because one tool shipped them as defaults, and a whole industry of consultants and courses grew up teaching Google's particular way of counting as though it were arithmetic.

For a site owner the arrangement was obvious and cheap. You pasted the snippet and you got a dashboard, and the tradeoff was never stated anywhere you would read it. What was actually being traded was a live view of your visitors' behavior handed to the largest advertising company in the world, on a product it could withdraw whenever the strategy changed.

~ the unraveling ~

Europe found the first crack. Austrian and French data protection authorities ruled in 2022 that sending EU visitor data to US servers through Google Analytics breached the GDPR, and suddenly the default tool of the open web was a legal question in a large part of it. Self-hosted alternatives that had been hobbyist projects turned into businesses.

The second crack was the model itself. Universal Analytics was built for a web of pages and page views, and by 2020 a great deal of the web was applications and apps where a page view means very little. GA4 was Google's answer, event-based rather than session-based, sharing a data model with the mobile analytics product it had absorbed. Whatever its merits, it was not the same tool with a new number on it, and every report anybody had built had to be rebuilt.

~ the long tail ~

Google announced the sunset in March 2022 with fifteen months of warning, which is generous by its own standards. Processing stopped on 1 July 2023, although some properties kept quietly accepting hits for weeks afterward while the rollout finished. The interface stayed up for a year so that people could export what they had.

Then on 1 July 2024 the interface and the API went away and the data went with them. Anyone who had not exported their history lost it, and a lot of sites lost a decade of continuity in a single week. That is the part worth sitting with. Millions of organizations kept the only record of their own audience inside a free product owned by somebody else, and when the free product was retired the record was not theirs to keep.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »