Google analytics, privacy and latency

Question

Hi,

I'm considering putting the Google Analytics tracker on my blog to get better stats (right now I use Summary.net, which is fast but occasionally of questionable accuracy, though way better than awstats). At any rate I have 2 big concerns and though I should ask the community here for opinions:

1. Privacy. In the past I've gone so far as to block Google's IPs for adsense and tracker. Basically it seems like at this point everything you do online is visible to Google in some way or another, but at the same time I wonder if this really matters. Should I just shrug my shoulders and embed the code?

2. Latency. I'm not very technically inclined so I don't know much about this, but I heard that if Google is having issues, you site will as well, just by including their code. is that possible?

Thanks!

Answer 1

1) Impossible to answer. If you're running a website for an illegal drug trafficking network, then I probably wouldn't use Analytics. Otherwise, I personally don't care. You could monitor your HTTP traffic and see exactly what the payload is if you're concerned about them tracking anything more than simple IP / browser data. If you're concerned about them knowing "who" visited your site, and have a valid reason, then don't use it.

2) Yep. Have you ever noticed a page taking a while to load and in the status bar it says it's waiting on google-analytics.com? I see it on a somewhat frequent basis on both small and large websites. It's not too big of a problem though IMO.

I believe that it's a recommended best practice to place your analytics script as close to the bottom of your page code as possible (the same would be true for any external scripts).

I'll also add that I didn't really like the idea of Google Analytics much until I started using it. The benefits really seem to outweigh the drawbacks. Its reporting is just fantastic. I still use AwStats on the same sites, however, simply because the data is accessible...and it's nice to compare numbers.