Our recent migration to GA4 left a lot to be desired and led us to explore for better google analytics alternatives. We tried just about everything out there, including Plausible, Fathom, and several others, all with their own pros and cons. The biggest hurdles were: limited features and higher costs.
That’s why we were so excited when we stumbled across Fullres recently. Not only do they have the best pricing around but they’re bundling multiple tools we use—ad revenue, analytics, web vitals—all into a single platform. Usually, you have to subscribe to multiple services and jump between browser tabs to see that amount of data together. Looking at their roadmap, there’s a lot more coming too.
Fullres also stood out with their quick 5-second installation setup. You get instant access to audience statistics in a GDPR-compliant manner and built-in Web Vitals data to continuously improve key metrics such as First Contentful Paint (FCP), Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), and other more.
For those who found the switch to GA4 challenging, Fullres is worth a try. It’s currently invite-only, so join the waitlist as soon as possible to get early access.
Real-time analytics is necessary for any business that needs to make decisions in hours, minutes, or seconds. Implementing real-time analytics requires processing high volumes of input data and matching it with existing data in minutes, seconds, or even less time.
This Refcard aims to acquaint readers with real-time analytics, where it is used, how it works, and the challenges involved.
Websites are undoubtedly the cornerstone (or corner store) of online businesses. The technology used to monitor, understand, and optimize their performance, however, has been rather stagnant until more recently. The emergence of Website Intelligence is seeking to put an end …
Are you looking to switch to the latest Google Analytics version?
Google is now recommending website owners to move to the new Google Analytics 4 because they will be sunsetting the previous Universal Analytics on July 1, 2023. After the sunset day, you won’t be able to track data in the older version.
In this article, we’ll show you how to easily switch to Google Analytics 4 in WordPress.
Why Switch to Google Analytics 4?
Google Analytics 4 (GA4) is the latest version of Google Analytics. It lets you track your mobile apps and websites in the same account, and offers new metrics, reports, and tracking features.
If you haven’t created a GA4 property yet, then now is the best time to switch to the latest version. That’s because Google announced that it will be closing down the old Universal Analytics on July 1, 2023.
What this means is that Universal Analytics will no longer receive data from your WordPress website, and it will eventually stop working after the sunset date. That means that all your old analytics data will be lost.
Switching to Google Analytics 4 as soon as possible will protect you from starting from scratch with no historical data.
To do this right, a lot of smart website owners are using the dual tracking method which allows you to continue using the current Universal Analytics while start sending data to GA4.
This way, you can future-proof your data while giving yourself plenty of time to learn the new Google Analytics dashboard and features.
That being said, let’s see how you can switch to Google Analytics 4 in WordPress with dual tracking.
Creating a Google Analytics 4 Property
If you already have an existing Google Analytics account using the old version, then you can eaily create a new GA4 property and start sending stats to GA4.
After that, head over to the ‘Admin’ settings page in the bottom left corner.
If you’re on classic Google analytics, then you’ll see the option to setup GA4.
Go ahead and click on ‘GA4 Setup Assistant’ under the Property column.
In the next step, the setup assistant will give you 2 options. You can create a new Google Analytics 4 property or connect an existing one.
Since we’re setting up a new property, simply click the Get Started button under the ‘I want to create a new Google Analytics 4 property’ option.
A popup will now appear with the details about the setup wizard.
If you’ve implemented your Universal Analytics using the Global Site Tag (gtag.js) code, then you’ll see an option to Enable data collection using existing tags.
This uses the existing tracking code on your site to collect information. That said, if you don’t already have the right tracking code on your website, we’ll show you how to add it to your WordPress blog below.
For now, you can go ahead and click the ‘Create property’ button.
The setup wizard will add a new GA4 property and copy the Universal Analytics property name, website URL, timezone, and currency settings.
You can now view your new Google Analytics 4 property in the GA4 Setup Assistant.
Next, you’ll need to click on the ‘See your GA4 property’ button to see your Google Analytics tracking code.
After clicking on the button, simply click on the ‘Tag installation’ option to retrieve your tracking code.
You should now see your new GA4 property under Data Streams.
Go ahead and click on your new property.
A new window will slide in from the right, and you’ll be able to see your web stream details.
Note: Google Analytics 4 uses both ‘data stream’ and ‘web stream’. These both simply mean the flow of analytics data that Google Analytics receives from your website.
Simply scroll down to Tagging Instructions section and click the Global site tag (gtag.js) option to expand the settings. You’ll now see your Google Analytics tracking code that needs to be added to your WordPress site.
One thing you need to know is that Google Analytics 4 reports are quite different than what you’re used to in Universal Analytics.
They have introduced new terminology, and many familiar metrics and reports are missing completely. Basically if you were using common reports like the Top Landing Pages report or others, then you’d have to recreate those from scratch in Google Analytics 4.
It will help you see all the familiar analytics reports right in your WordPress dashboard, and it also lets you use both Universal Analytics and Google Analytics 4 at the same time.
Not to mention, with MonsterInsights you get all the powerful tracking features such as outbound link tracking, author tracking, and more which can be enabled without writing any code.
Let’s take a look at how to easily set up Google Analytics 4 on your WordPress site with MonsterInsights.
Adding Google Analytics Tracking Code to WordPress Site
The best way to add Google Analytics tracking code to your WordPress website is by using MonsterInsights. This is the plugin that we use on WPBeginner.
MonsterInsights is the best Analytics solution for WordPress, and it’s trusted by over 3 million websites because it lets you easily setup advanced tracking without any coding skills.
You can use the MonsterInsights Lite version to set up Google Analytics in no time. There are also premium MonsterInsights plans that offer more features like custom dashboard reports, email summaries, scroll tracking, eCommerce tracking, premium integrations, and more.
MonsterInsights also offers dual tracking, meaning you can use both Universal Analytics and Google Analytics 4 at the same time. This is available in both the free version as well paid, and we highly recommend using this to ensure that your transition to GA4 goes smoothly.
First, you’ll need to install and activate the MonsterInsights plugin. For more details, please see our guide on how to install a WordPress plugin.
Upon activation, you’ll be taken to the MonsterInsights welcome screen in your WordPress dashboard. Simply click the ‘Launch the Wizard’ button to add Google Analytics to your site.
After clicking the button, the setup wizard will ask you to choose a category that best describes your website.
You can choose from a business website, publisher (blog), or online store. Once you’ve selected a category, click the ‘Save and Continue’ button.
In the next step, you’ll need to connect MonsterInsights with your WordPress site.
Go ahead and click the ‘Connect MonsterInsights’ button.
Once you click the button, you’ll need to sign in to your Google Account.
Simply select your account and click the ‘Next’ button.
Next, MonsterInsights will require access to your Google Analytics Account.
MonsterInsights App needs these permissions, so it can help you setup analytics properly and show you all the relevant stats right inside your WordPress dashboard.
You can click the ‘Allow’ button to continue.
After that, you’ll be redirected back to the MonsterInsights setup wizard.
To complete the connection, select your Google Analytics 4 property from the dropdown menu and click the ‘Complete Connection’ button.
Next, MonsterInsights will connect Google Analytics with your WordPress website.
On the next screen, you’ll see some recommended settings like file download tracking and affiliate link tracking.
Next, you can scroll down and select who can see reports and add different WordPress user roles.
Once you’re done, click the ‘Save and continue’ button.
After that, MonsterInsights will show different tracking features that you can enable for your website.
You can scroll down and click the ‘Skip for Now’ button.
Next, you’ll see a checklist showing that you’ve successfully connected Google Analytics to your website.
For example, it will show that you’re successfully connected to Google Analytics, the tracking code is properly installed, and the data is being collected.
That’s it, you’ve added Google Analytics 4 property to your WordPress site.
Creating a Measurement Protocol API Secret
If you want to MonsterInsights to track eCommerce purchases, form conversions, and more advanced tracking in Google Analytics, then you’ll need to create a Measurement Protocol API Secret.
First, you’ll need to go back to your Google Analytics account and then go to Admin settings. Next, click on the ‘Data Streams’ option under Property column.
Then you’ll need to select the Google Analytics 4 property that we created earlier.
Go ahead and select your property under Data Streams.
After that, you can scroll down to the ‘Advanced Settings’ section.
Simply click the ‘Measurement Protocol API secrets’ option.
A new window will now slide in with your Measurement Protocol API secrets.
You will have to click the ‘Create’ button.
After that, enter a nickname for your API secret so it’s easily identifiable.
When you’re done, click the ‘Create’ button.
You should now see your Measurement Protocol API secret.
Simply copy the API secret under the ‘Secret value’ field.
After that, you can head back to your WordPress website and navigate to Insights » Settings from your dashboard.
Now click on the ‘General’ tab at the top.
Next, you will have to scroll down to the ‘Google Authentication’ section.
Go ahead and enter the Secret value you just copied in the Measurement Protocol API Secret field.
You’ve successfully added Measurement Protocol API Secret in MonsterInsights.
Setting Up Universal Analytics Dual Tracking
Now that you have setup GA4, the next step is to enable dual tracking for Universal Analytics, so it can run alongside your Google Analytics 4 property in WordPress.
With MonsterInsights, you can easily set up dual tracking and simultaneously track both properties without writing code.
Note: If you already have Universal Analytics tracking code added to your WordPress website, then we recommend disabling it first. Otherwise, it could lead to double-tracking and can skew your data.
To start setting up dual tracking properly, you can head to Insights » Settings from your WordPress admin panel and then click on the ‘General’ tab.
Next, you’ll need to scroll down to the ‘Google Authentication’ section.
Now under the Dual Tracking Profile, enter your Universal Analytics (UA) code.
You can easily find your UA code in Google Analytics Admin settings.
Simply go to the Admin settings page in Google Analytics of your Universal Analytics property.
Then click on ‘Property Settings’ under the Property column.
You should see the Tracking Id, and it will look like this: UA-123856789-5
You’ve now successfully set up dual tracking on your WordPress website.
To see how your website is performing, simply go to Insights » Reports. Here you’ll find all the data you need to make the right decisions to grow your website.
Salesforce and Snowflake became strong technology partners more than a year ago. That partnership fruited prebuilt, bi-directional integration options between the two leading platforms in CRM and Data domains. The solution offers easy-to-use, point-and-click integration to push CRM data into Snowflake Data Cloud and also receive analytics data from Snowflake into Salesforce. The native Salesforce and Snowflake integration is built on top of Salesforce Tableau CRM (recently renamed CRM Analytics).
Architecture
From a technical perspective, there are 4 options that the Salesforce-Snowflake native data integration features can offer:
Not all workloads should go to the cloud! Low latency, cybersecurity, and cost-efficiency require a suitable combination of edge computing and cloud integration. This blog post explores architectures and design patterns for software and hardware considerations to deploy hybrid data streaming with Apache Kafka anywhere. A live demo shows data synchronization from the edge to the public cloud across continents with Kafka on Hivecell edge hardware and serverless Confluent Cloud.
Not Every Workload Should Go Into the Cloud
Almost every company has a cloud-first strategy in the meantime. Nevertheless, not all workloads should be deployed in the public cloud. A few reasons why IT applications still run at the edge or in a local data center:
Data ingestion is an essential step of any modern data stack. At its core data ingestion is the process of moving data from various data sources to an end destination where it can be stored for analytics purposes. This data can come in multiple different formats and be generated from various external sources (e.g., website data, app data, databases, SaaS tools, etc.)
Why Is Data Ingestion Important?
The data ingestion process is important because it moves data from point A to B. Without a data ingestion pipeline, data is locked in the source it originated in and this isn’t actionable. The easiest way to understand data ingestion is to think of it as a pipeline. In the same way that oil is transported from the well to the refinery, data is transported from the source to the analytics platform. Data ingestion is important because it gives business teams the ability to extract value from data that would otherwise be inaccessible.
At its core Snowflake is a data platform. It's not specifically based on any cloud service which means it can run any of the major cloud providers like Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform (GCP). As a SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) solution, it helps organizations consolidate data from different sources into a central repository for analytics purposes to help solve Business Intelligence use cases.
Once data is loaded into Snowflake, data scientists, engineers, and analysts can use business logic to transform and model that data in a way that makes sense for their company. With Snowflake users can easily query data using simple SQL. This information is then used to power reports and dashboards so business stakeholders can make key decisions based on relevant insights.
CDPs have risen up as one of the best solutions to tackle the challenge of data accessibility. Strictly speaking, CDPs collect and consolidate data from various sources and send that information to different target destinations (i.e. marketing tools and sales tools). The purpose of a CDP is to aggregate the information from various data sources and combine it together to create a single 360-degree view of the customer.
In addition to this, they also provide an additional activation layer to enable marketing automation. This is because CDPs were created to analyze user behavior and personalize their experiences. Every company has data, so CDPs are useful for both B2C companies and B2B companies.
There is a lot of discussion surrounding Snowflake and Databricks in determining which modern cloud solution is better for analytics. However, both solutions were purpose-built to handle different tasks, so neither should be compared from an “apples to apples” perspective.
With that in mind, I’ll do my best to break down some of the core differences between the two and share the pros/cons of each as unbiasedly as possible. Before diving into the weeds of Snowflake and Databricks though, it is important to understand the overall ecosystem.
With the world on pace to reach 175 Zettabytes of data by 2025, it’s no wonder why organizations are placing such a high emphasis on building out their technology stacks. Now more than ever, companies need a way to collect and consolidate data into a single platform to derive insights quickly.
This is one of the core reasons that Snowflake and Azure Synapse Analytics have risen to such popularity. However, Synapse and Snowflake are different solutions and both should be analyzed from an unbiased lens. With that in mind, here are some of the core differences and pros/cons to Snowflake and Synapse.
As the distinction between data professionals and non-data professionals becomes smaller and smaller, the need for technology that bridges the gap between the two parties is crucial. The benefits of interacting with a data warehouse, especially with large amounts of data, are unquestionable, but as a peripheral member of the core technology team who might not be very technical, it is not always practical to generate SQL queries on the fly.
This poses a problem, especially when departments such as sales, customer success, account management, etc., want the robust insights that could come from the vast amount of data that a company is storing, but they don’t necessarily know how to quickly gather these insights.
I like counting stars. Especially stars on GitHub! Tracking the growth of popular GitHub repositories has always been interesting to me. That's why I decided to use the public data set of GitHub events in ClickHouse to create dashboards with actionable metrics.
In this tutorial, I'll explain how to build a custom front-end visualization that fetches data from a ClickHouse instance. I'll use a managed instance of ClickHouse from Altinity Cloud and Cube Cloud as the metrics API layer.
Modern data-driven applications are based on various data sources and complex data stacks that require well-designed frameworks to deliver operational efficiency and business insights. Data pipelines allow organizations to automate information extraction from distributed sources while consolidating data into high-performance storage for centralized access.
In this Refcard, we delve into the fundamentals of a data pipeline and the problems it solves for modern enterprises, along with its benefits and challenges.
Cube has been an open-source project since 2018. We try our best to listen to the community and our users to make it the best analytics API server on the market today.
We really appreciate all the help and sincere dedication our lovely community has done to provide feedback, submit pull requests, and feature ideas to improve Cube even more. We hope the soon-to-be 12,000 stars on GitHub are a representation of our dedication to making our community happy.
You're bound to have heard the term GraphQL. Unless you live under a rock. I doubt that though. GraphQL is a query language for APIs and a runtime for fulfilling those queries with your existing data.
This tutorial will show you a step-by-step guide on how to use a GraphQL API to build Postgres metrics dashboards.
Earlier this week, I tried out a starter theme for a blog platform. The theme had loads of nice default features: pretty typography, fancy navigation, dark mode widget… and a couple of default trackers I really don’t want just sitting there in a header component, waiting for me to add my account information.
As web development has become increasingly complex, more starters, frameworks, and embeddable tools have been created to simplify our developer experience. Just paste this one line of code into the <head> of your site, and you’ll be a 10× full stack developer in no time. Sometimes we’ll pull out a feature we don’t want or the code we don’t need, but who has the time for a line-by-line review? If you got a feature for free, you might as well use it!
Over-simplifying our setup is risky. When we don’t fully understand what we’ve embedded on our site, we give up control of that feature to an unknown third party. We assume the maintainer knows best because the repository has a load of stars on GitHub or because a big name uses that same script on their site. Somebody must have checked this package is legit, right?
The malicious risk
Malicious scripts for password jacking and other nefarious purposes are sometimes found in popular npm packages. Cryptojacking, where crypto miners are installed on your site without your knowledge, are more common. Just recently, Alibaba Cloud services were targeted to mine the Monero cryptocurrency. If we’re a customer of a hacked service, we might hope our provider lets us know if our site is hacked in a timely fashion. If it’s an open source package, we’ve just got to hope we’re online when someone discovers the vulnerability so we can get our sites updated quickly.
The reliability risk
Many third parties we rely on for critical features are just incompetent or unreliable. We make jokes when some big internet infrastructure goes down and leaves us with no choice but to take it easy at work, but it’s not all fun and games for sites providing vital utilities and information for people.
For many years, we’ve been sold on third-party solutions to improve performance issues on our sites. And, occasionally, you will find a service that genuinely serves your site faster and in more locations across the globe than you can throw together yourself. But the majority of the most popular sites on the web have way more than one third-party script embedded on their site. From my work on Better Blocker, I can tell you that around ten third-party scripts is low, and as many as thirty on one homepage is common, especially on news sites. Does that many third-party scripts on one page have a positive impact on performance?
The privacy risk
Whether or not the third-party feature we’ve installed on our site is nefarious, incompetent, unreliable, or does its job, it’s always a privacy risk for our site visitors.
In a world where developer experience is often the priority, it’s too easy to forget we’re using these tools to build experiences for other people. And we have a responsibility to build experiences that don’t put our site’s visitors at risk.
Any third-party script, or any resource that can log visitor information, can be considered a tracker. At best, it has tracker potential. Your analytics, fonts, iframes, content delivery networks, CAPTCHAs — they all have the potential to collect information about your site’s visitors. What information, how much, and how often depends on what the feature does and the access you’ve provided it. That information collected about an individual could be used to sell them ads, build sellable profiles of them or even be used to discriminate against them.
I know privacy isn’t a popular topic in the web community. It feels like we’re already near the bottom of the slippery slope… and sometimes it’s easier to give up than to address how reliant we are on privacy-exploiting funding models. But there are small changes we can make to protect our visitors, even if we simply start with our own personal projects.
1. Review the third-party tools you use
Do you really need two different analytics scripts on your site? Can you embed that font locally instead? Reviewing the tools you already use gives you a manageable way to improve the privacy of your project a little at a time. And you’ll get a bonus when your site’s performance improves.
2. Use privacy-respecting alternatives
Over the last few years, privacy-respecting alternatives to mainstream technology have become more popular. One of my favorite sites is switching.software, which helps you find alternatives to the popular tools you use every day. Good Reports is another one that explains the reasoning behind each recommendation.
Privacy isn’t as hard as giving up the defaults
In this post, I decided not to go into the legal issues around privacy on the web. Making sites that adhere to laws and regulations around respecting rights is essential, but we’re more likely to make great experiences for the people using our sites if we care about their privacy, rather than worrying about what we can get away with on the legal side.
Privacy is not as hard as giving up the defaults, the tools that save us time, or uncritically copying our colleagues’ approaches. But removing one tracker at a time, we can make a difference.
Metadata synchronization (sync) is a core feature in Alluxio that keeps files and directories consistent with their source of truth in under-storage systems, thus making it simple for users to retrieve the latest version of data from Alluxio. Meanwhile, understanding the internal process is important in order to tune the performance. This article describes the design and the implementation in Alluxio to keep metadata synchronized.
Why is Metadata Sync Critical in Alluxio
In Alluxio, metadata refers to the information of files and directories in the Alluxio file system, including information of their owners, groups, permission, creation and modification time, etc. Metadata is independent of their content — even if a file or directory is empty, it still has associated metadata.
