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It doesn't always make sense to "collect only the data you need." For example, someone in our org will ostensibly have a good reason for setting up an event in
by staticautomatic 3y ago
It doesn't always make sense to "collect only the data you need." For example, someone in our org will ostensibly have a good reason for setting up an event in Google Analytics. As the head of analytics I have no use for their event but I'm going to end up ingesting it into BigQuery anyway because the built-in GA4->BQ transfer sends ALL the data, and I'm fine with that because it's damn near free for me to ingest and store. I could instead "collect only what I need" by running the transfer through an ELT tool and filtering out that event, but why would I bother doing that work and paying the ELT vendor money when Google will do it for free and charge me like $1K/year to store 100M rows of everything collected in GA4?
- williamcotton 3y agoThat cost analysis seems incomplete. How much did it cost to implement in the first place? That seems like millions of dollars in capitalization before service expenses are even considered!
- staticautomatic 3y agoSorry but I can't tell if you're being sarcastic or not. Google Analytics and BigQuery are both nominally free, the service expense is $1K/year, and the implementation cost literally a few minutes of my time.
- williamcotton 3y agoI’m not being sarcastic. There is engineering labor that requires hooking up all of these events. Then there is maintenance costs. And many more costs, direct or otherwise.
- staticautomatic 3y agoWith respect to the example I gave, no, there actually isn’t. In fact I don’t even understand what you think the work and costs involved are.
- williamcotton 3y agoI’ve seen organizations spend millions just in engineering labor costs for such endeavors. But sure, for small companies with limited domain events to begin with, the costs are relatively lower, and probably with the lower domain complexity it is less of a share of engineering time overall. But there are still opportunity costs! It’s not free to install dependencies across numerous code bases and hook into and label the events, even for a small business.
- fifilura 3y agoOP suggests using "built-in GA4->BQ transfer [to send] ALL the data". This seems like an extremely small endeavor.
- williamcotton 3y agoSo yes, for a small business that just drops a GA snippet into the bottom of their app it is inexpensive. I’m not sure that this qualifies as the “modern data stack”. That’s also not what happens when a larger company integrates Segment into their applications! That takes many engineering months to set up and then maintain for the lifetime of the app. If the full costs are analyzed, is the money spent well? There’s sone irony here in that much effort is put towards analysis of user behavior but very little effort put towards accounting for where the money is spent internally. That is why there is a slowdown in customers using these MDS products, not what the author of the article claims, rather that when feet are put to the fire, expensive services that haven’t paid off their debt are given the axe.
- fifilura 3y agoI think i can spot the difference in interpretation here. GG*GGP "someone in our org will ostensibly have a good reason for setting up an event in Google Analytics" In this case they already have Google Analytics. The question is whether it was worth exporting that data to BigQuery. Then whether it was worth setting up GA in the first place is not discussed.