Google Analytics

[foxfirefey]

LiveJournal has never allowed any real web analytics to be added to personal journals, although sponsored communities were able to get them. Sure, you could add stat counters or web bugs from LJ Toys. But I'm unaware of any way on LiveJournal to get the referral URL of people who were linking to your post, save for the recently implemented and entirely optional pingbacks.

Dreamwidth, however, is going to give paid users Google Analytics as a feature. This means that paid users will be able to know who in DW is linking to them, leading to some interesting changes from the way things used to be. I think this has the potential to surprise and upset people.

For instance, let's say you link to someone's post in a friends only post in your journal or use <user name="user"> to link to their journal in a locked post. Some of your access given subscribers click on that link, and if the user you linked to is paid and using Google Analytics, they'll know you were talking about them in a post they don't have access to, and if you linked to a specific post, they'll know which post you're talking about. Stealth talking about people has become that much harder and unreliable.

There's a limited ability to avoid this. URLs are automatically turned into links; you can do formatting to make it unlinked, so people have to copy and paste, but some people have browser extensions that will autolink anything that looks close to a URL, so you can't always depend on that. You'll have to go above and beyond to obfuscate the link to make sure that doesn't happen and not use user tags to link to someone--but if you don't do that, someone is bound to make a Greasemonkey script that could go to a highlighted name, and they'll still get the referral. Edit: charmian and kaki point out that URL obfuscators might get used more, like TinyURL and anonym.to. I agree with this! However, there are even browse add ons that resolve those services to their actual URLs, so even that is not a failsafe.

What effects do you think this is going to have on social interactions on Dreamwidth? What other effects will Google Analytics have on users?

Comments

[alittlebirdy]

I hope this isn't too much of a noob question, but I am unfamiliar with GA, particularly in this context. I am just wondering, who will have access to the GA data? If I have a paid account and I am using GA, is the data restricted to just my eyes? does DW as a company have access to that data? is it available to the public?

I'm not too worried about people talking about me behind my back, but I think having it turned on when you write fanfic, or make icons or layouts or post photos will be great. You'll be able to see who is hotlinking (once DW have their version of scrapbook running) who is reading your fic (or at least how many people are), how many people are looking at your photos/art even if they aren't commenting. I know on LJ I had a photo blog for a brief period, but rarely got comments. Would have been nice to know if people were looking at least, would have been so much more motivating, pushing me to add more content.

[foxfirefey]

It is not too much of a noob question!

Only Google and the person who has the Google Analytics account can view GA data. You can, however, give other people access to your Google Analytics account, but that's something you set up on your own. (I imagine this would be the kind of thing communities would do.) This data is not available to the public.

I don't think it will let you know who is hotlinking, because hotlinks don't load the JavaScript Google Analytics uses to keep its statistics.

But it will let you see how many people are reading your fic, although it won't be able to match up users with their accounts or anything. (The closest it comes is that you can generally assume a referral link from an account's reading list probably comes from that account, but even that isn't certain in many cases, as public posts on your reading list can be viewed by others.)

It won't let you know if someone is just reading your post on their friends list, but it will let you know if they go view something under the cut. But yes, it would let you know that people were looking at your journal.

DW as a company doesn't have access to Google Analytics data--they can't log into your account or anything--but they have access to any data Google Analytics could make just because they're hosting the servers and anybody running servers has access to logs like that if they so choose and that's true across the whole internet. LiveJournal keeps track of that kind of stuff too, for instance. And it's important to the service for DW and LJ to have those kinds of statistics--there's certain things you can tell, like if you have User Interface problems that are causing people to abandon tasks halfway through.

[sophie]

In addition to what Fey said above, I should point out that while DW uses Google Analytics for the main site, there's a hardcoded block in place that prevents it from showing on any journal pages, so even DW's own GA account won't show them that information.