Can you build your own Google Analytics?

It probably has crossed the mind of many organisations if you could build your own Google Analytics. After all, the actual collection of the data seems relatively straightforward from websites and apps and now with cloud storage and computing, it should be possible economically to store and process that data. Then by connecting a reporting tool you can create the reports and analysis that you need.

The build or buy debate is an old one in tech, but not one that doesn’t have merit. Our CEO, when working for a large broadcaster, needed a way to track online video content. Unfortunately, the main suppliers at the time, Omniture (now Adobe Analytics) and WebTrends were not designed to collect data about videos. There were some specificities in how video views were counted that technology based on pageviews did not address. For example, did a video view happen on the pressing of the play button or when the content loaded in the video player.?

Don’t forget back in 2007, broadband speeds were not as fast as they are now, and many people encountered buffering issues. So many people would press play and abandon the video as it was taking too long to load. The old web tracking technologies, based on tracking events, would track the click of the play button and inflate video view numbers.?

Therefore, our CEO instigated the building of a specific solution to track video views more accurately and create what was called then the Behaviour Capture Module (BCM). It could collect everything that web analytics tools did, but was designed specifically for capturing detailed video view information, such as when video was played in the player, percentage watched, view duration, etc. Things that are common now.?

However, this was before the era of cloud computing, and so collecting, storing and processing all that data was expensive in data centres, and since they were already using Omniture, they decided that they would only collect, store and process the video data from the BCM.?

Had this been built now, all the data could have been collected and most likely Omniture would have been discontinued at his organisation.?

So, if you have the appetite, and want to build your own digital analytics tool, then you could in theory build a composable digital analytics solution. Taking components from different providers, for example cloud storage and processing from AWS, Azure or GCP, database technologies such as Snowflake or Redshift,? reporting tools such as Power BI or LookerStudio, etc.

You would just need to weigh up the pros and cons, and whether you have a team large enough to maintain it as well. Or you could outsource it all to a trusted partner and have a digital analytics solution customised for your own needs, giving you exactly the data you want in the format that you want it. Questions of data ownership, privacy and governance will be under your control and you may even discover that when you want new features you are not beholden to the product road map of a third party.

If it is something you want to discuss, then get in touch with us at [email protected], and one of our expert consultants can discuss the right solution for you.?