[HN Gopher] Lightweight Alternatives to Google Analytics
___________________________________________________________________
Lightweight Alternatives to Google Analytics
Author : Tomte
Score : 603 points
Date : 2020-06-18 07:56 UTC (15 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (lwn.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (lwn.net)
| mobilio wrote:
| Analytics isn't count a pageviews.
|
| GA also counts - social interaction, events, Ecommerce and many
| more.
| netcan wrote:
| Tangential but...
|
| "Analytics" is rarely useful or unuseful because of the tool.
| These tools need to be treated as data collection, not reporting.
|
| If your goal is to inform certain decisions, track success or
| identify problems... a spreadsheet (or napkin) is usually where
| that happens.
|
| Say you do analysis systematically, make a list of questions and
| use your tools to answer them... usually you find that the tool
| itself doesn't matter much, and GA doesn't answer most of your
| questions out-of-the-box anyway.
|
| Say you want a "funnel." That usually consists of a handful of
| data points. GA usually doesn't have them by default, without
| tinkering configuration, etc. Decide what they are beforehand.
| Understand them. Use GA (or whatever) to get the data.
|
| Finding the tool for the job is much easier once you know what
| the job _is_. GA is extremely noisy, bombarding users with half-
| accurate, half-understood reports.
| mauserng wrote:
| Piwik PRO is also worth checking out. Our functionality matches
| GA. Our analytics is more focused on user privacy and is inline
| with privacy laws like GDPR, CCPA or industry regulations like
| HIPAA or EBA guidelines.
|
| Check out a comprehensive comparison of GA, GA360 & Piwik PRO at:
| https://piwik.pro/blog/piwik-pro-vs-google-analytics-compreh...
| mauserng wrote:
| Actually I meant sharing this link to the comparison table:
| https://piwik.pro/piwik-pro-vs-google-analytics-vs-ga360/
| komali2 wrote:
| Goat counter's been good and doesn't fingerprint.
| JackWritesCode wrote:
| Yes it does -
| https://github.com/zgoat/goatcounter/blob/master/docs/sessio...
| huhtenberg wrote:
| If you decide to migrate off GA, there's very little reason to
| not use self-hosted analytics.
|
| The only case when you'd get better analytics from a _service_ is
| exactly a GA-like setup that can track people as they go from one
| website to another. That is, the real value of an analytics
| service is derived directly from its ability to invade people
| privacy, at scale.
|
| Granted, migrating to another service is usually simpler, but it
| offers NO insights into the traffic that you can't get from
| parsing server logs and in-page pingbacks. You do however get a
| 3rd party dependency and a subscription fee.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| >The only case when you'd get better analytics from a _service_
| is exactly a GA-like setup that can track people as they go
| from one website to another.
|
| I was once making a service that provided cross site widgets
| for companies to embed. Obviously it was beneficial to track
| people as they go from one website to another, but at that
| point it was beneficial to do it with our own service.
| bttrfl wrote:
| Server logs only tell you about things that happen on your
| server. If you are using JavaScript it's likely there are
| plenty of events that might be valuable to you that never leave
| a trace in your logs.
|
| For example, if you validate forms with JS you might want to
| track form submissions and validation errors.
| huhtenberg wrote:
| _... and in-page pingbacks_
| lmkg wrote:
| > that can track people as they go from one website to another
|
| Note that even in Google Analytics, this requires extra set-up,
| has limitations, and tends to be pretty fragile in practice. GA
| identifies users by a first-party cookie and tracking cross-
| site visits requires decorating links with cookie values.
|
| If you're interested just in aggregate traffic from one of your
| sites to another, rather than something that requires full-path
| analysis (like marketing attribute), then you can get that from
| looking at referrers. This should be more-or-less equally
| available in GA and server logs.
| jedimastert wrote:
| > If you decide to migrate off GA, there's very little reason
| to not use self-hosted analytics.
|
| My personal domain[0] was taken by domain squatters (forgotten
| bill in debit card shuffle, bought up within seconds of expire)
| so for now I have to host on github.io. Thoughts on an
| analytics service?
|
| [0]: http://www.aarontag.com/
| elondaits wrote:
| My reason is the server not being able to handle the traffic.
| We used Piwik but I couldn't trust it'd be able to handle big
| eventual spikes of traffic (which the site itself could, being
| static and on a CDN) or that it wouldn't slow the site down (if
| I remember correctly I had the option to call piwik
| asynchronously and not slow down the site, but at risk that
| it'd be less accurate if people closed the window / navigated
| to another page quickly.).
|
| Of course you can run your own analytics on AWS or similar and
| have no issues with handling traffic, but that means higher
| costs / difficulty in setting up and maintaining it.
| dynamite-ready wrote:
| I often read posts stating a great deal of discouragement for
| self developed analytic solutions. I've recently developed a home
| rolled solution for a product I'll hopefully launch soon.
|
| There's no UI for my signals application, but it should give me
| raw access to all the GA metrics people typically look for
| (pages, referrers, user agents, etc). Storage could be pain
| point. Compute might also turn out to be, but if that ever
| becomes a problem, then I'll probably have much more to think
| about...
|
| What am I missing here?
| JackWritesCode wrote:
| Opportunity cost. Hacker News has some of the best developers
| in the world reading it. $100-500 / hourly rates. Why would
| they spend their time building & maintaining something when
| they could pay $140 / year for a top tier, privacy-focused
| analytics product like Fathom, where both founders work full
| time on it?
|
| Then you have redundancy of data. How are they backing up
| historical data? Are they running with failovers? How will
| their analytics do in the event that they get a hug of death
| from Hacker News or Reddit? There are so many factors to
| consider.
|
| I don't think we should discourage people from rolling their
| own if they enjoy it. Heck, I've built things that existed.
| That's how we get better. I'm just sharing why a lot of
| developers won't roll their own.
| nuccy wrote:
| I'm honestly curious, are all the analytics tools, which rely on
| making third party queries, still efficient with extensive use of
| adblocking these days?
|
| If not, then logs of webservers are the only 100% reliable place
| (if available of course), so old-style tools like awstats,
| Webalizer, etc [1] should have a rise in popularity again.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_web_analytics_software
| JackWritesCode wrote:
| Server side Analytics are far from reliable. Go and try
| Netlify, then you'll see how unreliable they really are.
|
| For us nerds, we can always block things using DNS level
| blocking but Fathom's custom domain feature has done really
| well for the majority: https://usefathom.com/blog/custom-
| domains-embed-code
| pkalinowski wrote:
| Good adblockers do DNS lookup to see if subdomain points to
| tracking server anyway.
|
| Only completely self-hosted (your domain, your tracking
| server) solutions are resilient to adblocking
| JackWritesCode wrote:
| For now
| nuccy wrote:
| Interesting, then as a workaround trackers may create an
| image with pseudo-random src pointing to
| pageXXXwebsiteYYYclientZZZ.ad.yoursite.com (yoursite.com is
| the site which serves the actual content), while asking the
| owner to point NS record for ad.yoursite.com to IP of their
| DNS server. So HTTP/S request or DNS request can reach them
| anyway. Obviously DNS caching will prevent them from
| knowing how many times this particular page was accessed by
| this particular client, but at least they will know that it
| was accessed at least once.
| Carpetsmoker wrote:
| You can set up a proxy, which isn't too hard (and operating
| a proxy is a lot simpler than operating an analytics
| service)
| elcomet wrote:
| The issue is that people often use free reverse proxies like
| cloudflare, that do caching, so not all requests reach the
| original server.
|
| In this case, the source of truth is cloudflare's loadbalancer,
| but you have to pay them to get full analytics.
| steviedotboston wrote:
| Until one of these alternatives is completely free like Google
| Analytics is I don't see a massive shift happening. I'm a web
| developer and there's no way I'd convince my clients to pay
| $20/month for something that Google offers for free.
| JackWritesCode wrote:
| There's a huge shift happening. People are realizing that
| Google Analytics isn't "free". You're sending data to a company
| that has a huge amount of privacy scandals.
|
| We have lots of agencies who use us, and their clients may
| differ from yours, but here's what's helped them:
| https://usefathom.com/blog/switch
| FalconSensei wrote:
| > There's a huge shift happening. People are realizing that
| Google Analytics isn't "free".
|
| Just be aware that, while that is true for HN, and some
| subreddits, that still doesn't apply to most people. It's the
| same as saying, based on comments on HN, that people are
| moving away from Chrome when its market share is not going
| down.
| AdriaanvRossum wrote:
| Thanks for mentioning Simple Analytics [1]. We are at this point
| indeed only cloud based. We believe we need to make a business
| case/profit first before putting a lot of extra work in a open
| source version and maybe failing with the business. It's a dream
| to make it open source, but not at this time.
|
| We are very firm on our values. We will never sell your data. We
| have many ways to get your raw data out of our system (API,
| download links, ...).
|
| Our collection script [2] is open source and today we are also
| adding source maps to our public scripts. Open source does not
| guarantee that a business runs that same software as their cloud
| based option. We are looking into services that can validate what
| we collect on our servers. We never collect any IPs of personal
| data [3].
|
| Great to see more products that care about privacy, I hope they
| will really care and commit to their values for a long time.
|
| [1] https://simpleanalytics.com
|
| [2] https://github.com/simpleanalytics/scripts
|
| [3] https://docs.simpleanalytics.com/what-we-collect
| rickette wrote:
| https://count.ly also looks pretty neat as a self hosted
| solution. Anyone experience with that?
| dclusin wrote:
| I use GoAccess. It's an offline access.log analytics engine. One
| feature it has is to generate static site from its db. I have an
| hourly cron script that picks up the last hours logs and
| generates a static site. You can see it in action at
| https://www.clusin.com/analytics/
|
| 1 - https://github.com/allinurl/goaccess
| mimimi31 wrote:
| I've tried GoAccess in the past, but I remember the
| documentation not being very thorough on certain topics like
| the databse, websocket connection, or log syntax. So it was a
| bit of a pain to set up.
|
| It also had some weird quirks like generating duplicate entries
| or randomly failing to parse some log lines (you seem to have
| quite a few of those "failed requests" yourelf by the way).
|
| There also doesn't seem to be a good way to display statistics
| for multiple virtual hosts. Even if you change your log format
| to include the host, you just get an additional table in the
| dashboard, but still can't look at the other metrics for each
| host separately. You'd have to run multiple GoAccess instances
| to achieve that.
| dclusin wrote:
| Yeah I definitely had to open some issues to understand how
| it works. I have multiple virtual servers as well and wasn't
| able to get it to break out links by virtual server.
|
| I figured it's fine for my needs since I literally have
| nothing on my domains. I could see it being frustrating for
| power users.
| severak_cz wrote:
| I have my own solution inspired by plausible.io and Simple
| analytics. See https://tildegit.org/severak/millions
|
| I used Matomo before, but simple dashboard in style of
| plausible.io is more useful for me. I have a little traffic on my
| sites.
| JackWritesCode wrote:
| Thanks for all the kind words about https://usefathom.com. We've
| been in business since 2018 and both founders now work full time
| on it.
|
| We're fully bootstrapped, actively rejecting millions of dollars
| in venture capital, and we are sustainable. That is the key. We
| are priced fairly, and at a level that allows us to ensure the
| longevity of our business.
|
| We are used by governments, small businesses, multi billion
| dollar companies and individuals. Everyone cares about privacy
| and legal teams love us.
|
| We are fully GDPR compliant and use zero cookies. A lot of people
| have read our article on cookie-free tracking, but that article
| is outdated now. We're also launching a new method over the next
| few weeks which is game changing, which we'll blog about.
|
| Our infrastructure is highly available and runs across multiple
| servers. We don't run our services from a single VPS, and have
| availability in multiple availability zones for everything. We
| pay premiums for our infrastructure because we take our customers
| data very seriously.
|
| We allow you to set-up a custom domain in less than 2 minutes,
| comfortably passing ad-blockers. Or if that's not your cup of
| tea, you can enable honor-DNT and respect ad-blockers.
|
| We are built to handle billions of pageviews a month, we've
| poured hundreds (thousands?) of hours into refining our
| aggregation script, and we're the leading solution on the market.
|
| Don't forget, we also offer unlimited uptime monitoring as part
| of your plan, sending alerts by SMS, Telegram, email and Slack.
|
| Finally, we run a popular podcast called Above Board, where we
| talk about business & privacy.
|
| If you haven't already checked us out, you should.
| PhilippGille wrote:
| > We are fully GDPR compliant and use zero cookies.
|
| From the GitHub repo [1]:
|
| > At present, Fathom Analytics Lite is not PECR compliant due
| to the fact that it uses an anonymous cookie. Our PRO version
| is PECR compliant, and we'll be making changes to this codebase
| some time in the future to make it compliant.
|
| The open source version seems to be lacking behind and might
| generally be treated without much love, given that their
| website doesn't even link to it (which is understandable from a
| business point of view, but doesn't inspire much confidence in
| its future maintenance).
|
| [1]:
| https://github.com/usefathom/fathom/blob/69baac5c4a4d96880a2...
| JackWritesCode wrote:
| Our goal is long term sustainability of privacy-focused
| analytics. We're achieving that. We tried to do it with the
| OS codebase, and the original tech guy left the project. The
| MRR was around $1,300 between 2 people after many months.
|
| When we focused on building a business, we were able to
| become a much more viable competitor to Google Analytics.
|
| The reason we haven't written off Fathom Lite is because
| we've always had plans to come back to it this year and put
| out an update. Will we be launching new features? No. Will we
| be fixing bugs and ensuring it's a solid product for
| individuals? Absolutely.
| css wrote:
| I have always used AWStats [0] and never thought I needed more
| information than that.
|
| [0]: https://www.awstats.org/
| acidburnNSA wrote:
| Same. Plus I have 15 years of continuous browsable data now. I
| check it all the time and it tells me what I want to know.
| r3trohack3r wrote:
| We launched https://everytwoyears.org today. It was my first
| project where I felt analytics was necessary, but also a moral
| quandary. For personal reasons, I'm very against PII big data.
| For project reasons, the project is literally about stopping mass
| surveillance so shipping a tool like Google Analytics was firmly
| off the table.
|
| I went with https://app.usefathom.com which tracks _aggregate
| anonymized_ data.
|
| They have the option to self host, but I'm sending them money to
| support the project. With today's launch, I'm really happy with
| the product. Will continue using it.
| wprapido wrote:
| A happy Matomo user
| PStamatiou wrote:
| Been using Fathom for a few months now (after migrating away from
| Gaug.es which I've had for at least 6-7 years prior but they got
| acquired by some random companies that has zero support and makes
| no improvements) and have been loving it so far. They're really
| responsive and always improving things. I like that I can cname
| the tracking script to my domain
| paulcpederson wrote:
| Also using fathom and really like it! Not having to put up a
| GPDR tracking popup is very nice, I find those quite annoying.
| JackWritesCode wrote:
| Thanks so much, really appreciate the comment here :)
| buro9 wrote:
| I've recently been pondering whether to create a log receiver
| that will produce Prometheus metrics as well as logs for Loki.
|
| Why?
|
| Because there are several open source projects that if joined up
| in a relatively simple way would provide a full RUM / Analytics
| solution.
|
| For collecting the analytics: Akamai Boomerang, which is a
| descendant of Yahoo tooling https://github.com/akamai/boomerang
| and BSD licensed
|
| Then insert a collector that will produce Prometheus metrics and
| write log lines. The metrics will provide the timing information
| and in many ways will be richer than Google Analytics, and the
| log lines will provide the potentially high cardinality of string
| based data like user agents, URIs, etc and Grafana supports
| PromQL queries against logs such that you can gain metrics from
| the log lines too.
|
| Then add in a free Grafana Cloud
| https://grafana.com/products/cloud/ and configure Prometheus to
| scrape from the collector, and Loki to consume the logs.
|
| This is an end-to-end cloud hosted RUM / Analytics solution that
| for a single user would be free and one can even add alerting.
|
| The missing link is that collector, to consume the Boomerang
| output and produce Prometheus metrics and log lines for Loki.
|
| All of this is open source and can be self hosted, the only piece
| you would have to host today would be that custom collector to
| receive the Boomerang requests.
| ahstilde wrote:
| The best alternative to Google Analytics is Parse.ly [1]. It's
| privacy-conscious, reliable, and user-friendly. Most importantly,
| it gives you important engagement metrics instead of vanity
| metrics.
|
| [1]https://parse.ly/overview
| XCSme wrote:
| If you are related to parse.ly: it's really confusing that
| clicking "pricing" doesn't show the pricing first.
| pcmaffey wrote:
| You can always roll your own basic analytics, eg
| https://www.pcmaffey.com/roll-your-own-analytics
|
| Doing so is extremely helpful to understanding what events and
| data you actually need for your use case.
| dougblackjr wrote:
| Engauge Analytics is a good alternative, and privacy focused:
| https://engaugeanalytics.com/
| krlx wrote:
| I too wished for a simpler, less invasive but still Javascript
| based, esthetically pleasing and free analytics solution (I am a
| cheap student) : https://github.com/Karalix/feu-analytics
|
| The Firebase free tier seemed perfect for my use case. It is far
| from being perfect, but Good Enough For Me(tm)
| jbrooksuk wrote:
| I've been happily using Fathom Analytics: https://usefathom.com
| and I have zero complaints.
|
| No tracking. Privacy focused. Lightweight. You embed from your
| own domain. They even do site monitoring now!
| lhdj wrote:
| My company switched to Fathom from GA about 4 days ago.
|
| We build privacy software so it felt slightly hypocritical to
| use a privacy-intrusive service like GA. So far so good.
|
| I went from 0 to Fathom in under 20 mins and for our _basic_
| requirements it works really well .
|
| Good job Fathom team :)
| JackWritesCode wrote:
| Thanks so much, glad you had such a good experience :)
| ghawkescs wrote:
| When I try to view your demo page I get 'Secure Connection
| Failed' every time. Firefox 77.0.1 on Windows 10.
| JackWritesCode wrote:
| Strange. Fully valid certificate. Try hard refreshing a
| few times.
| ghawkescs wrote:
| Still no luck, this is the URL
| https://app.usefathom.com/share/lsqyv/pjrvs. Did not load
| in Chrome either.
| JackWritesCode wrote:
| So strange. I've run it through multiple checkers and all
| of them are valid. No other issues reported, just this
| one.
| spockz wrote:
| From the site:
|
| > Our on-demand, auto-scaling servers will never slow your site
| down. Our tracker file is served via our super-fast CDN, with
| endpoints located around the world to ensure fast page loads.
|
| This suggests that this solution is not self hosted. Is there a
| solution like this which is really self hosted? This service is
| one small change away from actually tracking.
|
| Edit: Piwik/Matomo[1] appears to be the most mature one. [1]:
| https://matomo.org/
| XCSme wrote:
| I am also buliding something similar: https://usertrack.net/
|
| I think the main differences compared to Matomo is that it's
| simpler (less features), but provides for much cheaper some
| of their premium features (heatmaps, session recordings).
|
| Let me know if you have any questions about userTrack or any
| suggestions! :)
| tutuca wrote:
| Fathom is open source https://github.com/usefathom/fathom
| m90 wrote:
| Apparently this repo contains "Fathom Lite", a (from a
| codebase perspective) unrelated predecessor of what is
| currently being sold as a SaaS.
| GordonS wrote:
| And it seems that Fathom Lite misses one of the main
| selling points of Fathom - cookieless tracking.
| JackWritesCode wrote:
| Yes - Fathom Lite would need a good refactor to not use
| cookies.
| tedivm wrote:
| That's the old project- they have decided not to open
| source the new one.
|
| The open source project is barely maintained at this point-
| they update the readme and get the occasionally pull
| request, but it's not really being developed.
|
| I unfortunately switched to Fathom back when they were
| telling people they were committed to open source, so now
| I'm looking to migrate off to something a bit more
| trustworthy.
| JackWritesCode wrote:
| You've been saying this since last year. If I can help
| you migrate off of Fathom Lite to something else, please
| let me know.
| JackWritesCode wrote:
| Fathom Lite is self-hosted. Lots of people start off self-
| hosting but it's typically useful for people with low
| traffic, or for people whose time is worth less than money,
| or even those who enjoy it. Because you have to maintain
| anything you self-host. We like to cater for both.
| GordonS wrote:
| > No tracking
|
| Personally, I think that Fathom strikes a good balance between
| privacy and usability, but it does still use tracking (or at
| least it did when I was looking at it a few weeks back) - the
| difference is that it uses fingerprinting instead of cookies. I
| think it's implemented in a privacy-focused way, but it does
| look like they are ignoring some of the EU ePrivacy guidance,
| which explicitly states that consent should be obtained before
| using fingerprinting, even if PII can't be reverse-engineered
| from the fingerprint.
|
| As I say, I think their implementation makes a lot of sense,
| and even as a privacy advocate myself I think those particular
| pieces of ePrivacy guidance focused on fingerprinting is
| excessive. But the EU doesn't seem to agree.
| JackWritesCode wrote:
| We're not ignoring the guidance, it's just such a grey area
| when it comes to PECR / ePrivacy. Even the ICO's guidance, it
| talks about "cookie-like" technology. Our technology isn't
| cookie-like. And our processing isn't cookie-like either.
| We've had lawyers look at our documentation and all of them
| have said it's a grey area.
|
| You'll know this but some people reading might not: Under
| GDPR, there are multiple legal bases for processing and we
| rely on legitimate interest. PECR / ePrivacy is the grey area
| for us and other services.
|
| Having said all of this, we're fortunately moving away from
| requiring any compliance at all... by avoiding the
| complexities all together. We're rolling a refactor to our
| data collector over the next few weeks, and we won't have to
| have these conversations about grey areas anymore :) We've
| hired a top-tier privacy consultant and are going to be
| deploying a huge update, putting us at the top of the list
| for compliant analytics. Every single privacy-focused
| analytics service is in a grey area right now (some think
| they're not but they are). We will be the first to move out
| of this GDPR / ePrivacy grey area dance.
|
| As you say, you see the logic behind the implementation we
| had, but we're dealing with politicians who don't understand
| the difference between Google Analytics and privacy-focused
| analytics. And that's fine, the work they've done has lead to
| better privacy for everyone, so we appreciate them.
| GordonS wrote:
| > We're not ignoring the guidance, it's just such a grey
| area when it comes to PECR / ePrivacy. Even the ICO's
| guidance, it talks about "cookie-like" technology. Our
| technology isn't cookie-like. And our processing isn't
| cookie-like either. We've had lawyers look at our
| documentation and all of them have said it's a grey area.
|
| That sounds like you are trying to pick and choose the bits
| you want to hear :)
|
| There have been several ammendments since the original
| ePrivacy guidance. There is at least one such directive
| that is very explicit about fingerprinting specifically. If
| doesn't use ambiguous language, it states clearly that
| consent is required for fingerprinting.
|
| As I said, I personally think it's just bonkers, and I
| think your service is absolutely in the spirit of the
| ePrivacy rules. But you can't say the rules on
| fingerprinting are not clear.
|
| I'm keen to see what you've got coming, as the only way I
| see to avoid consent is not to associate identifiers with
| users at all - so each page hit would be a completely
| independent object. Can you say anything about your plans
| here?
| JackWritesCode wrote:
| Like I say, we've had lawyers review our docs. Even the
| term "fingerprinting" has more nuance to it.
| Fingerprinting is used as a way to attempt to set a
| permanent cookie / identify an individual, and their
| actions. We don't do this.
|
| And we definitely agree that it's bonkers.
|
| I can't say anything here until we've got our press
| release out.
| GordonS wrote:
| > Like I say, we've had lawyers review our docs. Even the
| term "fingerprinting" has more nuance to it.
| Fingerprinting is used as a way to attempt to set a
| permanent cookie / identify an individual, and their
| actions. We don't do this.
|
| Ouch, I kind of wish you hadn't said that, because it
| sounds like you're straying dangerously close into weasel
| words and deliberately incorrectly interpretations. Sorry
| if that sounds harsh, but what I've read is very clear.
|
| As before I like your solution, and I think it's
| absolutely in the spirit of privacy. But the guidance is
| really clear here, and gives examples of fingerprinting.
| Nobody said a fingerprint has to be a _permanent_
| identifier; as far as I recall, Fathom does use
| fingerprinting to identify individuals, so that a
| sequence of page views can be attributed to a single
| visitor. I understand that those fingerprints include a
| timestamp, and so are only valid for some time (2 hours,
| or whatever it is).
| JackWritesCode wrote:
| Thanks for your input here, Gordon. It doesn't sound
| harsh at all, you clearly care about privacy regulations
| and you're trying to help. Ultimately, we had moved based
| on conversations with lawyers. But as I say, we are
| rolling out changes this week & next, so it doesn't
| matter what we think about the regulation :) And thanks
| again for the challenge.
| GordonS wrote:
| Thanks for the debate, and I'll be looking out for what
| you've got coming next!
| Longwelwind wrote:
| I've been using a similar tool: https://simpleanalytics.com/.
|
| I wish they'd offer more plans between the first 2 cheapest,
| though. My open-source project is hitting the basic plan limits
| and the next offer is too expensive for me.
| JackWritesCode wrote:
| SA is good, and Adrian prices their services responsibility.
| Fathom charges $24 / month as our 2nd tier and I do believe
| Adrian should offer a middle tier too. But I know nothing
| about his business behind the scenes, so I can't comment.
| Ultimately, you can be confident that he prices his service
| to be sustainable, which we really respect.
| remux wrote:
| Some weeks ago I discovered fathom and I am fully satisfied
| with it.
| JackWritesCode wrote:
| So glad you love it :)
| JackWritesCode wrote:
| Thanks James. You wait till we launch V3 ;)
| ksec wrote:
| What's new for V3?
| JackWritesCode wrote:
| We're not announcing anything just yet but it'll be our
| best release to date
| clairity wrote:
| > "We're not announcing anything just yet but it'll be
| our best release to date"
|
| not a knock on you or fathom, but it seems like you're in
| fast-response sales mode here (which is totally fine)...
| the above is a particularly empty statement. why would
| any next release not be the best to date?
|
| maybe say it should be an exciting release, which is
| similarly anticipatory without being meaningless sales-
| speak.
| JackWritesCode wrote:
| Good point, heh. We're going to be improving speed of
| aggregation, real time dashboard, page / ref level
| metrics, more advanced goals and various other pieces.
| clairity wrote:
| thanks! in a background thread, i'm on the lookout for a
| privacy-focused analytics offering. it's for small
| personal things for now, so leaning toward simple and
| free, but who knows what the future holds.
| zabana wrote:
| I have zero use for your product but I just want to say that
| I love your website ! From the minimal design to the clear
| and concise copy, to the signup process. It's all
| frictionless and smooth, you nailed it :)
| JackWritesCode wrote:
| That means a lot, thank you. We've been running Farhom
| since 2018, and we've put a lot of thought into the user
| experience :)
| mhw wrote:
| If your app is already built with Rails, adding
| https://github.com/ankane/ahoy is pretty simple. Combine with
| https://github.com/ankane/blazer and you can build a reasonable
| set of reports as well.
|
| It's pretty simple to extend too: I've added basic client-side
| (JavaScript) error reporting on top of it, and I'm thinking about
| using it for Content Security Policy reporting too.
| etewiah wrote:
| Yeah, ahoy is pretty awesome! In fact everything by ankane is
| inkanely great - I have no idea how he manages to be so
| productive....
| mgreenleaf wrote:
| Another shameless plug, if you are just using it for finding out
| where visitors are coming from and page hits, I wrote
| https://geo-yak.com for that. Doubles as an ip geolocation API.
|
| I'm putting the finishing touches on a `tag=XXX` parameter that
| allows you to record a tag (like a pageid), and then filter the
| maps by it (not publicly documented yet, but will be in the next
| couple weeks).
| franky47 wrote:
| I'm working on an end-to-end encrypted analytics SaaS, to try and
| solve the "putting your eggs in someone else's basket" problem,
| while offering something simpler than self-hosting.
|
| I'm collecting feedback and looking to open it for beta in the
| next couple of weeks, but there's already a preview signup link
| in the newsletter, where I share my progress on building the
| platform on a weekly basis.
|
| https://chiffre.io
| m90 wrote:
| Out of interest, if you say you honor DNT, how exactly do you
| handle browsers that do not allow setting this as a user
| preference anymore (Firefox, Safari)?
| franky47 wrote:
| Firefox's settings (as of v77) still allow you to set (or
| unset) DNT, and I honor that. For Safari unfortunately, Apple
| chose to remove this feature because it could be used for
| fingerprinting, so there is not much to be done here.
| m90 wrote:
| Interesting, did Firefox revert their decision towards DNT?
| I remember being confronted with the behavior of it sending
| DNT headers no matter what, which must have been something
| around spring 2019.
| franky47 wrote:
| Possibly, I'm not using the DNT header though, because of
| the encryption, I need to know about DNT before the
| analytics data is even sent. I use navigator.doNotTrack,
| and where it's set I only encrypt and send a minimal
| visit count event.
| m90 wrote:
| I tried to do the exact same thing and had to stop
| considering DNT as it would essentially collect Chrome
| only back then. Good thing they have reverted this I
| guess. DNT makes a lot of sense as a concept still.
| JackWritesCode wrote:
| We've been building this as an option too. It's a cool feature
| that a lot of people will like. Good luck
| TomGullen wrote:
| I still can't see any solid reasons why a site owner would not
| use GA.
|
| Other products:
|
| - Objectively lack features
|
| - Potentially incur extra costs in money/time
|
| - May be a small barrier in m&a
|
| - May carry additional risks/attack vectors if self hosted
|
| Trying to ween off big tech is commendable, but likely
| detrimental to a business.
|
| Relatively high risk, low reward.
|
| I'm happy to have my mind changed. I can see a case for user
| hostility, but most sites I imagine don't have an audience
| sensitive to this at the moment anyway.
|
| From an idealogical standpoint, other cloud stat tracking
| services would only function if not many people used them. And I
| would also imagine feature creep would be inevitable and lead
| them to becoming an inferior version of GA.
| elondaits wrote:
| GDPR compliance.
|
| GDPR is the European privacy law. It protects European citizens
| so it applies not only to European companies but any company
| that does business in Europe (having offices or
| advertising/selling there).
|
| Google does not give much assurance regarding their GDPR
| compliance... their text on that subject is mostly CYA and then
| they make it your responsibility to decide how to use it in
| compliance (if at all possible).
|
| The GDPR gives you a small window to count visitors through
| cookies as long as all private information (even IP) is
| anonymized... OR you can go do a more traditional tracking with
| their explicit agreement. This last use case is completely
| useless in terms of visitor statistics, but analytics companies
| sometimes dare suggest it (as in "this is the way to do things
| right... so our product is compliant and it's not our
| responsibility if you break the law").
|
| That aside, I run international non-profit sites and GA is a
| bad look... and with good reason: Using social network sharing
| buttons, GA, CDNs, etc. gives too much power to track people to
| a few companies.
| tannhaeuser wrote:
| > _GA is a bad look_
|
| Totally agree, but are there "acceptable" CDNs, like unpkg?
| What about Google Fonts?
|
| > _The GDPR gives you a small window to count visitors
| through cookies as long as all private information (even IP)
| is anonymized._
|
| If it's not too much to ask, could you expand on that a bit,
| or share a link? I guess you mean it's ok to send a browser
| fingerprint for unique visitor stats without having to ask
| for permission, but I'm not aware of any legal debate let
| alone court decision with respect to that.
|
| Edit: obviously I can't read ("through cookies"), but cookies
| for unique visitor counts aren't "functional" are they, so my
| interpretation is that those cookies need consent; I'd love
| to hear otherwise though
| M2Ys4U wrote:
| >GDPR is the European privacy law. It protects European
| citizens
|
| The GDPR does not discriminate based on citizenship.
|
| It applies if the organisation providing the service is in
| the EU/EEA* OR if the user of the service is in the EU/EEA*
| (to the extent that the data reference their activity in the
| EU/EEA _).
|
| _ And the UK, but thanks to brexit there 's a parallel UK
| GDPR in place so... take that in to account.
| XCSme wrote:
| Some issues with GA version going self-hosted: - Privacy of
| your users: For a specific user, Google knows all the website
| he visits - Privacy your data: If Google knows the visitors of
| most websites, your competitors can leverage that advantage
| (using Google Ads for example) to steal your potential
| customers. - Google Analytics is bloated and slow (both in
| terms of the tracking script and the dashboard UI, where it
| takes several seconds for each graph/page to load). - You don't
| own your data, at any point Google can, even though unlikely
| to, block your account (for breaking ToS of some other service
| of theirs) and you lose all your data. - If everyone uses GA,
| it will become (already is) an analytics monopoly, which has
| many other drawbacks (lack of innovation for example).
|
| I do think that for the average user, using GA might be fine
| because it's free, easy to set-up and does its job. That is
| unless they care about all the possible consequences.
| Doctor_Fegg wrote:
| If your site actively competes with a Google product, you might
| not want to give them access to your user data.
| epoch_100 wrote:
| It's great to see more alternatives to GA, and to see those
| alternatives getting attention.
|
| For those interested, one other FOSS analytics tool is Shynet
| [0]. Modern, privacy-friendly, and detailed web analytics that
| works without cookies or JS. It also looks pretty slick.
| Disclosure: I'm a maintainer.
|
| [0] https://github.com/milesmcc/shynet
| dsalzman wrote:
| I switched to GoatCounter for my personal blog and it's more than
| capable. All I want is pageviews with timestamps per page and
| referrer info.
| FalconSensei wrote:
| Didn't know about GoatCounter. I think its the only free hosted
| alternative that I saw.
|
| Having a small static blog hosted on GithubPages, GA was the only
| option for me. (Not going to pay for analytics while my blog has
| like, 10 visits a week)
| abelaer wrote:
| I just installed goatcounter on my githubPages Jekyll page. 2
| minutes of work, works great.
| cpuguy83 wrote:
| Maybe stop spying on people?
|
| EU be like you have to put up this banner to tell them you are
| spying... it super annoying and everyone hates it... and you be
| like "sure, I love me some spying".
| dynamite-ready wrote:
| How do you define 'spying'? It's near impossible to invent or
| discover almost anything, without something tangible to
| observe.
|
| I suppose the purpose of why certain collections of data are
| put together is where all the anger rightfully comes from, but
| calling for a complete armistice on all (even innocuous) forms
| of data collection is a little churlish.
|
| You do it in microcosm too, you know. How many pictures do you
| have on your phone, that contain people you don't know?
| cfitz wrote:
| If you're using Ruby on Rails, perhaps consider the "Ahoy Matey"
| AKA "Ahoy" free and open source gem created by Instacart [1].
|
| I've used it in my personal projects and have never had any
| issues. It's great to have no vendor lock-in and full ownership
| of user metric data. If you go this route, please be responsible
| with the data and follow all relevant regulations & guidelines
| (ex: GDPR) regarding its storage and usage.
|
| [1]: https://github.com/ankane/ahoy
| srg0 wrote:
| TIL about European Union Public License:
|
| https://joinup.ec.europa.eu/collection/eupl/introduction-eup...
|
| OSI-certified, copyleft, non-viral, GPL-compatible, SaaS-aware,
| multilingual
| Hitton wrote:
| I'm kinda confused about that, because
| https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#EUPL-1.2 seems
| to say that it's possible to relicense the source to GPL which
| would go directly against Goatcounter's author who apparently
| wanted AGPL-ish license without ideological fluff.
| Carpetsmoker wrote:
| GoatCounter author here: yeah, that's not perfect; this also
| came up in the HN discussion for the article a while ago[1].
| I've been in touch with one of the authors of the EUPL since
| and the short of it is that they don't really think it's an
| issue.
|
| I've thought about this for quite some time, and decided I'll
| use a slightly modified version of the EUPL which removes GPL
| from the compatible license appendix. Just haven't gotten
| around to that for no reason in particular.
|
| [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21914245
| swyx wrote:
| how can it be both copyleft and non viral? isn't vitality a
| definitive feature of copy left?
| icebraining wrote:
| No, see LGPL and MPL for example.
| contravariant wrote:
| > it has no "viral effect" in case of linking
| sc11 wrote:
| Neither does the GPL or any other licence under European
| laws.
| contravariant wrote:
| That's interesting, wouldn't that mean that the licenses
| themselves aren't in some sense 'legal' in the EU? How
| does the GPL prevent this from invalidating down the
| whole license?
| icebraining wrote:
| That's surprising, considering the virality is part of
| the license text, not the law; does the law prohibit that
| clause?
| sc11 wrote:
| Here's a good explanation:
| https://joinup.ec.europa.eu/collection/eupl/news/why-
| viral-l...
|
| The short answer is that there are certain protections
| that ensure interoperability, and that linking to
| software does not make it a derivative work.
| twic wrote:
| That's an interesting analysis.
|
| That directive is usually understood to be about reverse
| engineering in order to build compatible software: "to
| obtain the necessary information to achieve the
| interoperability of an independently created program with
| other programs" being a key bit.
|
| It's not immediately clear to me - a programmer but not a
| lawyer - that this has any bearing on whether linking
| creates a derivative work.
|
| Have any other experts, or courts, weighed in on whether
| this analysis is sound?
| XCSme wrote:
| I can also add mine, even though more complex, it's still
| lightweight: https://usertrack.net
|
| I tried bringing together the most useful analytics features
| (user segments, heatmaps, session recordings, tags/events) in a
| self-hosted platform with simple UI. A/B testing feature is also
| coming soon. I built the platform with the optimal use-case being
| improving conversion rates on landing pages.
|
| My goal now is to prove and teach (even to non-technical users)
| that self-hosting is easy nowadays when you can create a VPS
| running your desired software in just a few clicks.
|
| I would love to hear some criticism or why you wouldn't want to
| try something like this.
| xrd wrote:
| Has anyone used any of these with a proxy to avoid ad blocker
| blocking? What I mean is, I installed matomo and then saw my ad
| blocker blocked it. Is there a way to make any of these work by
| proxying through the same domain as the site, so those analytics
| requests look just like all other ajax requests?
|
| I was surprised matomo wasn't listed here. Does anyone know if
| that was intentional? Seems like it fits the criteria of the post
| and the goals of open source.
| JackWritesCode wrote:
| Absolutely. We recommend custom domains
| (https://usefathom.com/support/custom-domains) but you could
| proxy through to the collector, no problem. It's a great way of
| doing it
| nofunsir wrote:
| Here's the most lightweight alternative to Google Analytics:
|
| Don't use analytics. You really don't need it. No. You really
| don't. No, No. I promise you. Just stop.
|
| All tracking is evil. All ads (except those inside a store for a
| product inside the same store) are evil.
| pachico wrote:
| We run our own analytics solution based on a js library, a small
| go app and ClickHouse for data aggregation. With a very cheap and
| small setup you can handle hundreds of millions of events per
| day.
| sjwright wrote:
| I run a reasonably large website and about two years ago it
| dawned on me that I _never checked Google Analytics._ It was
| completely useless. It wasn 't telling me anything useful. I also
| knew that it was marginally user hostile (or at least perceived
| as such) and affecting page performance, even if only slightly.
|
| Removing it felt momentous and insane. But in November 2018 I
| finally plucked up the courage and removed it. The crazy thing
| is, until this article appeared on the top of Hacker News
| reminded me, I had completely forgotten that I had removed it.
| Far from the world ending, it turned out to be the most
| inconsequential thing imaginable.
|
| (I remember pouring over web server logs in Analog and AWStats
| 15+ years ago. Now I honestly can't remember why. I think it was
| some combination of vanity... and because everyone else was doing
| it. I suspect for most web developers GA was just the natural
| evolution of that muscle memory.)
| JackWritesCode wrote:
| GA and AWStats are both awful products for a lot of people. For
| us, we check out Fathom dashboard daily to see referrers and
| popular content. And vitality (right now we can see a ton of
| traffic coming from HN). When I used GA, I never checked it.
| sjwright wrote:
| I've looked at many reporting tools, most of them are
| probably great for corporate/enterprise stuff.
|
| I'm self-employed, so I have no boss or shareholders that
| need pretty reports with bar charts. In my case my site is
| deeply database driven and I can build engagement statistics
| directly from real data using complex SQL queries.
|
| And while there's only a few such 'reports' that I check
| regularly, most of them are temporally incongruous--I think
| that's how you'd describe it--in that they look at what
| happened in the past contextualised by what's known in the
| present. (E.g. tracking engagements from new/irregular users,
| while they were new/irregular users, but which subsequently
| became regular users.)
| JackWritesCode wrote:
| Well that's a different story then. It sounds like you
| measure things your own way, so I agree that analytics are
| pointless in your edge case.
|
| For us, we have generated a lot of revenue by measuring
| what works and what doesn't. That's why analytics are worth
| it for a lot of people.
| zoomablemind wrote:
| > GA and AWStats are both awful products for a lot of people.
|
| Just wonder, what's awful about AWStats?
|
| Sure it's dated, and "analog" in a way that it's log-based,
| not JS. But it does not send the tracking to the third party,
| can be used offline.
| geerlingguy wrote:
| Fathom being so quick to load and simple to use, I glance at
| it here and there. I had given up on trying to find a good
| 'light' way to navigate Analytics.
| gorkemcetin wrote:
| Countly [1] is another open source alternative to Google
| Analytics - suggest you try it on Digital Ocean [2] or deploy on
| your own [3].
|
| It is self hosted, has support for desktop apps, mobile apps and
| web apps at the same time.
|
| [1] https://count.ly
|
| [2] https://marketplace.digitalocean.com/apps/countly-analytics
|
| [3] https://github.com/countly/countly-server
| mrpeker wrote:
| Some of my friends switched from GA to Countly. They are very
| satisfied, and I am thinking of using it in my next project.
| scoutt wrote:
| Interesting. Thanks. But I am not so sure about disabling
| SELinux:
|
| > Disable SELinux on Red Hat or CentOS if it has been enabled.
| Countly may not work on a server where SELinux is enabled. In
| order to disable SELinux, run "setenforce 0".
|
| https://support.count.ly/hc/en-us/articles/360036862332-Inst...
| snuxoll wrote:
| Unfortunately common on projects like these. Instead of
| guiding admins on how to properly configure SELinux it's
| easiest to just throw your hands up and say "disable it".
| ksec wrote:
| Is nice to see Plausible gaining traction. Here is an blog post
| [1] about how they were asked for using it on site with tens or
| hundreds of million page view.
|
| I am wondering if HN is interested in hosting analytics like
| plausible that is open for us to see. Sometimes I do wonder how
| many page view do HN get per day, where are we all from etc. For
| example the plausible demo site. 35% are using macOS. But only
| 15% uses Safari.
|
| [1] https://plausible.io/blog/april-2020-recap
| Kjeldahl wrote:
| I was recently looking for a good tool that supports both web
| site analytics and app analytics (custom events, typically pushed
| by SPAs). I looked at GA, Amplitude and finally Matomo (which I
| ended up with). GA and Amplitude either did not offer or made it
| hard to work down to the micro level, essentially tracking known
| individual users down to the singular event level. Matomo makes
| this easy, although it certainly looks a bit dated compared to
| the competition. And the free parts are somewhat limited (you
| need to buy stuff or hosting).
|
| I would have though that there would be several decent packages
| offering www + app analytics by now, but as I wrote, options were
| quite limited. Some of the options mentioned in the subject here
| looks like good options for just website analytics, but I'm not
| seeing much as far as "app analytics" (custom events) goes.
| srrr wrote:
| There are many packages listed at
| https://github.com/onurakpolat/awesome-analytics . Heap is an
| example of macro+micro+web+app.
| Kjeldahl wrote:
| Thanks for the tip. One of Heap's selling points seems to be
| that tracking events "manually" is over, everything is
| automatic. That might work if all "work" is defined as "stuff
| users do". For other types of "work" (calculation pipelines,
| job delegation etc) I'm sure being able to "micro manage"
| events can be useful. But sure, my use case might be
| different.
| JackWritesCode wrote:
| Less companies are focusing on user level tracking, as it's an
| invasion of privacy and compliance doesn't allow it
| Kjeldahl wrote:
| And I'm sure that makes sense if you have lots of users and
| low revenue per customer. If your use case is the opposite,
| tracking individual usage becomes more important. At least
| until you have lots of those users. After that, who cares! :P
| srrr wrote:
| Less companies are focusing on user level tracking because
| one single user is not a meaningful statistical group.
|
| Companies focusing on user level tracking today provide a
| different set of tools one might be used to and that can of
| course be compliant, see https://www.hotjar.com/.
| Fileformat wrote:
| I have been using GA for my side projects but have been unhappy
| with the Google's direction on privacy, so started researching
| others. There are just _so_ many: I think a lot of developers
| (including myself) think it is easy to do & start rolling their
| own & then try to productize it.
|
| Here is my research: https://til.marcuse.info/webmaster/alt-
| analytics.html
|
| I ended up going with GoatCounter.
| Bogdanp wrote:
| Shameless plug: I wrote and use nemea[0] for all my stuff.
|
| [0]: https://github.com/Bogdanp/nemea
| bad_user wrote:
| I have my own self-hosted Matomo instance [1].
|
| Via Docker & docker-compose it's quite easy to install and keep
| up to date and Matomo is open source, well maintained, very well
| behaved and pretty hands off.
|
| And I configured it on my websites with cookies turned off [2]
| and with IP anonymization [3]. In such an instance you don't need
| consent, or even a cookie banner, because you're not dropping
| cookies, or collecting personal info. Profiling visitors is no
| longer possible, but you still get valuable data on visits.
|
| Note that if you want to self-host Matomo, you don't need more
| than a VPS with 1 GB of RAM (even less but let's assume
| significant traffic) so it's cheap to self host too.
|
| And I disagree with another commenter here saying Analytics is
| just for vanity. That's not true -- even for a personal blog
| analytics are useful to see which articles are still being
| visited and thus need to be kept up to date, or in case content
| is deprecated, the least you could do is to put up a warning.
|
| And if you write that blog with a purpose (e.g. promoting
| yourself or your projects) then you need to get a sense of how
| well your articles are received. You can't do marketing without a
| feedback loop.
|
| [1] https://matomo.org/
|
| [2] https://matomo.org/faq/general/faq_157/
|
| [3] https://matomo.org/docs/privacy/
| boromi wrote:
| How do you actually host this? Do I need a VPS or is more of
| like a Heroki thing?
| johnchristopher wrote:
| You can easily set it up on a VPS with docker, check github
| for instructions.
| boromi wrote:
| Right, I found the official docker image
| https://github.com/matomo-org/docker
|
| But I was hoping for a simple DIY guide for setting
| everything up? I mean with Google Analytics a dummy can set
| it up very quickly. I know it'll take more work with
| matomo, but I need a little more details then just "use
| docker".
|
| I know I need a VPS, something like Digital Ocean.
|
| I know I need the matomo docker image.
| johnchristopher wrote:
| Sorry for misleading you. You don't need docker to run
| matomo (docker makes it convenient to install matomo -
| especially if you are running other containers on your
| server - but there are shortcomings, mainly the container
| setup).
|
| Matomo is just a set of php files. Upload them to any php
| hosting with a mysql database, in a matomo or
| matomoanalytics folder and point your browser to your
| domain name/matomo/ and the install setup should begin.
|
| If you have 0 experience with docker and just needs
| matomo then forget about docker and start from the php
| file with a standard php/mysql host.
| XCSme wrote:
| I am not familiar with matomo, but aren't those
| instructions enough? You go to DO, create new droplet
| from that image, and done? I assume once you have it
| installed you will get more info on how to add the
| tracker on your site from their interface ?
| snuxoll wrote:
| Matomo needs a database server (MySQL) and a way to
| execute cronjobs - that's about it. There's some gotchas
| if you're running in a HA setup or if the database runs
| on a separate server.
|
| I have a full deployment of Matomo in Kubernetes on
| gitlab [1] if anyone would find it useful (includes
| correct settings for running in multiple pods).
|
| 1: https://gitlab.com/pcgamingwiki/webanalytics/-/tree/ma
| ster/
| xorcist wrote:
| I haven't used the docker image, but Matomo is PHP in its
| simplest form.
|
| You unzip it. Click through a setup wizard. Done.
|
| (I also run in readonly noexec in an fpm chroot but
| that's not necessary.) I set it up for a couple of
| clients since the Piwik days and it's been pretty much
| set and forget, apart from the occasional upgrades.
|
| There are plenty of advanced functionality which probably
| few people understand and use. For my personal projects I
| am fine with log analytics which I mostly use goaccess
| for.
| Carpetsmoker wrote:
| > And I disagree with another commenter here saying Analytics
| is just for vanity. That's not true -- even for a personal blog
| analytics are useful to see which articles are still being
| visited and thus need to be kept up to date, or in case content
| is deprecated, the least you could do is to put up a warning.
|
| Some examples: I maintained a Vim ChangeLog for a while (which
| is quite some work), and turned out no one was reading that, so
| ... why bother?
|
| In another case, I wrote an article about "how to detect
| automatically generated emails" and I thought it wasn't
| actually that interesting and no one read it so considered
| archiving it, but turned out quite a few people end up there
| through Google searches etc. and I ended up updating it instead
| of archiving it, as it was clearly useful to people.
| thomasahle wrote:
| > And I configured it on my websites with cookies turned off
| [2] and with IP anonymization [3].
|
| Do you have a way to filter out your own visits in this case?
| On small pages I find that my own clicks and events during
| testing contaminates the statistics.
| GordonS wrote:
| > And I configured it on my websites with cookies turned off
| [2] and with IP anonymization [3]. In such an instance you
| don't need consent, or even a cookie banner, because you're not
| dropping cookies, or collecting personal info. Profiling
| visitors is no longer possible, but you still get valuable data
| on visits.
|
| Does this mean each page hit cannot linked to be any other? For
| example, can I see that a visitor viewed a particular sequence
| of pages?
| isiahl wrote:
| Just spitballing here but could you use the Referrer header
| to track sequences of pages
| mritchie712 wrote:
| Our SaaS runs on Google App Engine and sending the logs to
| BigQuery only takes a couple clicks[1]. From there you can
| write SQL to summarize the data by referrer, page viewed, etc.
| Here[0] is a starting point, though you'll need update the
| `WHERE` clause so it works for your use case.
|
| You get IP and user agent in those logs if you want to roughly
| track visit to conversion metrics.
|
| 0 - https://gist.github.com/mike-
| seekwell/83ac75c82a943e287a7abe...
|
| 1 -
| https://cloud.google.com/appengine/docs/standard/python/logs
| chrismorgan wrote:
| I self-hosted Matomo for a year and a half (and took over the
| AUR package for it and improved it in the process). It was no
| trouble to run, but I ended up uninstalling it late last year,
| for a few reasons: its interface is painfully slow (and that's
| nothing to do with my 1GB/1 vCPU VPS--I've interacted with a
| decent-sized instance at innocraft.cloud and it was similar),
| and I seldom looked at it, and I couldn't think of any way in
| which anything I found in the analytics would change my
| behaviour, and server-side analytics are good enough (better on
| some ways, worse in others), and I value speed. So all up, I
| figured: why am I slowing all my users down with this 50KB of
| JavaScript (of which I frankly need less than 1KB), and why am
| I keeping this software going?
|
| So now I pull out GoAccess (which reads the server logs) from
| time to time. I find that my Atom feed is the vast majority of
| _traffic_ to my site, which Matomo couldn't tell me. I should
| implement pagination on the feed and see if that helps. (Or
| limit the number of items in the feed, but conceptually I
| rather like everything being accessible from the feed. Wonder
| how many feed readers support pagination?)
| bad_user wrote:
| My websites are behind Cloudflare. If not Cloudflare then I'd
| use another CDN. Therefore I don't have logs.
|
| Also I disagree about the slowness.
|
| The script is loaded asynchrously, it does not block the page
| and I measure my loading times, which are really good
| actually. Just did a measurement and my front-page loads in
| 271 ms and this includes all network requests, including
| Matomo.
|
| I don't think this is a real concern, but rather a premature
| optimization. If GoAccess works for you, great, but that's
| not something I can use due to CDN.
| markdown wrote:
| > Just did a measurement and my front-page loads in 271 ms
| and this includes all network requests
|
| Is your audience just the people in your locality, or the
| entire world?
| chrismorgan wrote:
| The painfully slow interface I'm speaking of is Matomo's
| app, the part you as the site administrator look at; not
| piwik.js or whatever they call it now.
|
| But since you've raised the script part, 50KB of JS loaded
| from a new host is perhaps surprisingly much work,
| especially on slower devices. I find the difference between
| running no JavaScript at all and running Matomo's client
| script, _even asynchronously_ , to be _easily_ visible.
| forgotmypw17 wrote:
| Is pagination supported in feeds?
|
| It would be very useful. Like you said, it's nice when
| everything is accessible from the feed.
| chrismorgan wrote:
| <link rel="next" href="..."/>
|
| Deliberate semantics were defined for this as part of
| AtomPub, https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5023#section-10.1
| (before that, it made sense that it would mean this because
| of the relations registry, but nothing had been defined).
| It's clearly applicable to Atom syndication in general, but
| it's definitely more useful to AtomPub. I have no idea how
| wide client support is.
| the_gipsy wrote:
| Exact same reasoning here. I was burdening my users with
| slower load times, for something that didn't ever impact my
| "product" decisions. For any meaningful analysis, I always
| pulled up server side logs of things.
|
| So I changed to GoAccess too. I don't check it too often,
| just when I want to see the impact of some spam/publicity
| posting around.
| djsumdog wrote:
| I briefly tried Matomo, but didn't want the Javascript component
| and really just wanted log analysis. It's okay at log analysis,
| but it doesn't really shine unless you do javascript live
| tracking.
|
| So I disabled it and went back to awstats. I've been using
| awstats for over a decade, and for my personal site and projects,
| it pretty much gives me the majority of the data I really care
| about.
|
| I might look at shipping more complex nginx json logs to
| logstash/elastic search, but then I'd need to visualize them in
| Kibana and that just seems like a lot of heavy weight containers
| to run for stats I don't really need.
| darekkay wrote:
| Related submissions:
|
| - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19883876
|
| - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21890027
|
| - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22813168
|
| - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23411047
| runxel wrote:
| Still no real alternative when on a Github page, or am I missing
| something?
|
| It's not that I really _need_ statistics, but sometimes it would
| be nice to know if there is even _anything_ going on or you 're
| just screaming into a void.
|
| But I refuse to spam visitors of my pages with GA.
| zoomablemind wrote:
| The GH pages are still in a repo, so the repo's Insights:
| Traffic can show some stats on visits.
|
| https://github.blog/2014-01-07-introducing-github-traffic-an...
| jwr wrote:
| I turned off Google Analytics, because I realized that it doesn't
| actually report any useful or actionable data, just vanity
| metrics, and many of them of dubious quality.
|
| I run a SaaS and what matters for me is paid subscriptions.
| "Visits" (even if by humans, which is hard to tell) really do not
| matter much. Yes, I do want to increase conversion rates, and run
| bandit experiments, but I'm better off doing that myself.
|
| What also matters are search terms, but Google's search console
| (or tools, or whatever it's called this week) provides that.
|
| Turning off Google Analytics was hard to do psychologically --
| the Fear Of Missing Out is strong. But it turns out I'm not
| missing out on anything, except some dubious vanity data. And I'm
| making the web a better place in the process.
| srrr wrote:
| Analytics may give you the number of paid subcriptions but that
| is not the reason it exists. Modern analytics systems are build
| to give you a statistical view of all events/interactions
| leading up to a conversion or, more important, to a conversion
| that did not happen. With this information it is possible to
| optimize all touchpoints a user has with your services.
|
| It is easy to track all aspects of subscriptions including
| recurring revenue. The data quality depends on the data you
| send to google analytics and is not "dubious" but in your own
| responsibility. And google analytics is really good in
| separating bots from human visits.
|
| If google analytics did only report vanity metrics to you, you
| most likely did not use it the right way. Maybe you missed the
| segmentation tools to find groups of users for whom your
| service did not work out?
| jwr wrote:
| > google analytics is really good in separating bots from
| human visits
|
| That certainly wasn't my experience.
|
| But more generally: I optimize touchpoints using automated
| Bernoulli bandits with multiple variants. And I track the
| metrics that really matter (like signups, MRR, churn, etc)
| very, very carefully. My point was that just adding GA
| doesn't bring much value, and makes the web worse.
|
| Another example of how page visits don't matter: it's easy to
| get a huge spike of HN users clicking through. But if my SaaS
| has no relevance to HN users (except as a technical
| curiosity), this doesn't matter at all. It won't change my
| revenue, so it's irrelevant.
|
| Unless you run a site with ads, focusing on page visits
| doesn't make sense: it's like measuring the performance of a
| supermarket and getting excited about increasing traffic on a
| nearby highway. Could it influence your sales? Possibly. Is
| it actionable? Nope.
| jerven wrote:
| GA used to be good in separating the bots from the humans,
| but now I don't think so. I see a huge number of visitors
| from Dublin that seem to be AWS sourced bots (and Asburn,
| both have bounce rates like no other city). Millions of
| visits, from a place where we would expect thousands.
| cosmie wrote:
| GA's "Filter bots" setting simply applies the IAB bot
| filtering list[1]. The resources required to operate a
| page rendering bot[2] used to be a high enough bar that
| the ones doing so were large actors and would make their
| way onto that list pretty quickly.
|
| The IAB list is still a helpful baseline (if overpriced
| if you want to lease the list itself[3]), but all it's
| doing is applying suppression based on things like known
| bot IP ranges and user agents. It's far less effective
| than it used to be since it's so incredibly easy and
| cheap nowadays for anyone with an interest to spin up a
| rendering bot. Now you've got to supplement it actively
| with your own set of filters and heuristics if you really
| want to get rid of bot traffic polluting your data.
|
| [1] https://iabtechlab.com/software/iababc-international-
| spiders...
|
| [2] Scraping bots were cheap and easy to run before, but
| didn't render the GA javascript code so never showed up
| in analytics. It's only bots that use something like a
| headless browser to render the page that show up in GA,
| and those have only become commoditized and cheap/easy
| relatively recently.
|
| [3] Google applies the IAB list to your traffic for free
| if you check the setting for it, but if you want to use
| the IAB list yourself you have to pay $4k - $14k annually
| to lease it from IAB.
| timothy-quinn wrote:
| So far GA is answering two important questions for me - which
| marketing strategies are actually working (because it's hard to
| tell when you've got multiple going at once), and also making
| sure my marketing is actually hitting the geo-regions I need it
| to.
|
| That said though once I know which marketing tools are
| effective, there's nothing more that GA does that CloudFlare
| couldn't just tell me anyway (i.e. am I getting more or less
| traffic) and I'll probably drop it as it's one less dashboard
| to look at - like you said that conversion to subscriber _is_
| the ultimate metric for success.
| mrweasel wrote:
| > I realized that it doesn't actually report any useful or
| actionable data
|
| The actionable part never occurred to me, but makes so much
| sense. What action could anyone really take, based on the data
| presented by Google Analytics? On top of my head I can actually
| think of anything you could easily get from server logs.
| tyingq wrote:
| Well, you don't specifically need GA for it, but tracking
| referers to sales, for example...is often actionable. Similar
| for a funnel view to see where visitors drop off. Especially
| combined with some A/B testing.
| halflings wrote:
| Examples I saw in a website I launched last year: * High
| bounce rate showed that people did not find the content
| engaging / not what they were looking for, confirming a
| hypothesis I had; this was particularly true for certain
| sections of the website. * Time spent on pages was another
| metric that was helpful to find problems in some sections. *
| Easy slicing of traffic sources by referrer and country,
| showed me that most of my "good" traffic was coming from
| facebook, so I invested more time there.
| srrr wrote:
| To optimize the bounce rate metric even further a funnel
| can be created and measured. This allows to see bounces for
| each part of the funnel up to your conversion(s). It is
| often really valuable to see how a change on your website
| improves one part of the funnel but impairs another one,
| and than to think about the reason why this happens.
| srrr wrote:
| There are millions of possible answers to this question...
| Examples:
|
| - Conversion rate grouped by browser and browser version to
| find browser specific bugs. - Total revenue per user per
| marketing channel / search keyword / ... to optimize budget
| allocation. - Revenue by mobile OS version share to decide
| testing procedures to not optimize for users that don't
| contribute to your bottom line. - Client side loading times
| per user location and provider to optimize infrastructure
| placement. - ...
| chaosite wrote:
| One of the reason Google Analytics (and logging solutions
| like it) is popular is that people don't have access to
| server logs.
| f0rfun wrote:
| You mean unpopular?
| mtmail wrote:
| Popular. Because adding lines of javascript is much
| easier than processing server log files.
| JackWritesCode wrote:
| Server side logs aren't an accurate way of doing analytics
| and bring up compliance challenges (storing access logs and
| using them for purposes other than security etc.)
| hackernewsn00b wrote:
| Can you talk a little bit more about why server side logs
| aren't accurate for analytics? I was planning on doing
| basic analytics (pageviews mostly) using Cloudfront
| access logs stored in an S3 bucket and queried through
| Athena for a site I'm working on which uses the AWS
| stack.
|
| I know Cloudfront logs can sometimes drop, but is there a
| more important reason you're talking about?
| XCSme wrote:
| I think with server-side only is harder to filter bots,
| crawlers and get accurate bounce rates or session length
| times.
| TomGullen wrote:
| I find time spent on page is a great way to measure
| performance of redesigns on page. There are numerous
| actionable points.
| 72deluxe wrote:
| Hook into onbeforeunload and call your own javascript to
| post back to your own site to let you know when they've
| left.
| TomGullen wrote:
| I know how I'd do this, but have no reason to do it.
| jwr wrote:
| It might be, assuming two things:
|
| 1) That you actually care about this metric. I don't, I do
| not get paid by the number of minutes spent on pages, I get
| paid by the number of signed-up subscribers who use my
| software to make their workflow easier. I can (and prefer
| to) use bandit testing to measure the performance of
| redesigns.
|
| 2) that it can be reliably measured, which I don't think it
| can.
| Arnt wrote:
| Tom Gilb once said that "everything can be measured so
| accurately that the result is better than having no
| measurement at all" or words to that effect. I'm sure he
| phrased it better. In this case, some users aren't
| measured, which drags down the accuracy of the
| measurement.
|
| Even if the numbers are off by quite a few per cent, I
| can easily see how some site operators might benefit from
| knowing e.g. that visitors close one tutorial much
| quicker than the others.
| TomGullen wrote:
| We are a SaaS company also, and time spent reading
| manual/tutorial pages is important to us.
|
| With regards to point two, being reliably measured sounds
| to me like perfection is the enemy of adequate. Perhaps
| in low volumes you can't measure certain stats like this
| reliabily but in large volumes I think it's useful.
| srrr wrote:
| As long as your measurement is a random sample everything
| is okay. Even if it is not, it is much more information
| than you had before. You just need to keep it in mind
| when evaluating conclusions. We are not talking about
| drug tails here and no one dies if the measurement is not
| 100% accurate.
|
| I am able to measure everything 100% accurate. But this
| is really really expensive. It's a trade-of.
| XCSme wrote:
| Unless your page is google.com, where more time spent on
| page means the experience is worse, not better.
| TomGullen wrote:
| Context is important, and it's one metric amongst others
| that should be used.
|
| The point is, there are clearly actionable points GA can
| offer. It's disingenuous to think there are not.
| XCSme wrote:
| I agree, saying that there are no actionable points in GA
| is like saying analytics in general are useless.
| boomlinde wrote:
| Counter example: I search for information on a subject. I
| get many interesting and relevant results and therefore
| spend more time on the page.
| XCSme wrote:
| This makes it even more obvious that a longer or shorter
| session length is not clearly better or worse, it depends
| on a lot of other things.
| bonestamp2 wrote:
| The main product I work on does not use google analytics, but
| we do use mixpanel to see what our paid users are actually
| doing with the SaaS. We actually don't care who each user is,
| we just want the aggregate data. We believe this data is
| important for retaining paid subscriptions and attracting new
| ones. Let me explain.
|
| There's one feature that 100% of our subscribers use. I mean,
| it's the main thing we do and everyone who subscribes needs
| that function. Even without analytics, we know that we have to
| continually make that feature faster and smarter to stay ahead
| of our competition. We know that if we fall behind our
| competitors, our subscriptions will dwindle.
|
| But, then we have a bunch of other features that help customers
| solve some edge case problems around that main thing. It's very
| important for us to know which of those functions are being
| tried, used, and reused (or not). Not all customers use these
| features, but some are tools we have that nobody else in our
| space does. So, having insights on which ones are getting
| traction and which ones need improvement help us spend our
| marketing and engineering time better to attract new customers
| and retain our existing ones.
|
| I can't imagine not having any analytics. I feel like we need
| them to continually make small course corrections that ensure
| we're providing the best value to our existing customers.
| GordonS wrote:
| > We actually don't care who each user is, we just want the
| aggregate data.
|
| > It's very important for us to know which of those functions
| are being tried, used, and reused (or not)
|
| Aren't these 2 at odds with each other, or else how can you
| tell when the same person re-uses a feature? Surely you need
| some kind of user identifier for that?
| bonestamp2 wrote:
| Yes, good point, I should have been more clear. You're
| right that we track unique users, but we do so in abstract.
| I suppose with some work we could pull together enough data
| from different sources to determine who a particular user
| was in a particular session. I just meant that we don't do
| that and it's not easy for us to do that because we don't
| care about that type of data. We only care about what each
| abstract user does in the sense that we want to know the
| aggregate of how many users did that thing.
|
| Additionally, unlike google analytics, we do support the
| browser's "do not track" flag. So if a user doesn't want to
| be tracked at all, we completely respect that.
| moron4hire wrote:
| This was my experience as well. Early on, when I was still
| learning, it helped me learn the importance of extremely low
| Time-To-First-Paint. But now, I just default to good designs
| that are easy to read. There's nothing new to be learned that
| GA could provide insight on.
|
| Also, early on, I found the Referrer tracking to be useful for
| discovering the reach of my projects and to help me get into
| conversations with users on other sites to help them with using
| my software. But that feature of GA eventually became useless
| when Google did nothing to address Referrer spam.
| nofunsir wrote:
| Good for you! This is the right method. Analytics -- in the
| sense of watching mouse clicks and reference urls -- are only
| trying to close the feedback loop FAR sooner than when it
| actually matters.
| chrispauley wrote:
| I feel the same way.. mostly. I want one thing from GA and that
| is user flow. I've first hand seen this help a startup run
| landing page experiments and very quickly to improve their
| conversion rates. (The startup was selling a luxury consumer
| product)
|
| This won't work for everyone and will be of little value to
| many. However that tool just doesn't seem to exist on most if
| not all of the lightweight alternatives. Matomo is the only
| alternative I have seen implement this feature, though those
| with more experience with the alternatives will hopefully show
| me I am wrong on that.
| drunkpotato wrote:
| I also don't think google analytics is that useful. It's one of
| many possible tools for user tracking, and far from the best
| one. Thought it's "free" so I guess that's why it's more
| popular than much better tools.
|
| But the fundamental problem is that analytics provides data and
| information, when what people want is knowledge and wisdom. But
| you need to do the work to get it. No amount of analytics is
| going to tell you that your Facebook ads are underperforming
| their potential because your buy button is hidden by an overlay
| in the built-in Facebook browser, especially if Facebook is
| your best performing channel overall. Analytics can't tell you
| what's _not_ there. There's no substitute for having developers
| and marketers actually purchase your product, themselves, on
| the channels your customers use. And too many companies don't
| do that.
|
| Just a hypothesis I have, that most e-commerce companies are
| leaving millions to tens of millions of dollars on the table by
| not giving all their employees a corporate credit card and
| having them purchase their product on it, say, once a month.
| They're losing out on far more than they'd end up paying for
| the few instances of fraud.
| westicecoast32 wrote:
| For a personal project everyone basically ignored every post
| I made about it. I used server logs to generate analytics and
| noticed people hit the first page and left (I assume they
| spent seconds and left).
|
| I then broke up the main page to many smaller pages and
| notice people still leaving right away but my documentation
| page got more overall clicks since the main page didn't
| massively overload them
|
| I guess analytics don't give you answers but know what pages
| they tend to click on and what happens when you make a page
| more simple/more heavy you can figure out a solution
|
| However I didn't end up finding a solution and I'm planning
| to rewrite my project. I have a better idea how I should
| introduce it to people next time
| jayd16 wrote:
| Do you not find value in adding events to your pages so you
| have user funnels for conversions? Or do you think bots cause
| too much noise for this?
| yagodragon wrote:
| I'd like to ditch google analytics for a new small side project
| I'm building. I live in a small country in Europe and for me the
| most important feature of these alternatives is the cookieless
| tracking and the lightweight scripts. However, the pricing is too
| steep for a project that won't gain more than thousands users.
|
| Fathom analytics and simple analytics cost ~100$/year.
|
| Plausible costs ~50$
|
| I really liked and almost settled with plausible but I just saw
| goatcounter right now. It's free for personal / open source
| projects. That's so nice for small projects like many people here
| are building.
| sleepyhead wrote:
| Fathom and Plausible are both open source:
|
| https://github.com/usefathom/fathom
| https://github.com/plausible/analytics
| woudsma wrote:
| You should check out Matomo (formerly Piwik), which is a free
| self-hosted GA alternative. I'm very satisfied with it so far.
| It disables tracking by default - I think, but this is
| configurable in the Matomo dashboard.
| jgillich wrote:
| I recently started using Kindmetrics, a very simple analytics
| tool written in Crystal. Looks very similar to Plausible
| actually, it may have been inspired by it.
|
| https://kindmetrics.io/
|
| https://github.com/kindmetrics/kindmetrics
| neilsimp1 wrote:
| Off topic, but I used to run a website that had Google Analytics.
| This site and domain are now 100% down and have been for over a
| year.
|
| I _still_ get monthly emails from Google about the analytics for
| this website. Apparently it 's getting 200-300 visitors per month
| still. I have replied back to Google vie email about this several
| times but never heard any reply. I wonder what site they are
| tracking?
| TomGullen wrote:
| IIRC the measurement protocol can be used to send fake traffic
| by bad actors.
| infinitelurker wrote:
| Ghost/spam traffic is a real problem for GA. UA codes are
| public and can be targeted with spam referrals or simply
| randomly hit (especially for UA codes that end in -1).
|
| Filtering spam and getting useful data on GA is a never ending
| job that Google keeps making harder. (re removal of Service
| Provider / Network Domain [1])
|
| [1]: https://support.google.com/analytics/thread/27808046?hl=en
| TomAnthony wrote:
| It is quite possible to take a GA tracking code for one site
| and put it on another site. This has happened to me quite a lot
| where people have lifted content or copied code from my site.
| You can see the hostnames in GA (you have to dig for it), which
| could explain this.
| marvinblum wrote:
| Does anyone have experience with passive fingerprinting? I
| thought about implementing it into our Go backend as a middleware
| of some kind and track that way. I haven't found anything like it
| so far, but it would be ideal to track without cookies.
| propelol wrote:
| Device fingerprinting falls under European data protection
| laws, so might as well just use cookies if you're going that
| path.
| marvinblum wrote:
| That's really unfortunate. Well, at least it's easier to
| implement a cookie solution then.
| Carpetsmoker wrote:
| I did a write-up of solutions that I'm aware of here:
| https://github.com/zgoat/goatcounter/blob/master/docs/sessio...
| - happy to add more if anyone knows of any.
| marvinblum wrote:
| Thank you!
| JackWritesCode wrote:
| The Fathom one isn't accurate and references an old article.
| I'll submit a PR in a few weeks if I remember :)
| ent101 wrote:
| A lot of people may not care about this, but Google Analytics
| (and another 3rd party, hosted analytics platforms) are very
| important when trying to sell your website. Basically, it allows
| the buyer to access reliable historical data about your website
| which in turn makes it easier to arrive at a valuation.
| pantulis wrote:
| Of course you can now do Google Analytics server-side with GTM:
| https://www.optimics.cz/what-is-gtm-server-side-tracking-and...
|
| Have GCP? Hit this button and you get your docker container in
| your Kubernetes cluster doing all the stuff for you, pretty
| awesome.
| ilovefood wrote:
| I've recently whipped up my own self-hosted analytics solution
| [0] based on SQLite, Bash and Metabase. It's all self hosted,
| easy to install and very flexible with regards to the queries you
| can write and display. Metabase comes with a lot of cool features
| for display, live reload and other cool stuff. :)
|
| [0]: https://funnybretzel.com/self-hosted-analytics-using-
| sqlite-...
| zubspace wrote:
| Thanks for the tutorial. Looks interesting.
|
| I'm a fan of GoAccess. Unfortunately the queries are pre-made
| and there are nearly no options whatsoever. You can't (yet)
| filter by date for example.
|
| One thing I realized is, that on small sites, like my blog, an
| overwhelming amount of traffic comes from search engines or
| bots which are looking for vulnerabilities. Filtering them out
| takes a lot of time in any self-hosted or self-made solution.
| leephillips wrote:
| I use GoAccess too. If I want to filter by date (for example)
| I just run the log file through sed before feeding it to
| GoAccess.
| wolfhumble wrote:
| Looks like a nice combo that can be used for other projects as
| well; thanks for the writeup! :-)
| dimovich wrote:
| Thank you for the writeup. Always nice to see new applications
| of Metabase. Will try it out.
| ckotso wrote:
| Snowplow is also an option. It's an open-source data collection
| solution that, unlike GA, gives you full ownership of your event-
| level data and the freedom to define your own data structures.
| Not exactly what you'd call 'lightweight' but quite a few
| Snowplow users/customers have come from GA for the level of
| flexibility and control they can have over their data sets.
|
| (Full disclosure: I work for Snowplow Analytics)
|
| - https://github.com/snowplow/snowplow
|
| - https://snowplowanalytics.com/
| ValentineC wrote:
| I've setup the Snowplow collector and tracker on some of my
| sites because that part is _very_ straightforward (and the
| tutorial on the wiki is great), but I 've never gotten past
| those steps to analyse the data collected.
|
| Is there a highly-opinionated tutorial that shows how one can
| get some vanity metrics out from Snowplow?
| h4kor wrote:
| If you only need page views, for example for a personal blog, try
| goaccess (https://goaccess.io/).
|
| It uses your server logs for simple analytics.
| JackWritesCode wrote:
| Just be sure to check with your legal team regarding using web
| logs for analytics purposes
| FalconSensei wrote:
| But then you can't use it on Github Pages, right?
| limeblack wrote:
| For static web pages I like https://disqus.com Has comment and
| minor analytics support.
| Clex wrote:
| Google Analytics has a "bot filtering" option that works pretty
| well (even though it's not perfect). Do the alternatives also
| have similar features? There is a lot of automated traffic on the
| internet.
| jka wrote:
| It looks like GoatCounter does; it uses a library,
| https://github.com/zgoat/isbot by the same author to detect
| bots.
|
| Detecting and deterring spam and sketchy behaviour while using
| open source software could be an interesting technical problem
| area.
| JackWritesCode wrote:
| Of course. Fathom filters bots on the client side and then
| looks for bot signs on the server. If it looks questionable, it
| doesn't process it.
| dx034 wrote:
| Matomo has the same, works pretty well. Via plugin they can
| also track bots to show that separately but they're filtered by
| default.
| VadimPR wrote:
| I'm not sure if it's actually filtered - I think they're just
| tracked and classified. At least that's what I'm seeing in my
| instance.
| devalnor wrote:
| I use Ackee, also a simple and open source alternative
| https://ackee.electerious.com/
| MentallyRetired wrote:
| Came here to share Ackee. I haven't used it yet but it looks
| really nice.
| jboynyc wrote:
| Another alternative not listed in the article:
| https://www.offen.dev/
| kasbah wrote:
| I recently had a discussion about the interface with the
| Goatcounter developer [1]. Also put in a feature request with
| Posthog [2]. Hadn't heard of Plausible, maybe that's the one for
| me!
|
| [1]: https://github.com/zgoat/goatcounter/issues/302
|
| [2]: https://github.com/PostHog/posthog/issues/1020
| Hoasi wrote:
| > Hadn't heard of Plausible, maybe that's the one for me!
|
| Plausible is pretty good, found it useful to monitor traffic
| and usage for small projects.
| juanre wrote:
| I stick to GA because I fear that removing it could impact my
| site's ranking. Is it an unfounded fear, anyone knows?
| pauljarvis wrote:
| We actually looked into this:
|
| https://usefathom.com/blog/google-analytics-seo
|
| Funny as it sounds, using Fathom instead of GA could increase
| your SEO rankings :)
| joppy wrote:
| What kind of server-side analytics are people using today, for
| personal blogs and things? Projects like GoAccess which eat an
| nginx log file and output some analytics seem like a nice middle
| ground for those of us who want some feedback on how people are
| using a website, without needing all the bells and whistles of
| something more like Google Analytics (not to mention the fact
| that it doesn't need any Javascript loaded or anything).
| Personally I've found GoAccess pretty good, but the interface a
| little difficult to use and understand, so I'm looking for
| projects like it.
| PaulRobinson wrote:
| Server side was how it was always done back in the early days
| of the web, and analog[0] was state of the art.
|
| Around 1999/2000 there was a rise of ISPs needing to install
| reverse proxy caches because the growth of consumer access
| meant they were getting seriously contended on upstream access.
| I was working at the time at a UK 0845 white label ISP called
| Telinco (was behind Connect Free, Totalise, Current Bun and
| other 0845 ISPs), and to my knowledge we were the first in the
| UK to install a Netapps cache. It was the moment we realised
| (by checking the logs to see if it was working), just how much
| porn our customers were accessing.
|
| Those caches blow server side analytics to pieces, because
| frequently you wouldn't even know the user had hit the page.
| What server side analytics was useful for is what we'd now call
| Observability: they gave reasonable Latency, Error Rate and
| Throughput metrics, which combined with some other system logs
| might also give you a sense of Saturation.
|
| As such, they were not too useful for marketing. Google
| Analytics was the first product that allowed high fidelity
| analytics even if reverse proxy caches (and even browser
| caches), were all over the place.
|
| And here we are. In a World where we are tightly surveilled by
| corporate entities in order to try and get us to click on
| things. Bit sad really.
|
| I'd encourage people to think about what they need these
| analytics for.
|
| If it's marketing, you might just as well using GA: it's the
| best product out there. We just need to lobby for better
| regulation (at least GDPR and cookie setting popovers give us
| choices on that regard now).
|
| If you're stroking your ego, consider whether such an invasive
| technology is worth the price, and if you need those numbers.
|
| If you're making sure your infrastructure can handle the
| traffic, use server side analytics alone. Parse your logs using
| the huge number of tools out there able to do that in near-
| realtime, and leave your users' browsers free of tracking
| cookies and javascript.
|
| [0] https://www.web42.com/analog/
| Nextgrid wrote:
| Caches are irrelevant now that the world has moved to HTTPS.
| divbzero wrote:
| There are no public caches with HTTPS, but there are still
| private browser and CDN caches to contend with.
|
| To ensure your origin server is hit on subsequent HTTPS
| requests, you would still need to configure response
| headers for cache validation [1] to be
| Cache-Control: no-cache
|
| instead of Cache-Control: private
|
| [1]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
| US/docs/Web/HTTP/Headers/Ca...
| Nextgrid wrote:
| Yes, but those are caches that you control, so when it
| comes to analytics you would get the logs off them too in
| order to get accurate metrics.
| dig1 wrote:
| Webalizer [1] can be alternative. No fancy UI, but gets job
| done. For anything heavier and serious, ELK [2].
|
| [1] http://www.webalizer.org/
|
| [2] https://www.elastic.co/what-is/elk-stack
| stephenr wrote:
| I've setup GoAccess for a client's site, the problem is it
| doesn't have a great HA solution.
|
| You either ship all your logs to one place (and hope that place
| doesn't go offline) or ship your logs to multiple places and
| hope both destinations are in sync. We've opted for #2 right
| now (hint: it's not perfect) but it's made me think about
| writing an alternative.
|
| Rather than shipping all the logs all around, my plan is to
| have each source (i.e. web server) run a process on it's own
| logs, and use something like Redis to store the aggregated
| statistics.
| Cenk wrote:
| I've been pretty happy with Matomo (formerly Piwik), especially
| their non-cookie mode. But the interface is ugly, confusing, and
| makes finding information much more difficult than Google
| Analytics does.
|
| Edit: One major thing I am unhappy with in Matomo is event
| tracking. GA makes it much easier (in my experience) to track
| conversions and events, and presents the data in a better way.
| XCSme wrote:
| Hi Cenk, I have been building a tool[0] similar to Matomo, but
| the plan was to make the UI much simpler to use but also
| provide more premium functionalities (heatmaps, session
| recordings) for cheaper.
|
| My idea was to focus everything on "segments". So for all the
| data you can quickly create user segments and instantly filter
| the data to see only stats for the users you want, or compare
| stats between segments.
|
| There is a public dashboard that you can check, I would love
| some feedback if you have the time :)
|
| [0]: https://usertrack.net/
| VadimPR wrote:
| I found the Matomo interface to be a breath of fresh air
| compared to Google Analytics! As a non-power user, GA was too
| heavy and enterprise-like. Matomo is much cleaner, simpler, and
| more efficient for me to work with.
| Cenk wrote:
| I'm surprised to hear that! Are you using a different theme?
| VadimPR wrote:
| I don't think so - just the default. The light version of
| https://themes.matomo.org/DarkTheme#preview.
| Cenk wrote:
| Thanks - I'll give it a try
| pier25 wrote:
| In my blog I started using Netlify's analytics which are server
| based and cost $9 per month (up to a number of views) and I gotta
| say they are extremely basic and lackluster. I paid for the
| subscription for one month but I don't think I will keep on
| paying.
|
| Edit:
|
| Also it doesn't seem to be tracking referrers correctly.
| JackWritesCode wrote:
| Yes, Netlify Analytics are bad. Try Fathom.
| pier25 wrote:
| I'm sure it's a better service but at $14 per month (or $140
| per year) for a low traffic blog it's too expensive. I don't
| need anything that fancy.
|
| I moved to Netlify analytics from Goat counter because I
| liked the idea of having server side analytics, but at $9 per
| month these are extremely overpriced.
|
| I think I will just go back to Goat counter.
| tannhaeuser wrote:
| I really hope an analytic genius can come up with a technique
| (like differential privacy, but I'm no expert here) that would
| give advertisers what they want (unique visitor counts, and very
| few other metrics) to place ads on sites, yet doesn't give away
| too much privacy, nor leads to enslavement under a single central
| entity. I guess if something like that doesn't come along, then
| only old school content-based ads (site sponsoring) without any
| tracking can be considered ethical (or no-ads of course). The
| argument against content-based ads was always that it doesn't
| suffice to finance even web hosting let alone content production.
| But with ad prices going to the bottom, I wonder if the figures
| still add up in favour of targetted ads today.
| lmkg wrote:
| Apple/Webkit already has a proposal along those lines.
|
| https://webkit.org/blog/8943/privacy-preserving-ad-click-att...
| gramakri wrote:
| We have been using a self-hosted matomo for our company site for
| years now (back from when it was called piwik). Highly recommend
| it! The satisfaction you get out of not using any google product
| is unsurpassed.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2020-06-18 23:00 UTC)