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Show HN: Volument – Our take on website analytics

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Re: Show HN: Volument – Our take on website analytics

#11

Post by wizzwizz4 »

mritchie712 wrote: post #9
tipiirai wrote: post #6

Founder here (1). Here's a backstory: We launched the MVP two years ago with this HN post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20037116 Market demand was there but the product wasn't ready for the load yet. Fast forward two years and now it's all "perfect". The product is now useful — even for people using goaccess or similar. The main reasons include: 1. Understanding of traction and how visitors behave before they…

> European visitors are secretly tracked without their permission. This is quite a claim to just throw in and not footnote or back up in any way.

It is. I've had several discussions with Marko Saric (co-founder of Plausible), and I doubt he'd've let this slide even if his co-founder was Mark Zuckerberg. The author of “Only 9% of visitors give GDPR consent to be tracked”[0] is hardly the sort of person to secretly track users in violation of the GDPR.

Which part of Plausible's source code[1] is doing the tracking, exactly?

[0]: https://markosaric.com/gdpr-consent/

[1]: https://github.com/plausible/analytics

Re: Show HN: Volument – Our take on website analytics

#12

Post by tipiirai »

andrenotgiant wrote: post #10

A year ago, I found Volument's mini-manifesto "Minimalism: an undervalued development skill"[1] on HN (discussion [2]) and it resonated hard with me. I worked in Marketing and community at DigitalOcean over five years as it scaled. I had contributed to a hodge-podge of overlapping analytics tools running in managed chaos at my company, I had watched another team get hoodwinked into a multi-year deal with a big analyt…

Thank you, Andy! Really appreciate this comment.

Re: Show HN: Volument – Our take on website analytics

#13

Post by RileyJames »

Very interesting. I’ve recently switched a bunch of sites from GA to plausible, and love it! I only used the few features / tools plausible offers, the rest of GA was privacy invading bloat.

But I foresee I will need the kinds of features volument provides in the near future (only some of the conversion focused websites / pages). Might throw it up on one site today to test it out.

Re: Show HN: Volument – Our take on website analytics

#14

Post by jakelazaroff »

tipiirai wrote: post #4
strzibny wrote: post #3

> Fathom, Simple Analytics, and Plausible offer bare-bones pageview- and session statistics. Like Volument, they all focus on privacy so you don't need any cookie banners outside Europe. I am not sure I follow. Why do you still need one in Europe? And besides I think you don't need one with your competitors [0] [0] https://nts.strzibny.name/privacy-oriented-alternatives-to-g...

It's the local European laws. For example in Finland, where I live all analytics software must display a consent because the data is used for non-essential purposes. Applies to Volument and our competitors. More details on this doc, which is co-authored with a GDPR official: https://volument.com/learn/data-privacy

GDPR differentiates between cookies and localStorage? I'm skeptical, but if so that's… a really surprising loophole.

Re: Show HN: Volument – Our take on website analytics

#15

Post by tipiirai »

thehappypm wrote: post #7
tipiirai wrote: post #6

Founder here (1). Here's a backstory: We launched the MVP two years ago with this HN post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20037116 Market demand was there but the product wasn't ready for the load yet. Fast forward two years and now it's all "perfect". The product is now useful — even for people using goaccess or similar. The main reasons include: 1. Understanding of traction and how visitors behave before they…

Hey! Cool product! I have run many A/B tests in my career, and agree that it really does take ages to get statistically relevant results, and most results don't really pan out at scale. (Though in my experience, a new button color might drive conversion just by catching the user's eye as something new, but this doesn't stick around). How do you get A/B test results faster? New math? Or just more BS? ;)

The secret is on Volument's ability to measure a bunch of "leading indicators", like the ratio of first-time visitors who stayed on the website more than 7 seconds (which indicates a better first impression). For every key conversion event at the bottom of the funnel (such as "signed up"), there are thousands of leading indicators to take insights from. By utilizing these top-of-the-funnel metrics you'll know whether the new version better in a matter of days — even hours on a very busy site.

Another fact is that Volument is a full-blown analytics software it already knows all the data for the baseline variant "A", so you only need to collect data for the "B" variant after a specific timestamp. Further cutting the measurement time by 50%.

More about the topic here:

https://volument.com/learn/

Re: Show HN: Volument – Our take on website analytics

#16

Post by tipiirai »

wizzwizz4 wrote: post #11
mritchie712 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> European visitors are secretly tracked without their permission. This is quite a claim to just throw in and not footnote or back up in any way.

It is. I've had several discussions with Marko Saric (co-founder of Plausible), and I doubt he'd've let this slide even if his co-founder was Mark Zuckerberg. The author of “Only 9% of visitors give GDPR consent to be tracked”[0] is hardly the sort of person to secretly track users in violation of the GDPR. Which part of Plausible's source code[1] is doing the tracking, exactly? [0]: https://markosaric.com/gdpr-conse…

Plausible is totally and absolutely GDPR compliant so there is no need for a GDPR consent dialog, which essentially asks for a permission to track the visitor itself personally. GDPR is all about identities.

However, most European countries (like my home Finland) have a law that requires a "milder" consent to be asked when the visitor's device information is being read for non-essential purposes. There's no way around this[1]. These local laws stem from the ePrivacy directive.

[1]: https://volument.com/learn/data-privacy

Re: Show HN: Volument – Our take on website analytics

#17

Post by tipiirai »

jakelazaroff wrote: post #14
tipiirai wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's the local European laws. For example in Finland, where I live all analytics software must display a consent because the data is used for non-essential purposes. Applies to Volument and our competitors. More details on this doc, which is co-authored with a GDPR official: https://volument.com/learn/data-privacy

GDPR differentiates between cookies and localStorage? I'm skeptical, but if so that's… a really surprising loophole.

It doesn't differentiate. GDPR is about identities and using them for non-essential purposes. It doesn't take a stance on the technologies in use. According to our lawyer GDPR law texts doesn't contain the word "cookie" anywhere.

Storing a user identifying random id to any permanent storage (cookie, localStorage, etag, Flash, you name it...) goes against GDPR.

Re: Show HN: Volument – Our take on website analytics

#18

Post by Dyac »

So, I am exactly your target market. I run optimisation at a mid-size global company with a few websites (ranging from 100k to 100m sessions per year).

I do A/B testing day in day out. While it has its issues, I think completely dismissing it the way you do on the site makes me question everything else the site claims.

I looked at the live demo and it says about "significance", so I guess you're using a frequentist approach. The sample sizes are to small though, and I think you have SRMs, and it seems like the start and end times for the variants don't match. Also, in ecom it's bad practice to run any test or do much analysis on incomplete periods (eg a pay cycle).

Why aren't you using bayesian stats?

How can I compare test variants? We use monetate or SFCC a/b testing. Can it hook off events like GA can?

Re: Show HN: Volument – Our take on website analytics

#19

Post by fuzzymind »

Dyac wrote: post #18

So, I am exactly your target market. I run optimisation at a mid-size global company with a few websites (ranging from 100k to 100m sessions per year). I do A/B testing day in day out. While it has its issues, I think completely dismissing it the way you do on the site makes me question everything else the site claims. I looked at the live demo and it says about "significance", so I guess you're using a frequentist a…

The major difference between traditional A/B testing and Volument is that the comparisons are based on _cohort analysis_. It takes two groups of visitors and places them side-by-side starting from the very first visit: how they gradually build awareness and interest (metrics from the first visit) before taking action (on the first visit or on later visits). Then you take a cutoff day (say Day 7) and compare what has happened (how much retention, conversions, sales, virality) before that day. The whole "traction" so to speak.

Re: Show HN: Volument – Our take on website analytics

#20

Post by fuzzymind »

krmmalik wrote: post #8

Ok, you have me convinced. I'm actually going to try this. I have two separate sites I want to try it on. Is it 10k free events per site or per user account. Also, is it "catch-all" event tracking or do I have to set the event tracking up manually? Apologies if that's already mentioned on your site but I did go through the article and didn't see any mention of it.

You must setup conversions manually. Here are the instructions:

https://volument.com/learn/setting-up#conversions

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