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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

#31

Post by golondon »

Hi, what's the infra behind this? What do you use to store events or only the count of them to generate the numbers?

Other question I have is, you seem to have returning visitors feature and as far as I understood, you store info in localStorage to be able to do that. I guess you're generating a uniq identifier to be able to that and store in the localStorage. Although it's not a cookie, semantically isn't kinda same thing? If you were to store those in cookies you would have needed to show cookie banner, but since it's in localStorage you don't have to?

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

#32

Post by tipiirai »

golondon wrote: post #31

Hi, what's the infra behind this? What do you use to store events or only the count of them to generate the numbers? Other question I have is, you seem to have returning visitors feature and as far as I understood, you store info in localStorage to be able to do that. I guess you're generating a uniq identifier to be able to that and store in the localStorage. Although it's not a cookie, semantically isn't kinda same…

We're using Nats (https://nats.io/) for event streaming and pub/sub. The sessions are aggregated in memory, then they go to Badger (https://github.com/dgraph-io/badger), and finally the daily aggregates are easily distributable and immutable JSON files.

We're setting a session identifier to sessionStorage and those id's are wiped out once the session is processed and leaves the server memory. We worked together with a privacy specialist to ensure this is not violating GDPR. Details on what/how we collect data is here:

https://volument.com/privacy/

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

#33

Post by rambambram »

lukestevens wrote: post #24
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…

Just wanted to say that is an exceptionally well-written launch post. - Solid summary - Novel solution (omg AIDA in a CRO tool!) - Clear benefits spelled out vs the competition - Relatable use cases - Jumping off points to explore the rest of the product The product of years spent thinking about the problem I guess! Good stuff :D

I second Luke, very clear write up! However, I don't understand one thing: how are European visitors secretly tracked with Simple Analytics? I built my own statistics module for Hello Website. There's no tracking going around, so no cookie-bars for my user's visitors. I say statistics explicitly (instead of analytics), because I didn't add a conversion/goal/funnel-part. Even building some site statistics module for yourself gives you more accurate numbers then GA, that A/B-test went well. ;)

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

#34

Post by rambambram »

tipiirai wrote: post #16
wizzwizz4 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 aroun…

Thanks. Very clear now. Don't mind my question above about the same.

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

#35

Post by tipiirai »

rambambram wrote: post #33
lukestevens wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just wanted to say that is an exceptionally well-written launch post. - Solid summary - Novel solution (omg AIDA in a CRO tool!) - Clear benefits spelled out vs the competition - Relatable use cases - Jumping off points to explore the rest of the product The product of years spent thinking about the problem I guess! Good stuff :D

I second Luke, very clear write up! However, I don't understand one thing: how are European visitors secretly tracked with Simple Analytics? I built my own statistics module for Hello Website. There's no tracking going around, so no cookie-bars for my user's visitors. I say statistics explicitly (instead of analytics), because I didn't add a conversion/goal/funnel-part. Even building some site statistics module for y…

Just like Volument, Simple Analytics is a website tracker. It reads device information, like the URL and referrer data, and sends it back to servers for analytics, statistics, or similar non-essential stuff. You must inform the visitor if this device information is tracked as per local European laws that are listed on our data-privacy document:

https://volument.com/learn/data-privacy

Both trackers are absolutely GDPR compliant because the visitors are not identified and you can of course just ignore the banner for all visitors, just like Simple Analytics advices to do, but that's a legal risk. Probably very small, but still.

Note that this is what we've told by GDPR professionals and not me interpreting the law.

Thanks for the compliment!

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

#36

Post by tipiirai »

jakelazaroff wrote: post #22
tipiirai wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Got it — the difference between Volument’s localStorage and GA’s cookie is the “identifying” aspect of the latter.

Exactly. GA uses identifying cookie so a consent is needed outside Europe too as per CCPA and others. Moreover you must explicitly ask for permission to identify the visitor and explain why you do it.

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

#37

Post by krmmalik »

fuzzymind wrote: post #20
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

alrighty, I installed it. Let's see how this goes.

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

#38

Post by golondon »

tipiirai wrote: post #32
golondon wrote: post #31

Hi, what's the infra behind this? What do you use to store events or only the count of them to generate the numbers? Other question I have is, you seem to have returning visitors feature and as far as I understood, you store info in localStorage to be able to do that. I guess you're generating a uniq identifier to be able to that and store in the localStorage. Although it's not a cookie, semantically isn't kinda same…

We're using Nats ( https://nats.io/ ) for event streaming and pub/sub. The sessions are aggregated in memory, then they go to Badger ( https://github.com/dgraph-io/badger ), and finally the daily aggregates are easily distributable and immutable JSON files. We're setting a session identifier to sessionStorage and those id's are wiped out once the session is processed and leaves the server memory. We worked together w…

Thanks!
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