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Roll Your Own Analytics

pcmaffey.com

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Re: Roll Your Own Analytics

#21

Post by pcmaffey »

kotrunga wrote: post #18

I like the idea.... but this doesn't make sense. I'm all for not using Google Analytics- I don't use it on my site. But why would you then use Google Sheets to hold the info? That's ridiculous. That's like telling people how to make an apple pie without sugar, and the last step before baking is dumping in a pound of sugar! If you want an easy data store, use something like SQLite. There are plenty of options that are…

For sure, there are a bunch of reasons not to use Google Sheets. For this, it's just an easy, free, and temp way to get a new site up without needing to setup a backend.

It's not really a hard requirement for me to get off Google though, just to avoid using their ad-tech. For privacy concerns, using Google Sheets isn't all that different from using MySQL on Google Cloud, etc.

Re: Roll Your Own Analytics

#22

Post by Scirra_Tom »

I love the idea of rolling your own solutions, it's fun and challenging and you'll learn a lot especially when it comes to scaling. For actual deployment for a startup though, I struggle to see any benefit whatsoever.

Re: Roll Your Own Analytics

#23

Post by bryanrasmussen »

There are of course other benefits to rolling your own analytics:

1. you can build the analyzers how you want, to relate different disparate events to each other and get a report of that easier than you can with a 3rd part solution (if the 3rd party solution can even do what you want)

2. You can do real time querying of the data relating to what the user is interacting with at the moment.

downsides, stuff like gender/age analysis will be outside of your grasp - at least at the beginning.

Re: Roll Your Own Analytics

#24

Post by fbelzile »

Very cool. For those that want to de-Google-ify their website analytics in a more practical sense, consider using a self-hosted Matomo (formerly Piwik) instance: https://matomo.org/

I find it has 80% of the features GA has, it's GPL v3+ and only takes a few minutes to setup.

Re: Roll Your Own Analytics

#26

Post by folkrav »

fbelzile wrote: post #24

Very cool. For those that want to de-Google-ify their website analytics in a more practical sense, consider using a self-hosted Matomo (formerly Piwik) instance: https://matomo.org/ I find it has 80% of the features GA has, it's GPL v3+ and only takes a few minutes to setup.

Also mentioned in the article:

> Avoid ad-blockers - My goal with analytics is to learn how people use my site so I can improve it and serve them better. I'm not using ad-tech so there's there's no point in getting blocked by 25% of visitors with an ad-blocker. That means doing 1st-party analytics, without using a 3rd-party tracking snippet—even self-hosted!*

> *Some ad-blockers already block self-hosted Matamo/Piwik tracking snippets.

Re: Roll Your Own Analytics

#27

Post by AndrewStephens »

I encourage efforts like this. Far too many sites pour their data into Google Analytics, giving Google far too much information about our browsing. In my opinion, even logging the IP addresses of visitors is risky with laws like the GDPR coming into force.

I decided to practice what I preach by rolling my own basic analytics for my site. I had a different set of requirements[0] than this person but I am comfortable with the results.

This only flaw I have found is that it has revealed that most of my blog posts get pathetically few hits[1].

[0] https://sheep.horse/2019/1/the_world%27s_worst_web_analytics...

[1] https://sheep.horse/visitor_statistics.html

Re: Roll Your Own Analytics

#28

Post by amartya916 »

fbelzile wrote: post #24

Very cool. For those that want to de-Google-ify their website analytics in a more practical sense, consider using a self-hosted Matomo (formerly Piwik) instance: https://matomo.org/ I find it has 80% of the features GA has, it's GPL v3+ and only takes a few minutes to setup.

Depending on what kind of analytics you want, Fathom is quite nice too. I recently set it up on my servers (about a month ago) and its been working well. It’s open source as well, with a public Trello board that speaks to future dev goals. https://github.com/usefathom/fathom

Re: Roll Your Own Analytics

#29

Post by dalbasal »

Working backwards, I start by defining what data I care about tracking. This is actually one of the biggest ancillary benefits of rolling your own analytics. I get to perfectly fit my analytics to my application.

This could easily make the whole thing worthwhile. Ultimately, the number one ingredient for useful analytics is figuring out what you want to know, and how you are going to use that knowledge. It's usually a missing ingredient and GA encourages a much more passive approach.

Re: Roll Your Own Analytics

#30

Post by fbelzile »

folkrav wrote: post #26
fbelzile wrote: post #24

Very cool. For those that want to de-Google-ify their website analytics in a more practical sense, consider using a self-hosted Matomo (formerly Piwik) instance: https://matomo.org/ I find it has 80% of the features GA has, it's GPL v3+ and only takes a few minutes to setup.

Also mentioned in the article: > Avoid ad-blockers - My goal with analytics is to learn how people use my site so I can improve it and serve them better. I'm not using ad-tech so there's there's no point in getting blocked by 25% of visitors with an ad-blocker. That means doing 1st-party analytics, without using a 3rd-party tracking snippet—even self-hosted!* > *Some ad-blockers already block self-hosted Matamo/Piwik…

I'm okay with this. If a user agent is attempting to block my tracking code (piwik.js), it's likely that the user doesn't want to be tracked.

Part of respecting user privacy is accepting the fact my tracking scripts will be blocked by most privacy extensions.

I feel Matomo does privacy correctly. By default it continues to use the well known piwik.js filename that extensions block and also respects the DNT (do not track) signal from browsers.

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