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GoatCounter – Simple web statistics, with no tracking of personal data

goatcounter.com

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Re: GoatCounter – Simple web statistics, with no tracking of personal data

#31

Post by kareemm »

samteeeee wrote: post #21
kareemm wrote: post #7

Looks nice. I’m somewhat surprised we haven’t seen an obvious alternative to Google Analytics yet. It’s got a wide and deep surface area. But feels like for the majority of eg B2B SaaS apps there’s a much simpler solution to be built. Something that conves mainline scenarios like: - what channels / sites / campaigns is my traffic coming from? - what pages are people landing on? - what pages are driving conversions? -…

https://simpleanalytics.com/

Can't find obvious ways to see landing pages or conversions from their demo:

https://simpleanalytics.com/simpleanalytics.com

Am I missing something?

Re: GoatCounter – Simple web statistics, with no tracking of personal data

#32

Post by javajosh »

overcast wrote: post #20
kareemm wrote: post #7

Looks nice. I’m somewhat surprised we haven’t seen an obvious alternative to Google Analytics yet. It’s got a wide and deep surface area. But feels like for the majority of eg B2B SaaS apps there’s a much simpler solution to be built. Something that conves mainline scenarios like: - what channels / sites / campaigns is my traffic coming from? - what pages are people landing on? - what pages are driving conversions? -…

It's not that surprising that someone hasn't come up with a product as comprehensive, and most importantly "free". That's a lot of infrastructure.

Then you've got to give people a server-side component they can run, so that the infrastructure (not to mention security/privacy) load is handled by the right party. I personally think it's horrible that it's become industry standard to sell out customers like this.

Re: GoatCounter – Simple web statistics, with no tracking of personal data

#35

Post by Carpetsmoker »

kijin wrote: post #28
kareemm wrote: post #7

Looks nice. I’m somewhat surprised we haven’t seen an obvious alternative to Google Analytics yet. It’s got a wide and deep surface area. But feels like for the majority of eg B2B SaaS apps there’s a much simpler solution to be built. Something that conves mainline scenarios like: - what channels / sites / campaigns is my traffic coming from? - what pages are people landing on? - what pages are driving conversions? -…

How badly do you want to avoid tracking your users? It's hard to get statistics on conversion when you don't even track users across pages on your own site. It looks like GoatCounter can't show you unique visitors or how they move around on your site because it doesn't track them. There are no cookies on the main page! This seriously limits the kinds of features that can be implemented. On the other hand, they're col…

Yeah, I'll add some sort of "cookie tracking". It's just not done yet. There is some prior art at Fathom and Simple Analytics on how to do that while still preserving anonymity. I'm not entirely sure yet which approach I'll take.

I might make it an optional feature, too. Again, need to look in to it in-depth.

There are a zillion-and-one things to do, and thus far other things have taken priority :-)

Re: GoatCounter – Simple web statistics, with no tracking of personal data

#36

Post by lbriner »

kareemm wrote: post #30
kijin wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How badly do you want to avoid tracking your users? It's hard to get statistics on conversion when you don't even track users across pages on your own site. It looks like GoatCounter can't show you unique visitors or how they move around on your site because it doesn't track them. There are no cookies on the main page! This seriously limits the kinds of features that can be implemented. On the other hand, they're col…

I don't care that much about not tracking my users tbh. I'm only using it to optimize conversion on my site. I'm not selling it or doing anything untoward, and wouldn't ever.

You can't optimise conversion if you remove the ability to track users. If you see 8 hits on page A and 4 on page B, is it that 4 people left or that the first 4 people visited the page twice before they moved to page B? You can't tell without the unique cookie.

That said, having a unique but anonymous cookie within a single site isn't the end of the world but Google only provide GA for free because it is useful for determining other things.

Re: GoatCounter – Simple web statistics, with no tracking of personal data

#37

Post by AndrewStephens »

I applaud anyone one makes an effort to avoid thirdparty analytics products. Analytics in general does nothing to help the users of your site while pushing additional work onto the client and leaking information.

But looking at data is fun so I ended up creating my own super light counter that I run on my site so I can see hits. My goal was to store as little information as possible - only hit counts as stored, and no cookies are used at all.

https://sheep.horse/2019/11/visitlog_-_sheep.horse_analytics...

I don't have any fancy graphs but the numbers are interesting

https://sheep.horse/visitor_statistics.html

EDIT: all I discovered is that my blog gets pathetically few hits.

Re: GoatCounter – Simple web statistics, with no tracking of personal data

#38

Post by Carpetsmoker »

kareemm wrote: post #29
arp242 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GoatCounter doesn't do a lot of these things ... yet, but it's definitely planned. I'm a little bit hesitant to look too much at GA, since I don't to just make an "open source GA". In a lot of jobs I worked at we were essentially just "making a shit copy of a shit product", to put it crudely. I really want to avoid doing that. So the way may be quite different, but the goal of providing meaningful business insights i…

I wouldn't look at how GA implements things. But I'd look at what people are using GA to learn. The four scenarios I listed above are important to understand when running the marketing side of a B2B SaaS company. I don't care about the implementation details (other than they're straightforward). But I need to understand that info. And today there's no obvious choice other than GA. This surprises me.

Matomo is probably the only serious contender at the moment, as far as I know.

I agree that info is important, I just meant that the UI might turn out quite different from GA.

Re: GoatCounter – Simple web statistics, with no tracking of personal data

#40

Post by dbrgn »

Can it also run in "server log parsing" mode so that no JS scripts are required? This makes it even easier to avoid processing personally identifiable information (if you don't collect the full IP) and it works even if people have JS disabled (or if the clients are automated scripts).

Matomo is quite good at this.

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