Nice work! Off-topic but remember that you can get a surprising amount of analytics using just your web server logs and no JavaScript at all https://goaccess.io/
GoatCounter – Simple web statistics, with no tracking of personal data
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Re: GoatCounter – Simple web statistics, with no tracking of personal data
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
No need for it to be free. I'd be willing to pay to not blow my brains out every time I have to touch GA.
I know you'd be willing to pay, so would I, but most would not, which is why Google Analytics is so ridiculously popular.
Re: GoatCounter – Simple web statistics, with no tracking of personal data
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
You're assuming most of planet even understands what you just said. They just want 4 lines of code that they paste in their Wordpress for free.
Re: GoatCounter – Simple web statistics, with no tracking of personal data
#44How do you know it doesn't need a consent notice? Anything that tracks people uniquely, via a personal identifier, is in-scope and counts as personal data. Is the assumption here that it counts as 'legitimate interest'?
There is no "unique personal identifier"; I have some ideas on how to track recurring visits without such an ID, but that's something for the future. Perhaps I should clarify the README on this a little bit.
Ahh, cool! Someone else linked to your privacy policy where it's super clear "Visitors are not tracked by using e.g. persistent cookies".
Might be worth clarifying by bringing this line up especially as there are tons of "gdpr compliant" products that get fuzzy on the details pretty quickly.
Re: GoatCounter – Simple web statistics, with no tracking of personal data
#45I don't like the UI. Does this also provide a REST API so I can make my own UI and just use this as a backend?
There is no API, and unless a lot of people ask for it I'm not planning to build it any time soon either. Making an API isn't too hard, but providing a stable API would slow down development quite a bit as this project is really still in its early days. I don't think it's worth it right now. Sorry :-(
Better data export facilities is something that I intend to do soon-ish, and you could build your own UI with that, but it'll be based on data/DB sync rather than querying an API, which is quite a different workflow.
Re: GoatCounter – Simple web statistics, with no tracking of personal data
#46Looks 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? -…
The main reason is that it took tens of years to build Google Analytics as it is and Google has the advantage to be able to provide more information about the user such as demographic data (gender, age, etc) since they have all the data in-place.
Having said that, there is no need to create an exact copy of Google Analytics because most of the people probably use only 20% of the features anyway. Each business has its own use-case and data source so it would be much more convenient to ingest all the raw event data into your data warehouse either using third-party tools such as Segment or open-source tools such as Snowplow and Rakam. This is the only way to have full control over your data.
1. If you don't want to store sensitive user-data, just don't send it to your servers.
2. Create the reports either using SQL or something like Rakam that provides you an interface similar to Amplitude / Mixpanel but on top of your data-warehouse so that you don't need to share your data with a third party service.
Shameless plug: I'm working for the company behind Rakam. (https://rakam.io)
Re: GoatCounter – Simple web statistics, with no tracking of personal data
#47The only thing that stops me from switching from Google is pricing. I have 2 niche blogs (does that count as commercial?) as a side project that barely makes any money and paying $180/year is completely unrealistic. I would switch without blinking with a more friendly pricing.
Re: GoatCounter – Simple web statistics, with no tracking of personal data
#48Can 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.
No, but this wouldn't be too hard to add. I'm not planning to work on it soon, but I'll be happy to review PRs/provide guidance on how to build it.
I will add docs on how to run it in "server mode", where instead of using a JS script you add a HTTP request in your apps middleware. This is an idea I had the other day and I did some research on it, and it should work quite well (haven't started work on it yet though).
Re: GoatCounter – Simple web statistics, with no tracking of personal data
#49Sounds great.
I like privacy-aware analytic tools. So far I have been using https://www.privalytics.io
Similar functionality-wise from what I can tell, but different in style.
Re: GoatCounter – Simple web statistics, with no tracking of personal data
#50Can someone explain the attraction of embedded JS for analytics, what exactly does it buy you versus log parsing?
Log parsing seems like the logical choice for the static site crowd but it seems like there's little interest there. I must be missing something.