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

goatcounter.com

61–70 of 139 posts

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

#61

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/

It's becoming more common to not have access to the logs. But I agree if you can access them, they can be a better approach.

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

#63

Can 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.

Out of curiosity, what are the options for log parsing? The ones I know are Awstats and Webalizer. Is there any more up to date or more modern alternative to these two?

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

#64
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If you pay for additional plugins (or cloud version) that aren't open source, you may have this. The basic version is like the rest and ugly as hell.

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

#65
I should have waited a few more months before coding my own statistics tool (KISSS [1]) (which is also mentioned in GoatCounter's rationale document [2]). :D

GoatCounter seems really promising, I especially like the simple web interface, the selected programming language (Go) and that it should work with a simple SQLite database.

Keep up the great work!

If you need some ideas for features that are currently implemented into KISSS but not into GoatCounter (AFAIK):

- Request stats from multiple domains (e.g. see the number of page views for all domains combined)

- Request stats by different criteria (e.g. only show stats with referrer of Hacker News or Browser Firefox)

- Reports: Daily email or Telegram message with stats

- Telegram bot: Request stats via Telegram

There's definitely a need of privacy-respecting analytics services that don't collect personal data. I hope you can succeed with your project!

[1]: https://kis3.dev/

[2]: https://github.com/zgoat/goatcounter/blob/master/docs/ration...

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

#66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was actually written as an alternative to Fathom! My original plan was to contribute to Fathom until it suited my needs, but the Open Source version of Fathom is on indefinite hiatus and the maintainers are working on a (closed) rewrite. I decided that starting from scratch would be better, as there were some things I would have preferred to do fundamentally different. What I really wanted was to add analytics to…

Oh no! What's the source on the indefinite hiatus? I use Fathom for all of my sites. Haven't heard about any of this. Can you point me to anything?

See this issue: https://github.com/usefathom/fathom/issues/268

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

#68
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Every website needs analytics. The market is huge. Doesn't matter if most don't want to pay.

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

#70
post #36
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Like I said, I don't care about not tracking my users. In other words I'm fine tracking my users.
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