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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

#71

Post by muchbetterguy »

Nice work. I'm currently in the process of building something similar to this and Fathom - mostly out of curiosity - I will ping a link up here when it's ready for a test-drive.

The current setup is similar to Fathom in that I temporarily track a user session by generating a unique hash for the user, then, if that hash has already been seen in the past 30 mins, we move hash to the latest page view instance and can increment a pages viewed counter for the session. We can't tell which pages you've been on in the past, only that you started a session at X time, and viewed N pages, with the last view at Y time.

Incidentally, I had a PoC for the data ingest running as a Cloudflare Worker using their KV storage. What could be interesting about that is that there'd be zero third-party widget code to inject into a webpage: You'd log the pageview in the worker and pass on the request.

But the market for those Wordpress users who want to paste a few lines of JS snippet into their site would be lost. And it would add a few 100ms to each request you want to log.

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

#72

Post by Carpetsmoker »

WinonaRyder wrote: post #52
intrepidhero wrote: post #50

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.

The most obvious one I miss (I don't currently only use server-side analytics) is something like screen size. You can do user-agent sniffing to _guess_ what the size of a mobile device is, but it doesn't tell you whether or not you can stop wasting time making your content responsive on a tiny screen that no-one uses anymore.

You can probably use UA Client Hints to do this; but it requires some custom-fu and doesn't work in all browsers.

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

#73

Post by dudus »

kareemm wrote: post #26
dudus wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For enterprises Adobe Analytics is actually the industry leader, and there are a few other options as well. For startups there's plenty of options, mixpanel is probably my favorite. Google Analytics probably has more users because of ease of use for small business but I wouldn't say it's a space without competition.

Mixpanel's more product usage. The most valuable part of GA is imho the marketing piece. Eg: - "Show me where my visitors are coming from" - "Show me what landing pages are most popular... at driving conversion... by channel" etc

Mixpanel also has traffic source attribution. Including Google ads out of the box.

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

#74

Post by paul7986 »

WinonaRyder wrote: post #2

Source code: https://github.com/zgoat/goatcounter . The author also gives a rationale for choosing the EUPL (EUROPEAN UNION PUBLIC LICENCE) here: https://www.arp242.net/license.html . EDIT: ksec posted this link: https://github.com/zgoat/goatcounter , but, at the time of writing, my comment is higher... It provides rationale for why GoatCounter exists and comments about _why not_ other solutions like Fathom, Open Web…

Wait your advertising a product that doesn't track you/steal your data yet your screenname here is Winona Ryder who was caught shoplifting.... hmmmmm

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

#76

Post by wastedhours »

AndrewStephens wrote: post #37

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 n…

> Analytics in general does nothing to help the users of your site

I find this really interesting, and am amazed that more sites and services don't surface some of their analytics data to users. Look at the success of yearly "wrap up" campaigns (disclosure: I work for a company with one of the most famous versions of that mechanic, but don't work on it).

You'll get users opting into some data and tracking if there's some tangible benefit to them on the other end. It seems like people love learning about their usage of products, and there's a lot of data that people would be happy to share if they got some benefit too.

For example, I know Google tracks when I click a link in a SERP - but now that they surface the "you've visited this X times, last time on Y", I'd happily opt into that data collection because of the pseudo-utility/interest factor of it.

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

#77

Post by RL_Quine »

WinonaRyder wrote: post #52
intrepidhero wrote: post #50

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.

The most obvious one I miss (I don't currently only use server-side analytics) is something like screen size. You can do user-agent sniffing to _guess_ what the size of a mobile device is, but it doesn't tell you whether or not you can stop wasting time making your content responsive on a tiny screen that no-one uses anymore.

You can do this with only media queries in CSS, most likely.

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

#78

Post by chadlavi »

If this tool could also show you anonymized aggregates of click trails through your site, I'd be down in a heartbeat. Raw visitor counts and some metrics on where they came from are sometimes useful, but for a web app the much more useful info comes from the pathways people take through the app.

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

#79

Post by Carpetsmoker »

mad182 wrote: post #75

Top tier "Business Plus" with up to 1M pageviews/month seems kinda low. I currently have 3 separate personal side projects with more views than that :D

The numbers are more or less similar to various competitors, but it's not a problem if you need pageviews, just need to get in touch.

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

#80

Post by reaperducer »

dudus wrote: post #23
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? -…

For enterprises Adobe Analytics is actually the industry leader, and there are a few other options as well. For startups there's plenty of options, mixpanel is probably my favorite. Google Analytics probably has more users because of ease of use for small business but I wouldn't say it's a space without competition.

I did some research into this a few months ago, and it turns out you're right.

If a company is serious about learning about its customers and how they use their products, then it invests in Adobe Analytics.

If a company is looking for something that's free, quick, and "good enough," then it goes with Google Analytics.

Just like if a company is serious about advertising, it hires a professional ad agency. If it's looking for something cheap and "good enough," it go with Google AdWords.

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