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An alternative to using Google Analytics on your website

plausible.io

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Re: An alternative to using Google Analytics on your website

#51

Post by mark242 »

Not sure who makes Plausible, but if the "live demo" is reflective of the actual product, it's sorely lacking. The reason that GA so popular is because of the free tier, sure, but also because GA 360, the really amazingly expensive version, has features that let you really get insights about your visitors.

Here's a popular question these days: "when can I stop supporting IE 11?" With GA, the answer comes in a couple of clicks; revenue generated sliced by browser version. I don't even see the revenue generated section of Plausible, or really any way to associate any metadata with custom events. GA gives you this functionality without any coding.

If you don't want to use GA, try something like Amplitude, which has a lot more data manipulation options than Plausible.

Re: An alternative to using Google Analytics on your website

#53

Post by lmkg »

dagenix wrote: post #2

> These two tracking scripts combined add 45.7 KB of page weight to each and every page load. Which is only true is there is no caching and I highly doubt that these files are configured not to be cached after the first load

The Google Analytics script itself, analytics.js, is cachable and cached.

By design, Google Tag Manager and gtag should not be cached. The behavior of those scripts can be configured from wizard interfaces, and there is an expectation that published changes take effect immediately.

Also, all of these scripts are deeply and thoroughly asynchronous. They are designed not to impact site speed. Not to say that they can't or won't (I've seen GTM do horrendous things when used improperly), but I would trust an actual timing metric over a file size metric.

Re: An alternative to using Google Analytics on your website

#54

Post by tanderson92 »

Etheryte wrote: post #44

The correct proposition instead would be to stop analytics on your website, period. There's many sites that benefit greatly from the insight, but I'd argue they're a minority. Your personal blog doesn't need analytics. Let's be honest, for many people, analytics is just a way to feed their ego — my ramblings reached 100 people, so you could say I'm kind of a big deal. Google is, obviously, very well aware of this tar…

Analytics can absolutely be useful for your personal blog / website. Imagine you're an academic on the postdoctoral fellow / tenure track job market and you want to both numbers and see locations of where your hits are coming from, google analytics can help. For universities the ISP entry is often "X university" which makes things even clear than the broad Geo category of which city the hit comes from. This can be very informative in terms of what leads are likely to come up.

Re: An alternative to using Google Analytics on your website

#57

Post by abhisuri97 »

carlisle_ wrote: post #35

If you're going to tear down a competitor's product and shill your own you should probably be up front about it.

I think that if a blog shilling a company/product is hosted on said company's website, they're already sufficiently up-front about it.

Re: An alternative to using Google Analytics on your website

#58

Post by lucideer »

tachion wrote: post #18

It sounds like a nice product, but sadly it's not exactly why GA is so popular (being a 'nice' product, that is). It is popular, because it's free, relatively easy to implement on any website, requires no self-hosting and powerful, once running. I've checked your website for pricing, but not only there's no word about free tiers, but there isn't even anything on the pricing at all. So, when it comes to majority of GA…

> It is popular, because it's free, relatively easy to implement on any website, requires no self-hosting and powerful, once running

Tbh, I disagree. While a lot of the above is true, it's largely popular because it's a recognisable brand, and because the majority of frontend devs are already familiar with it and haven't felt the need to explore an alternative (network effect).

While an alternative does really need to be free and easy to implement, it also needs to address the above two hurdles, which is a tough ask.

Re: An alternative to using Google Analytics on your website

#59

Post by Yizahi »

"Nobody was fired for using Google Analytics" (c) Is financial burden to change any part of your product, including GA, and 99.99% of all companies in the world don't give a damn about users of their products, so it will never happen unless some global power restructure happens and Google will fall out of grace. And even then most likely it will be simply replaced with even worse GA-2.
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