Those looking for more ethical alternatives to the Spyware you're using see https://switching.software.
An alternative to using Google Analytics on your website
61–70 of 311 posts
Re: An alternative to using Google Analytics on your website
#62Yes! I've just removed GA from one of my pet projects (shameless plug https://golang.cafe) - And started using Cloudflare NS https://www.cloudflare.com/dns/. Now I get users/analytics reports at DNS level. No bloated JS trackers, no privacy policies and weird stuff and I can track visits even when adblockers are enabled. This would definitely be overestimated as bots would be counted in but it seems pretty accurate so far! It also has unique users count (although this is overestimated)
Re: An alternative to using Google Analytics on your website
#63The 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 ve…
What is the created value from that data extraction, though? That you know that the uni you applied to looked at your website? That's nice, but again, simply a way to reinforce your ego as far as I see — you get insurance that you're important enough to get through the first filter. But what actionable data does this interaction give you?
Re: An alternative to using Google Analytics on your website
#64If this is your personal website, one option to consider is dropping the analytics completely. Do you really need to know exactly (and it’s not even that exact, since people block or can’t load your analytics) how many people viewed your blog posts? Anecdotally, if you put your email at the bottom of the page you’ll get a pretty good idea just from the number of people who send you one.
Or just do it the old fashioned way - have the server keep an access log, then use something like GoAccess ( https://goaccess.io/ ) to produce reports from it. It’s not real-time reporting, but then you probably don’t need real-time reporting for your personal site anyway.
Alas, I don’t control my server, but if I did I would say you might not even need this. If you’re using Google Analytics right now it’s probably better than that, though.
Re: An alternative to using Google Analytics on your website
#65Great if it's not written in some sort of exotic language and just in php. Don't get me wrong I'm not a fan of php but if it's written in php it would be run anywhere but not only on your private special configured VPS.
Re: An alternative to using Google Analytics on your website
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
According to google, it is: “Google uses the information shared by sites and apps to deliver our services, maintain and improve them, develop new services, measure the effectiveness of advertising, protect against fraud and abuse, and personalize content and ads you see on Google and on our partners’ sites and apps”.
I can't find this language in the GA terms and conditions.
Section 6 of https://marketingplatform.google.com/about/analytics/terms/u... says
>Google and its wholly owned subsidiaries may retain and use, subject to the terms of its privacy policy (located at https://www.google.com/policies/privacy/), information collected in Your use of the Service.
and https://www.google.com/policies/privacy/ says under "Provide personalized services, including content and ads"
>We use the information we collect to customize our services for you, including providing recommendations, personalized content, and customized search results.
Re: An alternative to using Google Analytics on your website
#67It 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…
Nothing is “free”. You are selling Google your visitor’s data so that they can let you take a peek at a subset of what they collect.
Re: An alternative to using Google Analytics on your website
#68It 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 t…
Photoshop is the defacto-standard in image editing, yet clones which are free and copy the photoshop UI are rapidly catching up for a segment of the userbase, eg. photopea.com
If someone set up a Scroogle Analoytics which had a simple code snippet, was free, and had near-identical looking dashboard, I'd use it.
Re: An alternative to using Google Analytics on your website
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
One alternative that should be seriously considered is not having analytics at all. I don't doubt that they're useful for many people in many situations, but consider whether they're useful to you in your situation. When was the last time you look at analytics? What did you learn from it? What actions did you take? Are you really gaining anything from them? I think most personal blogs, for example, gain nothing from…
If you don't care if people are reading your blog, why bother posting it online at all? Why not just blog into a local Word document, like the character Creed on "The Office"? If you do care whether people are reading what you write, then analytics is the obvious way to find out.
I think "analytics" and "traffic stats" are different things.
Re: An alternative to using Google Analytics on your website
#70If this is your personal website, one option to consider is dropping the analytics completely. Do you really need to know exactly (and it’s not even that exact, since people block or can’t load your analytics) how many people viewed your blog posts? Anecdotally, if you put your email at the bottom of the page you’ll get a pretty good idea just from the number of people who send you one.
You are right, you don't need to know it in a small blog or site But metrics and statistics are the very foundation of science, and the graal of software engineering. I can't resist the temptation of knowing which browsers and the countries of the users of my website, or how many hacker news visitors come to it every other season, so many possibilities... sigh
You really don’t need to know that. I mean, it’s often (but not always: see the perils of optimizing for “clicks”) nice if you could, but you are actively trading the privacy of your visitors for that information.