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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

#81

Post by nsgi »

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…

Also, unlike many smaller analytics providers, Google Analytics doesn't have glaring CSRF vulnerabilities and doesn't have creepy features that let you spy on individual users (no idea if this applies to Plausible or not).

Re: An alternative to using Google Analytics on your website

#82

Post by saagarjha »

rchaud wrote: post #78
saagarjha wrote: post #33

If 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.

> 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 can't be serious. Who in this day and age reads an article and thinks "Hmm, that was useful, I'll send the author a note of thanks"? This might have been the case in 1995 when there were only a few websites around, and Internet use was considered leisure time and not part a…

A fair number of people, surprisingly. Some will also send emails with questions or comments.

Re: An alternative to using Google Analytics on your website

#83

Post by asdfasgasdgasdg »

Yizahi wrote: post #59

"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.

I would say that 99.99% of businesses do give a damn about their customers. And particularly they care about their customers' preferences as demonstrated by their economic behavior. Very few customers care whether a business uses GA enough to change their purchasing decisions. Businesses therefore rightly view the decision as neutral with respect to customer preferences.

Re: An alternative to using Google Analytics on your website

#84

Post by paraditedc »

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…

Let's be honest, many things in life (especially quantitatively measured) are done to feed the ego. There's no need single out website views.

Re: An alternative to using Google Analytics on your website

#85

Post by skrtskrt »

hidiegomariani wrote: post #62

Yes! 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…

Is this somehow different than what you get from hosting on Cloudflare Dash? I have my GitHub pages DNS through Dash and the only additional thing I wish I had was referrer analytics.

Nice site, too. Bookmarked :)

Re: An alternative to using Google Analytics on your website

#86

Post by rchaud »

fitzn wrote: post #73

I really dislike the user experience of GA. I literally know 1% of the functionality it offers and I only _need_ 1% of what it offers. But I do like that it's free. Was planning to one day give https://simpleanalytics.com/ a shot.

GA is complete overkill for hobby websites that get ~100s of visits/day. If you have a commercial website selling stuff, or conduct A/B testing, or have marketing channels funnelling traffic to the site, then you pretty much have to use something like GA or Adobe Analytics.

Re: An alternative to using Google Analytics on your website

#87

Post by lmkg »

barbegal wrote: post #66
snowwrestler wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

On the other hand, take a look at this:

https://privacy.google.com/businesses/rdp/

Google's usage of Analytics data is restricted unless GA is integrated with Google Ads.

I think section 6 may actually be referring to collecting data about the Google Analytics user's usage of analytics, not data about the website visitor. I.e. if Bob puts GA on his website and Alice visits the website, then the sentence you quoted is about Google tracking Bob's usage of GA, not about Alice's visit. But I am very unsure about that.

Re: An alternative to using Google Analytics on your website

#88

Post by coldpie »

rchaud wrote: post #78
saagarjha wrote: post #33

If 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.

> 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 can't be serious. Who in this day and age reads an article and thinks "Hmm, that was useful, I'll send the author a note of thanks"? This might have been the case in 1995 when there were only a few websites around, and Internet use was considered leisure time and not part a…

> Who in this day and age reads an article and thinks "Hmm, that was useful, I'll send the author a note of thanks"?

I do. Maybe you should, too?

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