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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

#131

Post by SkyMarshal »

carlisle_ wrote: post #108
abhisuri97 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I really don't think so, I've never heard of this company I didn't know what they sell. I had to poke around the website and read the comments here to realize. That's really the exact opposite of being up front.

I’ve never heard of Plausible either but the instant I browsed to the article I suspected they were a competitor. I skimmed the table of contents and saw the last item was recommending a product with the same name as the website, and my suspicion was confirmed. They’re perfectly up front and obvious about it, not hiding anything.

Re: An alternative to using Google Analytics on your website

#132

Post by GrinningFool »

londons_explore wrote: post #76
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.

If you want high quality blog posts, you need to know which ones are popular and bring in new readers. Without that, you'll loose a really strong signal for self improvement, and your blog might become write-only...

I don't see anything in what you said that explains the assumption that a popular post is a high-quality post.

Certainly if you're looking to build an audience, then the popularity of your posts is an important metric that will help you craft additional popular posts.

But it seems to me that the the only _quality_ indicator isn't a metric at all - it's actual feedback from people who have read what you've written.

Re: An alternative to using Google Analytics on your website

#133

Post by maple3142 »

munk-a wrote: post #106
throwaway894345 wrote: post #102

I have a hobby blog that I'm trying to run for Browser (~3 lines of JS) -> API Gateway -> SQS Queue -> Lambda (ETLs queue into) -> Athena. I was originally just going to use Postgres, but RDS/Aurora are expensive and running Postgres in EC2 is going to be at least as much work (configuring SSH, process management, backups, monitoring, logging, image building, networking, etc). My custom plan is ~$3/month all-in provi…

Your choice is, of course, your choice, but I'd strongly suggest GA for this use case. I understand and agree that Google is in fact evil and we should avoid feeding the beast, but a hobby website using GA is too minor to care about for any of the privacy reasons the author states and if it's fully static pages then ideally the performance will already be light enough that the bloat of GA isn't going to make a differ…

I have a blog hosted on GitHub pages, and I only want to know what pages are viewed the most. Before using GA, I have considered multiple alternative. For self-hosted alternatives, I don't bother to use it because I don't want to maintain a server just for my blog. As for other paid hosted alternative, I avoid them because I want it to be as cheap as possible. So I eventually choose GA, but in a different fashion, because I do care about its bloat. I simply write a short JavaScript using Measurement Protocol[1] to only send pageview to GA, which works very well for me.

[1]: https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection...

Re: An alternative to using Google Analytics on your website

#134

Post by bad_user »

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…

> "The correct proposition instead would be to stop analytics on your website, period."

Analytics are for optimizing your business and presentation, for finding out how big your audience is, how it responds to new content or features, etc. And for users it's not a loss of privacy if the data is anonymized.

Even for your personal blog, if you treat it as a tool for reaching an audience, then analytics are useful for growing that audience. When you put effort into writing articles, you want to see some results, after all it's an investment. And even if it's a hobby, seeing the size of your audience can serve as motivation. Even if it's a hobby, as long as you publish it online, you want others to read it, so it isn't a hobby that you can do in isolation without feedback.

In fact analytics can be a legitimate interest under GDPR. Usage of Google Analytics might be in a gray area due to it being a third-party and it's debatable if they are GDPR compliant, but usage of analytics in general is perfectly legit without explicit consent, as long as the data is anonymized.

Re: An alternative to using Google Analytics on your website

#135

Post by megous »

nsgi wrote: post #114
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…

With any website it's important to know how many visitors it is receiving. In the context of a blog knowing you're getting a lot of traffic can motivate you to publish more content and knowing more about your visitors can also feed into what sort of content you publish. You could look at your server logs, of course, but analytics is easier to set up and gives you higher quality data than something like AWStats. Since…

Or you can have comments or some social platform for interacting with users, which is more rewarding, direct, and useful for future direction or content suggestions.

Re: An alternative to using Google Analytics on your website

#136

Post by saagarjha »

rchaud wrote: post #90
dandare wrote: post #25

The million-dollar question: will removing GA hurt my search raanking?

No. Hacker News does not use GA. Yet it ranks at the top for many searches.

Hacker News also happens to have a monopoly on certain search terms ;)

Re: An alternative to using Google Analytics on your website

#137

Post by progre »

saagarjha wrote: post #64
smacktoward wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I too don't controll my server, but it turned out that my hosting provider (one.com) has pretty nice access analytics, e̶v̶e̶n̶ ̶f̶o̶r̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶p̶r̶o̶j̶e̶c̶t̶s̶ ̶I̶ ̶h̶a̶v̶e̶ ̶w̶h̶e̶r̶e̶ ̶o̶n̶e̶.̶c̶o̶m̶'̶s̶ ̶o̶n̶l̶y̶ ̶r̶o̶l̶e̶ ̶i̶s̶ ̶D̶N̶S̶ ̶r̶e̶d̶i̶r̶e̶c̶t̶ ̶t̶o̶ ̶a̶ ̶c̶h̶e̶a̶p̶ ̶V̶P̶S̶ (Edit:Nope it does not, how could it). When I discovered this I dropped GA for most of my projects. I have one remaining project that still uses GA but only bcs I haven't gotten around to fix it. Maybe your hosting provider has analytics too? I had to poke around in the dashboard for one.com to find it.

Re: An alternative to using Google Analytics on your website

#138

Post by throwaway894345 »

munk-a wrote: post #106
throwaway894345 wrote: post #102

I have a hobby blog that I'm trying to run for Browser (~3 lines of JS) -> API Gateway -> SQS Queue -> Lambda (ETLs queue into) -> Athena. I was originally just going to use Postgres, but RDS/Aurora are expensive and running Postgres in EC2 is going to be at least as much work (configuring SSH, process management, backups, monitoring, logging, image building, networking, etc). My custom plan is ~$3/month all-in provi…

Your choice is, of course, your choice, but I'd strongly suggest GA for this use case. I understand and agree that Google is in fact evil and we should avoid feeding the beast, but a hobby website using GA is too minor to care about for any of the privacy reasons the author states and if it's fully static pages then ideally the performance will already be light enough that the bloat of GA isn't going to make a differ…

I've used GA before for this same blog, and the bloat was perceptible. Not only that, but the GA interface was poor and there was a lot of spam. Adding onto that the various ethical concerns (privacy and Google's questionable politics), I decided to go with something else.

Also, to reemphasize, the primary purpose of the blog and its infrastructure is to serve my own amusement and to indulge my technical interests.

Re: An alternative to using Google Analytics on your website

#139

Post by mulmen »

numbers wrote: post #107
throwaway894345 wrote: post #102

I have a hobby blog that I'm trying to run for Browser (~3 lines of JS) -> API Gateway -> SQS Queue -> Lambda (ETLs queue into) -> Athena. I was originally just going to use Postgres, but RDS/Aurora are expensive and running Postgres in EC2 is going to be at least as much work (configuring SSH, process management, backups, monitoring, logging, image building, networking, etc). My custom plan is ~$3/month all-in provi…

I've done something similar to this that has worked for me without a lot of effort besides the first time setup. I use Fathom which is open-source and available to use on any hosting service. I use it with DigitalOcean so it's $5/mo and I get to run it on as many websites I have. Might not be very helpful in your case but I'd recommend thinking about using a simpler setup than SQS Queue + Lambda, if that works for yo…

I had to scroll a bit more than this thread would prefer to find the pricing. It says "get started for free" but the lowest pricing tier is $14.00/mo. Looks like "free" is only the 7 day trial.

Re: An alternative to using Google Analytics on your website

#140

Post by AndrewStephens »

Congratulations on getting your subtle advertising on the front page. I admire your restraint in only mentioning your product at the conclusion of a long article - nicely done!

That said, you state what many have been been saying for years - GA is overkill for most sites and gives a stupid amount of information to Google. But sites are giving up their users information to any 3rd party analytics package, not just GA.

Hosting your own analytics is the only ethical way to go, unless you really, really need the demographic data that GA provides (which you probably don't).

Having passive feedback that people are actually reading your posts is nice but a simple hit-counter would probably do the job and relieve your readers of losing another little slice of their privacy.

I'm going to take a leaf out of the poster's book and mention my own project in passing: https://sheep.horse/visitor_statistics.html

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