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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

#181

Post by hk__2 »

DevKoala wrote: post #67
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…

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.

> Nothing is “free”

Can we stop with this nitpicking? You’re not paying any money, so it’s “free”. That Google analyses your data is another story: it could do it whether you’re paying or not.

Re: An alternative to using Google Analytics on your website

#182

Post by andrewzah »

throwaway894345 wrote: post #150
numbers wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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 you ️ I did try to find something simpler, and I remember looking at Fathom but I don't recall off the top of my head what my qualm was. Basically anything that involves a VM is more complex than the system I described and anything that involves Docker is considerably more expensi…

You could use a VPS with hetzner or scaleway for $5/mo with decent specs, or use an older raspberry pi 2/3. I had metrics services like prometheus, grafana, and matomo analytics running on my old pi before I migrated them to a VPS.

It's a little more complex, yes, but running a VPS with a few services / docker is not really that complex in the grand scheme of things. It opens you to the world of open source and/or just running long-lived processes. You also could host your site on it, removing a dependency on github offering free static hosting forever.

Re: An alternative to using Google Analytics on your website

#183

Post by seanwilson »

What do people suggest if you have a website that sells something?

Knowing where your traffic is coming from, if your new redesign helped or hindered users in finding content, and knowing which traffic sources result in the most sales sounds business critical to me.

I've seen lots of situations where when we look into analytics, it becomes obvious users are having trouble finding content or don't know the content is there to be found (e.g. putting an important link behind a navigation menu was a bad idea).

I feel people can overly focus on the more manipulative side of A/B test, but analytics is useful for improving your UX as well. Not everyone runs a personal blog without a care for monetisation or viewership either.

Re: An alternative to using Google Analytics on your website

#184

Post by throw_m239339 »

chadlavi wrote: post #12
shripadk wrote: post #5

The biggest drawback to not having Google Analytics on your website is if you choose to run Google Ads for your site and you have to retarget/remarket on Google properties. Without Google Analytics you are out of luck as you can enable remarketing only in Google Analytics (and you would need Analytics linked to Google Ads). If you have a personal website or a business that grows organically without needing to use Adv…

don't run google ads either

But what are the alternatives for websites with a small audience? not many choices out there.

Re: An alternative to using Google Analytics on your website

#185

Post by markosaric »

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…

thanks for your feedback! We had pricing on the home page but have now added a pricing link in the top menu too :)

Re: An alternative to using Google Analytics on your website

#186

Post by slenk »

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…

I assume you mean you are running the whole site through the cloudflare proxy, not just DNS. You cannot get that advanced of DNS metrics by just using them for DNS.

Re: An alternative to using Google Analytics on your website

#187

Post by clairity »

nsgi wrote: post #122
clairity wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "[GA]...doesn't have creepy features that let you spy on individual users" google reserves that for itself so as not to lose it's dominance of online advertising and targeting. why would they share their bread and butter with the little guys?

No idea if that's true or not regarding Google Analytics, but you can opt out of all data sharing and I imagine Google would be in a lot of trouble if they didn't honour that.

i'm sure there are people at google who want to honor those opt-outs in good faith, and there are those who don't.

the massive organizational system itself, nevermind the massive computational systems, acts against doing this thoroughly and auditably.

it's also hard to believe that they'd get the data out of every last nook and cranny when they don't even swap out dead hard drives in their datacenters because of time and cost to find them (as related to me by a googler a number of years ago).

and they have an army of lawyers and lobbyists for anything that falls all the way through the cracks to the public in a way that allows lawsuits (gdpr and the like).

Re: An alternative to using Google Analytics on your website

#188

Post by mschuster91 »

booi wrote: post #161
hidiegomariani wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It tells you even percentage and absolute number of cached dns queries. Cloudflare is dope!

I think he meant queries from caching nameservers that cloudflare does not control. I would argue the majority of queries would be fulfilled by these caching nameservers.

Setting a sufficiently low DNS TTL will take most caching servers out of the question.
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