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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

#221

Post by meowface »

animalgonzales wrote: post #217
vikramkr wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think everyone is so negative on the post because the post is a sleazy ad in disguise. If it had opened with "these are the reasons that we are unsatisfied with analytics which led us to launch our own alternate service, plausible" or even just "why we made plausible.io" then we would know up front that it's an ad but maybe still a worthwhile read. This hides the fact that they want you to maybe try plausible to th…

Where's the sleaze? GA does shady shit, Plausible has a competitor product and they're making the pitch on their company blog. What am I missing?

They used a clickbaity title and deeply buried the lede by disclosing that this is an advertisement for a competing (paid, non-self-hosted, proprietary) product only at the very bottom of a long list. I would bet 95% of readers did not realize this was an advertisement until getting to the bottom.

Re: An alternative to using Google Analytics on your website

#222

Post by DevKoala »

hk__2 wrote: post #181
DevKoala wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Google cannot analyze your user traffic if they don't have a pixel on your site. What are they going to do? Look at your traffic logs?

Designing a website that has traffic insights while respecting your visitor's privacy requires effort.

If you want to delegate the insights, you can pay for it or let Google look at your data. The data goes straight into their ad exchange analysis. In fact, you cannot publish Google ads on your site unless you have had google analytics running on your site for a while.

Re: An alternative to using Google Analytics on your website

#223

Post by SkyMarshal »

cortesoft wrote: post #215
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.

The blog seemed to very intentionally not mention the company's product until the very end. They should have led with that.

It's on the company's own blog under their own domain. It's not like this is a submarine article or the like.

http://paulgraham.com/submarine.html

Re: An alternative to using Google Analytics on your website

#224

Post by meowface »

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 think trying to estimate site visitor/visit statistics solely from DNS traffic would lead to very inaccurate results.

However, if you're using Cloudflare as a reverse proxy, those numbers are pretty much as accurate as you can get. Way more accurate than GA and other JavaScript-based solutions.

Re: An alternative to using Google Analytics on your website

#225

Post by mywittyname »

ksec wrote: post #118

Plausible, Fathom [1] and Simple Analytics [2] are very similar in features. While self hosting is not supported, plausible is Open Source [3] running on Elixir and Postgre. It is also the most affordable out of three, starting at $6 only. I am not sure why HN are so negative about this post, when two years ago everyone were cheering for GA alternatives. Although I do agree it needs to add "Pricing" in the Navigation…

Matamo is free, OSS, and takes just a few minutes to install.

https://matomo.org/

Re: An alternative to using Google Analytics on your website

#226

Post by ForHackernews »

duhi88 wrote: post #204
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?

They made a statement within the last few years that they don't use GA data for their own purposes. The scarier implication is they don't need GA to understand web trends. They can collect far more data using Chrome, AMP, Android, Ads, and more.

Bull shit they don't. Let's see a sworn statement by a Google executive in court or else I don't believe it.

Re: An alternative to using Google Analytics on your website

#227

Post by ForHackernews »

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 don't think that's true at all. You can opt out of seeing the results of Google tracking in your own Google profile, but it doesn't stop them tracking you.

Re: An alternative to using Google Analytics on your website

#228

Post by KerryJones »

These posts are the trash of the internet. Why?

This post...

1 - Fails to explain until the end that they are a competitor writing a "bash" piece

2 - Gives conclusions based on incomplete data and comparisons (website speed is barely affected by 45kb these days, many websites have much bigger reductions on multi-mb loads)

3 - States giant scary click-baitish claim in bold and then in smaller print gives the real story. "It's a liability..." to "it is a potential liability"

4 - Gives a false sense of "many reasons" ("It's a liability" and "It uses cookies" are the same complaint)

5 - States opinions as facts ("It worsens the UX...") -- it might, but the vast majority of websites use cookies, and so this doesn't add anything that you wouldn't have to deal with anyway.

Re: An alternative to using Google Analytics on your website

#229

Post by lgl »

tyre wrote: post #173

What's the best server-side only, self-hosted analytics platform if I don't want to add any JS to the front-end? Running nginx here

In my opinion there are no longer any really viable server side analytics/log processing that's equivalent to what you get with GA unless you want to either install some kind of server with a ton of features and dependencies or use a tool that will most likely also require the use of js.

The amount of crawlers, botnet spam, hacking or scanning activity and other non-visitor related hits you get these days will require a lot of filtering, updating spamlists, blacklisting, etc and you'll probably end up spending more time tweaking your webserver and analytics setup than actually gathering any relevant information from said analytics.

That said, the "old" log processing tools like AWStats, Analog, Webalizer, etc are still available although I'm not sure if they've been kept updated. I'm sure there is also a lot of more competition on self hosted tools that try to replicate what GA does but I'm not that familiar with any either.

Re: An alternative to using Google Analytics on your website

#230

Post by blast »

ForHackernews wrote: post #226
duhi88 wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They made a statement within the last few years that they don't use GA data for their own purposes. The scarier implication is they don't need GA to understand web trends. They can collect far more data using Chrome, AMP, Android, Ads, and more.

Bull shit they don't. Let's see a sworn statement by a Google executive in court or else I don't believe it.

The point people are making is that it's subtler than that. They don't need GA for a surveillance machine. They've already got one.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ea8GyscSFaQ.

It's more valuable to them to be able to truthfully say they don't add GA data to it. Meanwhile offering GA for free chokes out that competitive avenue to anyone else.

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