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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

#231

Post by Tomte »

tyre wrote: post #177
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…

For personal projects, what about basic usage data from something server-side like nginx logs? No JS, no tracking, just basic analytics. Even if it's only a personal blog, knowing what people care about is helpful If anyone has recommendations for something self-hosted like this, I'm in the market :)

Do you mean GoAccess?

Re: An alternative to using Google Analytics on your website

#232

Post by munk-a »

shortstuffsushi wrote: post #157
munk-a wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Discovering that users are having difficulty finding pricing information... might be one useful piece of data you could garner with a good analytics tool. Also I just checked out the pricing's placement and that is utterly terrible UI - the site uses light greyshade striping in the background for difference sections and then has the pricing block proceeded by a very dark background block with no information immediate…

Genuine question, how would you find that users are struggling to find pricing using an analytics tool? How would you set that up / what would you look for to identify that? Something like scrolling around / back and forth implying they're struggling to find data or something?

A good signal would probably be dithering as you mentioned above - either scrolling back and forth through sections or navigating through different components if you website has a paged layout.

Additionally, as a business, you want to make sure users are following a pretty predictable flow through some limited entry points (like homepage, FAQ, information bulletins) - then either to pricing and then additional information or additional information then pricing (then, ideally, a sale).

If a user is returning to the entry point (i.e. a flow like information bulletins > home page > FAQ > information bulletins) and that happens enough then you can assume that some information users want after the FAQ (maybe, ideally, you think the pricing) isn't being delivered to them and so they're returning to their entry point to see if they browsed the information incorrectly.

If you've got good stats on how far down on a page people are scrolling that could also be something helpful to detect the specific UI issue I mentioned in the post above.

Edit: I might suggest Don't Make Me Think by Steve Krug[1] as a resource if you'd like to learn a bit more about user flow analysis.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don%27t_Make_Me_Think

Re: An alternative to using Google Analytics on your website

#233

Post by saagarjha »

jefftk wrote: post #214
coldpie wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You may get more comments/emails than I do. I think I've gotten 3 worthwhile comments and 2 emails in the 8 years my blog has been active. I actually turned comments off, because I was getting thousands of spam daily, and that seems like a waste of everyone's time.

I host my comments externally. For example, https://www.jefftk.com/p/mosh is currently on the HN frontpage as https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22810589 , and I think of that like my comment section. I have my blog pull in the comments from there: https://www.jefftk.com/p/mosh#hn-22811119 I also pull comments from LessWrong and Facebook, though the FB comment integration is pretty temperamental.

Is there a way to comment on your post if it's not been posted to Hacker News/Facebook/LessWrong?

Re: An alternative to using Google Analytics on your website

#234

Post by lghh »

overeater wrote: post #198
lghh wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Reading the link" isn't quite poking around, is it?

You don't know what it is from just reading the link. And even that itself is not upfront -- browsers have been trying to hide the URL for a while now. What if you read it on Google AMP? I agree with the other commenter that this is misleading.

I should have been more clear - reading the content of the link.

Re: An alternative to using Google Analytics on your website

#235

Post by tyre »

Tomte wrote: post #231
tyre wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For personal projects, what about basic usage data from something server-side like nginx logs? No JS, no tracking, just basic analytics. Even if it's only a personal blog, knowing what people care about is helpful If anyone has recommendations for something self-hosted like this, I'm in the market :)

Do you mean GoAccess?

oh! This looks great, thank you!

Re: An alternative to using Google Analytics on your website

#236

Post by tobilg »

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…

You might have a look at https://ownstats.cloud

Re: An alternative to using Google Analytics on your website

#237

Post by junkilo »

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…

plausible.io looks to be a one-developer show. pretty impressive.

Re: An alternative to using Google Analytics on your website

#238

Post by tyre »

lgl wrote: post #229
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 requir…

This is helpful, thank you.

You mean to say that spambots don't respect robots.txt??

Good to think about. I'll check these out and see what they've done (if much) to mitigate that issue. I'd imagine that would need to be front and center, unless they're focused more on internal services.

Re: An alternative to using Google Analytics on your website

#239

Post by hidiegomariani »

slenk wrote: post #186
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.

I use cloudflare as nameserver that effectively takes over all DNS queries for my domain

Re: An alternative to using Google Analytics on your website

#240

Post by robotnikman »

londons_explore wrote: post #68
lucideer wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

This is the first time I've heard of photopea, thanks for sharing that!
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