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An alternative to using Google Analytics on your website

plausible.io

271–280 of 311 posts

Re: An alternative to using Google Analytics on your website

#271
post #78

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…

My blog only has a few hundred hits, and I haven't put my email address on it or invited anyone to contact me, but I've still gotten emails from two people and had some pleasant conversations.

Re: An alternative to using Google Analytics on your website

#272

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…

Hotjar, Fullstory, Crazyegg.

Re: An alternative to using Google Analytics on your website

#273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't poke around. I knew by the time I finished reading the Table of Contents, before I even got to the content. Even if they had said in their very first sentence of the content "Disclaimer: We are a competitor to Google Analytics", I would have already known before that. It's blatantly obvious, they didn't need to spoon feed me. This isn't some submarine article. http://paulgraham.com/submarine.html

Your comment reminds me of this: https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2018/04/28/meta/ >"I am THE ONE. You only need to know me. I am better than all of you."

All the examples given in that article are people belittling complex programming tasks. But this was just a simple a reading comprehension and logical deduction task, not even remotely in the same league.

But maybe to you this was a similarly difficult task, so I apologize if I was being insulting by belittling it. Sorry!

Re: An alternative to using Google Analytics on your website

#274
post #175
post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you mean XSS?

I'm specifically talking about CSRF as I've found that to be quite widespread and some analytics providers have had flaws that can lead to your account being deleted or stats sent to someone else's email address, etc. I don't know if there's a similar problem with XSS, but I trust Google's security practices more than most other companies.

I see. I always have this idea in my head, to start a service and get people to put my script on their web sites, and pull a grand scam one day by changing the script to do something malicious on those poor sites that didn't add SRI.

Re: An alternative to using Google Analytics on your website

#275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your comment reminds me of this: https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2018/04/28/meta/ >"I am THE ONE. You only need to know me. I am better than all of you."

All the examples given in that article are people belittling complex programming tasks. But this was just a simple a reading comprehension and logical deduction task, not even remotely in the same league. But maybe to you this was a similarly difficult task, so I apologize if I was being insulting by belittling it. Sorry!

Wow what a pretentious person you are.

Re: An alternative to using Google Analytics on your website

#277
post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I get that, but you don't get more information than number of DNS queries - nothing about users

Re: An alternative to using Google Analytics on your website

#279
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…

> 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…

Free + because it's so popular, when you have a problem, there are a million resources to find answers. Not even Adobe Analytics can match that.

My mate worked at Yahoo, and they used Yahoo Analytics, and he said it was great, but that when you ran into any issues at all, good luck working out what to do!

The reality of an analytics product is that a non-techy marketing person needs to be able to solve their own issues without wasting tech time (which is the only reason why TagManager exists), and that's a REALLY hard problem to solve.

Re: An alternative to using Google Analytics on your website

#280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pricing can be seen at https://plausible.io/#pricing 6$ / month for a personal website. 12$ / month for a startup. 36$ / month for a business.

$6 is about the cost of monthly hosting for many personal websites. I'd argue theres not a good value proposition here, at the low end of the scale at least.

I think $6/mo. for fast, privacy-focused analytics for small sites is very reasonable.

There's no ad revenue to support this business — the website owner is the customer, not the product. That is a different business model from Google analytics or WordPress free analytics.

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