Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

We ditched Google Analytics

missiveapp.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 79 posts

Re: We ditched Google Analytics

#51

Post by masonhensley »

rplnt wrote: post #39
masonhensley wrote: post #9

Nice, idea for someone (I wish I had time)... "Good Housekeeping Seal" for Analytics - Self host analytics - Don't use google analytics - Don't use tracking pixels (FB, Reddit, etc) - etc "Good Housekeeping Seal" for Billing Practices (in same vein, a little off topic though) - Can cancel your subscription online - Sends reminders prior to charging card (dark pattern on some sites) - Open receipt API to scrape out hi…

> Can cancel your subscription online I think this is legally required in EU at least? I mean, if you started the subscription online. Same with the trial I believe.

Despite that, many companies employ dark patterns where you can take that action if you are in the EU, but they add friction in other markets.

Re: We ditched Google Analytics

#52

Post by krlx »

dpcan wrote: post #3

Is anyone using an open source statistics system that's as simple as simple analytics? Maybe even something that can be setup to run stats for multiple clients from our own VPS?

Shameless plug, I wanted to develop a simple tiny stats dashboard using firebase as a backend: https://github.com/Karalix/feu-analytics

However, while it does what it is intended to do, it needs further dev that I am too lazy to do.

Re: We ditched Google Analytics

#53

Post by wastedhours »

bdefore wrote: post #45
dewey wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because a lot of times things are hosted on services where you don't have access to raw log files (Netlify for example).

And in the Netlify example, they'll sell you analytics based on the logs (adblocker proof) for $9/month. For one case on a site I operate, the numbers are ~2x higher than GA.

This was always the way back before GA really gained traction - a lot of the old school log monitoring analytics basically equated requests as hits (with only some slight filtering) and so the numbers were always inflated (I never normally got to 2x, normally to about 1.5x - but guess it depends on the implementation's filtering of bots, spam IPs etc... Edit: remember we were using AWStats).

Was great being able to spin the traffic figures on our game review site for PRs who didn't understand web analytics at that time.

Re: We ditched Google Analytics

#54

Post by rkwz »

edraferi wrote: post #44
rkwz wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Freshlytics - https://github.com/sheshbabu/freshlytics * Cookies are not used * Personally identifiable information (PII) is not collected * See the pageview in different dimensions like page urls, referrers, browsers etc * Supports multiple projects * Supports RBAC Screenshots - https://github.com/sheshbabu/freshlytics/blob/master/docs/sc...

Looks useful, but it depends on PipelineDB, a PostgreSQL extension for streaming data. Unfortunately PipelineDB hasn't been updated since May 2019 [0] when they were acquired by Confluent [1]. The former PipelineDB team appears to be focused on Confluent's KSQL product [2]. There's an open source "ksqlDB" but it appears to depend on Kafka, so it's not a 1:1 replacement for PipelineDB[3]. [0] https://github.com/pipeli…

Yes, I'm relying on the "continuous views" feature of PipelineDB which is like autorefreshing materialized views. I'm planning to swap PipelineDB with TimescaleDB in near future

Most of the heavy lifting is done by Postgres/PipelineDB with Node.js as a simple wrapper so it's both performant and consumes less resources.

http://docs.pipelinedb.com/continuous-views.html

https://docs.timescale.com/latest/using-timescaledb/continuo...

Re: We ditched Google Analytics

#55

Post by tarun_anand »

Let me first of all congratulate you. And secondly throw my hat in the ring. We offer a commercial alternative to Google Analytics and have seen massive interest in this space.

Please let us know if you are looking for alternatives.

Re: We ditched Google Analytics

#57

Post by XCSme »

kmfrk wrote: post #4

How private is using localStorage for ID persistence instead of cookies for Google Analytics - and in general? It's what I'm using, but obviously it takes an expert to figure out just how much of an improvement it is. Apparently Service Workers can also be used. https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection...

The biggest advantage of localStorage is that it is, as its name implies, "local" to the site you are visiting. Cookies can be shared accross domains and sites you visit, but localStorage can not. If one on domain you store `localStorage.ID = 5`, you can not read that from another domain, as `localStorage.ID` will be undefined in a different domain context.

Re: We ditched Google Analytics

#58

Post by pimterry »

ken wrote: post #25

Call me old-fashioned, but if developers really want to minimize their impact on visitors, I wonder why they shifted away from using plain old log files. In the screenshot of the dashboard, "screen size" is the only attribute I see which can't be derived from a web server request log entry. I was using Analog to analyze Apache logs back in the 1990's -- it's older than JS.

Analytics from server logging breaks in the cases where either:

- Page navigation often happens client-side (so most dynamic SPAs)

- Content is often cached and/or served from a CDN (so most non-trivial static sites)

In reality, nowadays most page loads don't ever touch the origin server, for a wide range of good reasons. Including analytics in the client-side page sidesteps that whole problem.

Re: We ditched Google Analytics

#59

Post by exlurker »

amelius wrote: post #35
mikro2nd wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This! Exactly this! The moment you start worrying about which posts/pages people looked at is the very moment you start getting sucked into the vortex that's called "pandering to the crowd". The extreme end of that is "clickbait content". Down that road I wish not to go!

Yes, there are much better ways of getting user feedback, for example a comments section.

Disqus? Just joking. Any good alternatives?

Re: We ditched Google Analytics

#60

Post by XCSme »

nerdponx wrote: post #5
kmfrk wrote: post #4

How private is using localStorage for ID persistence instead of cookies for Google Analytics - and in general? It's what I'm using, but obviously it takes an expert to figure out just how much of an improvement it is. Apparently Service Workers can also be used. https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection...

Seems to me like LocalStorage in this case is just a way to get around people deleting/blocking cookies. What would be the legitimate use?

See my comment above, localStorage can not be shared between domains as cookies can. So it's a lot better for privacy. With localStorage you can only track multiple visits of a user on the same site, not across sites.
Post reply on HN