I also made the switch two weeks ago and I don't miss anything. I even removed google-fonts from my site and host the .woff files myself, so I don't force my users to send requests to Google. I replaced GA with my own self-hosted analytics platform[0] and I plan to add a lot more privacy features to it.
We ditched Google Analytics
61–70 of 79 posts
Re: We ditched Google Analytics
#62Call 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.
CDN could give you your logs though. I think cloudflare gives you analytics for example (not very detailed in the free version, but you can get more by paying).
Re: We ditched Google Analytics
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 s…
2x is usually just unique visitors, because most people block ads and trackers (at least those who visit tech blogs).
Counting all requests will be much more than 2x the GA visitors.
Re: We ditched Google Analytics
#64Re: We ditched Google Analytics
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, there are much better ways of getting user feedback, for example a comments section.
Disqus? Just joking. Any good alternatives?
I've seen a bunch of people just link to HN and reddit discussions of their posts. On my blog I am using utteranc.es, which let's people make comments using github issues. It does require making a github account though. Here's an example of some comments on a post: https://blog.kdheepak.com/writing-papers-with-markdown.html
Re: We ditched Google Analytics
#66You can talk to the Google Analytics API directly and control exactly what is sent to Google's servers. This also allows to create custom identifiers for users or sessions, or to track no personally identifiable information at all. A good starting point is Minimal Analytics which also removes lots of unnecessary bloat:
Re: We ditched Google Analytics
#67Earlier 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.
Or simply an email or a contact form.
The reality is that one usually does not have large discussion, only one to one exchanges (if any). Email is fine for that, you can always update the post if there aee interesting outcomes.
Re: We ditched Google Analytics
#68Both google analytics and google tag manager are blocked in NoScript for me. If your site is using them they're useless for me and my actions on your site. Also every single one of my clients are blocking them too. Part of talk with my clients is to also make them install NoScript + uBlock Origins.
Re: We ditched Google Analytics
#69You can talk to the Google Analytics API directly and control exactly what is sent to Google's servers. This also allows to create custom identifiers for users or sessions, or to track no personally identifiable information at all. A good starting point is Minimal Analytics which also removes lots of unnecessary bloat: https://minimalanalytics.com/
That's cool! Isn't the client-side request to `www.google-analytics.com` enough for Google to track users between sessions and domains?
Re: We ditched Google Analytics
#70To remove google analytics, I will be implementing snow-plow. First PoC was quite good.
Dashboards via BigQuery + Google Datastudio + Custom stuff.