My personal blog also ditched GA and uses an alternative tool without cookies. Admittedly, it's harder for businesses whose management is steadily being replaced by analytics.
We ditched Google Analytics
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Re: We ditched Google Analytics
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
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).
AFAIK Cloudfront also let’s one store access logs.
Re: We ditched Google Analytics
#73Call 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.
> Page navigation often happens client-side
But most will still load the content from the backend, so you can count those requests.
Re: We ditched Google Analytics
#74You 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?
Yes definitely. They collect the IP address and a browser fingerprint at the very least.
I'm not sure if this is doable by proxying through the server, so only custom events (with an unrelated IP - the server's one) are sent.
Re: We ditched Google Analytics
#75On my personal blog, I just decided to go without any analytics. I feel like I'm writing for myself and to engage a close group of friends. Maybe make some new friends along the way. I don't want to blog for page views or retweets, it just feels like it creates a bad set of incentives. Ultimately the feeder bar of vanity metrics feels so draining. The important post that 5 people deeply appreciate is just as valuable…
I haven't looked at personal website analytics for years. I left them out of my current blog redesign.
Like you, I don't maintain this blog for the fame and glory.
However, I depend on analytics for my monetised website. I depend on that website to make rent. I'd still like to find a less invasive solution.
Re: We ditched Google Analytics
#76Call 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.
Logs are missing some information I occasionally need to make decisions:
- Browser and screen resolution
- Time on page
- Tracking of on-page events
Re: We ditched Google Analytics
#77I have been in the process of moving all of my stuff off of Google services (while I have an excessive amount of free time during Shelter In Place. So I recently moved from Google Analytics to https://usefathom.com . I quite like it. I would like to see how many people read my stuff, but I value my privacy and would like to do the same for others. It's pretty good, and
My problem with usefathom is that their analytics hasn't been prooved in court or by a European GDPR data watchdog to be in the clear of not storing personal information. If you only want to ditch GA because you don't trust Google, then I'd also use usefathom. I think what they do is very clever, but we settled with SimpleAnalytics instead (not as sophisticated and less analytics, but determine unique visitors by ref…
I'd still prefer Fathom because the data isn't fed into Google's fine-tuned tracking machine. Even if it's not a perfect solution, it's likely better than Analytics in that regard
Re: We ditched Google Analytics
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's cool! Isn't the client-side request to `www.google-analytics.com` enough for Google to track users between sessions and domains?
Yes definitely. They collect the IP address and a browser fingerprint at the very least. I'm not sure if this is doable by proxying through the server, so only custom events (with an unrelated IP - the server's one) are sent.
Google Analytics never uses browser fingerprints. The default tracking scripts only use first-party cookies. If you call the GA API directly, you don't even need cookies or local storage. This will make some of the reports meaningless, of course. The user's IP address is obviously sent, but it can be truncated by setting an option.
Re: We ditched Google Analytics
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes definitely. They collect the IP address and a browser fingerprint at the very least. I'm not sure if this is doable by proxying through the server, so only custom events (with an unrelated IP - the server's one) are sent.
Google Analytics never uses browser fingerprints. The default tracking scripts only use first-party cookies. If you call the GA API directly, you don't even need cookies or local storage. This will make some of the reports meaningless, of course. The user's IP address is obviously sent, but it can be truncated by setting an option.
> The user's IP address is obviously sent, but it can be truncated by setting an option.
The IP address is inherently sent due to how the internet operates (unless you proxy GA calls through your server, which I'm not sure is even possible).
The option to "truncate" the IP address just tells Google you don't want to store it for your analytics. It has no effect on whether Google still keeps it on their side for their own benefit.