Lightweight Alternatives to Google Analytics
1–10 of 320 posts
Re: Lightweight Alternatives to Google Analytics
#2Google Analytics has a "bot filtering" option that works pretty well (even though it's not perfect). Do the alternatives also have similar features? There is a lot of automated traffic on the internet.
Re: Lightweight Alternatives to Google Analytics
#3I use Ackee, also a simple and open source alternative https://ackee.electerious.com/
Re: Lightweight Alternatives to Google Analytics
#4I recently had a discussion about the interface with the Goatcounter developer [1]. Also put in a feature request with Posthog [2]. Hadn't heard of Plausible, maybe that's the one for me!
Re: Lightweight Alternatives to Google Analytics
#5I’ve been pretty happy with Matomo (formerly Piwik), especially their non-cookie mode. But the interface is ugly, confusing, and makes finding information much more difficult than Google Analytics does.
Edit: One major thing I am unhappy with in Matomo is event tracking. GA makes it much easier (in my experience) to track conversions and events, and presents the data in a better way.
Re: Lightweight Alternatives to Google Analytics
#6Google Analytics has a "bot filtering" option that works pretty well (even though it's not perfect). Do the alternatives also have similar features? There is a lot of automated traffic on the internet.
Matomo has the same, works pretty well. Via plugin they can also track bots to show that separately but they're filtered by default.
Re: Lightweight Alternatives to Google Analytics
#7Google Analytics has a "bot filtering" option that works pretty well (even though it's not perfect). Do the alternatives also have similar features? There is a lot of automated traffic on the internet.
It looks like GoatCounter does; it uses a library, https://github.com/zgoat/isbot by the same author to detect bots.
Detecting and deterring spam and sketchy behaviour while using open source software could be an interesting technical problem area.
Re: Lightweight Alternatives to Google Analytics
#8Google Analytics has a "bot filtering" option that works pretty well (even though it's not perfect). Do the alternatives also have similar features? There is a lot of automated traffic on the internet.
Matomo has the same, works pretty well. Via plugin they can also track bots to show that separately but they're filtered by default.
I'm not sure if it's actually filtered - I think they're just tracked and classified. At least that's what I'm seeing in my instance.
Re: Lightweight Alternatives to Google Analytics
#9If you decide to migrate off GA, there's very little reason to not use self-hosted analytics.
The only case when you'd get better analytics from a _service_ is exactly a GA-like setup that can track people as they go from one website to another. That is, the real value of an analytics service is derived directly from its ability to invade people privacy, at scale.
Granted, migrating to another service is usually simpler, but it offers NO insights into the traffic that you can't get from parsing server logs and in-page pingbacks. You do however get a 3rd party dependency and a subscription fee.
Re: Lightweight Alternatives to Google Analytics
#10I’ve been pretty happy with Matomo (formerly Piwik), especially their non-cookie mode. But the interface is ugly, confusing, and makes finding information much more difficult than Google Analytics does. Edit: One major thing I am unhappy with in Matomo is event tracking. GA makes it much easier (in my experience) to track conversions and events, and presents the data in a better way.
I found the Matomo interface to be a breath of fresh air compared to Google Analytics! As a non-power user, GA was too heavy and enterprise-like. Matomo is much cleaner, simpler, and more efficient for me to work with.