Lightweight Alternatives to Google Analytics

TIL about European Union Public License:

https://joinup.ec.europa.eu/collection/eupl/introduction-eup...

OSI-certified, copyleft, non-viral, GPL-compatible, SaaS-aware, multilingual

Server side was how it was always done back in the early days of the web, and analog[0] was state of the art.

Around 1999/2000 there was a rise of ISPs needing to install reverse proxy caches because the growth of consumer access meant they were getting seriously contended on upstream access. I was working at the time at a UK 0845 white label ISP called Telinco (was behind Connect Free, Totalise, Current Bun and other 0845 ISPs), and to my knowledge we were the first in the UK to install a Netapps cache. It was the moment we realised (by checking the logs to see if it was working), just how much porn our customers were accessing.

Those caches blow server side analytics to pieces, because frequently you wouldn't even know the user had hit the page. What server side analytics was useful for is what we'd now call Observability: they gave reasonable Latency, Error Rate and Throughput metrics, which combined with some other system logs might also give you a sense of Saturation.

As such, they were not too useful for marketing. Google Analytics was the first product that allowed high fidelity analytics even if reverse proxy caches (and even browser caches), were all over the place.

And here we are. In a World where we are tightly surveilled by corporate entities in order to try and get us to click on things. Bit sad really.

I'd encourage people to think about what they need these analytics for.

If it's marketing, you might just as well using GA: it's the best product out there. We just need to lobby for better regulation (at least GDPR and cookie setting popovers give us choices on that regard now).

If you're stroking your ego, consider whether such an invasive technology is worth the price, and if you need those numbers.

If you're making sure your infrastructure can handle the traffic, use server side analytics alone. Parse your logs using the huge number of tools out there able to do that in near-realtime, and leave your users' browsers free of tracking cookies and javascript.

[0] https://www.web42.com/analog/

Still no real alternative when on a Github page, or am I missing something?

It's not that I really need statistics, but sometimes it would be nice to know if there is even anything going on or you're just screaming into a void.

But I refuse to spam visitors of my pages with GA.

I turned off Google Analytics, because I realized that it doesn't actually report any useful or actionable data, just vanity metrics, and many of them of dubious quality.

I run a SaaS and what matters for me is paid subscriptions. "Visits" (even if by humans, which is hard to tell) really do not matter much. Yes, I do want to increase conversion rates, and run bandit experiments, but I'm better off doing that myself.

What also matters are search terms, but Google's search console (or tools, or whatever it's called this week) provides that.

Turning off Google Analytics was hard to do psychologically — the Fear Of Missing Out is strong. But it turns out I'm not missing out on anything, except some dubious vanity data. And I'm making the web a better place in the process.

Of course you can now do Google Analytics server-side with GTM: https://www.optimics.cz/what-is-gtm-server-side-tracking-and...

Have GCP? Hit this button and you get your docker container in your Kubernetes cluster doing all the stuff for you, pretty awesome.