81–90 of 320 posts
Google 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.
I've recently whipped up my own self-hosted analytics solution [0] based on SQLite, Bash and Metabase. It's all self hosted, easy to install and very flexible with regards to the queries you can write and display. Metabase comes with a lot of cool features for display, live reload and other cool stuff. :) [0]: https://funnybretzel.com/self-hosted-analytics-using-sqlite-...
I'm a fan of GoAccess. Unfortunately the queries are pre-made and there are nearly no options whatsoever. You can't (yet) filter by date for example.
One thing I realized is, that on small sites, like my blog, an overwhelming amount of traffic comes from search engines or bots which are looking for vulnerabilities. Filtering them out takes a lot of time in any self-hosted or self-made solution.
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.…
> I realized that it doesn't actually report any useful or actionable data The actionable part never occurred to me, but makes so much sense. What action could anyone really take, based on the data presented by Google Analytics? On top of my head I can actually think of anything you could easily get from server logs.
- Conversion rate grouped by browser and browser version to find browser specific bugs. - Total revenue per user per marketing channel / search keyword / ... to optimize budget allocation. - Revenue by mobile OS version share to decide testing procedures to not optimize for users that don't contribute to your bottom line. - Client side loading times per user location and provider to optimize infrastructure placement. - ...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> it has no "viral effect" in case of linking
Neither does the GPL or any other licence under European laws.
It's pretty simple to extend too: I've added basic client-side (JavaScript) error reporting on top of it, and I'm thinking about using it for Content Security Policy reporting too.
I'm putting the finishing touches on a `tag=XXX` parameter that allows you to record a tag (like a pageid), and then filter the maps by it (not publicly documented yet, but will be in the next couple weeks).
I'm collecting feedback and looking to open it for beta in the next couple of weeks, but there's already a preview signup link in the newsletter, where I share my progress on building the platform on a weekly basis.
I've been happily using Fathom Analytics: https://usefathom.com and I have zero complaints. No tracking. Privacy focused. Lightweight. You embed from your own domain. They even do site monitoring now!
Thanks James. You wait till we launch V3 ;)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I realized that it doesn't actually report any useful or actionable data The actionable part never occurred to me, but makes so much sense. What action could anyone really take, based on the data presented by Google Analytics? On top of my head I can actually think of anything you could easily get from server logs.
Examples I saw in a website I launched last year: * High bounce rate showed that people did not find the content engaging / not what they were looking for, confirming a hypothesis I had; this was particularly true for certain sections of the website. * Time spent on pages was another metric that was helpful to find problems in some sections. * Easy slicing of traffic sources by referrer and country, showed me that mo…
If 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 simp…
Of course you can run your own analytics on AWS or similar and have no issues with handling traffic, but that means higher costs / difficulty in setting up and maintaining it.