Lightweight Alternatives to Google Analytics • Hacker News Board

Re: Lightweight Alternatives to Google Analytics

#141

Post by XCSme » Thu, Jun 18, 2020, 1:43 PM UTC

hackernewsn00b wrote: post #131

JackWritesCode wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Server side logs aren’t an accurate way of doing analytics and bring up compliance challenges (storing access logs and using them for purposes other than security etc.)

Can you talk a little bit more about why server side logs aren't accurate for analytics? I was planning on doing basic analytics (pageviews mostly) using Cloudfront access logs stored in an S3 bucket and queried through Athena for a site I'm working on which uses the AWS stack. I know Cloudfront logs can sometimes drop, but is there a more important reason you're talking about?

I think with server-side only is harder to filter bots, crawlers and get accurate bounce rates or session length times.

Re: Lightweight Alternatives to Google Analytics

#142

Post by lmkg » Thu, Jun 18, 2020, 1:48 PM UTC

tannhaeuser wrote: post #102

I really hope an analytic genius can come up with a technique (like differential privacy, but I'm no expert here) that would give advertisers what they want (unique visitor counts, and very few other metrics) to place ads on sites, yet doesn't give away too much privacy, nor leads to enslavement under a single central entity. I guess if something like that doesn't come along, then only old school content-based ads (s…

Apple/Webkit already has a proposal along those lines.

https://webkit.org/blog/8943/privacy-preserving-ad-click-att...

Re: Lightweight Alternatives to Google Analytics

#143

Post by steviedotboston » Thu, Jun 18, 2020, 1:49 PM UTC

Until one of these alternatives is completely free like Google Analytics is I don't see a massive shift happening. I'm a web developer and there's no way I'd convince my clients to pay $20/month for something that Google offers for free.

Re: Lightweight Alternatives to Google Analytics

#144

Post by severak_cz » Thu, Jun 18, 2020, 1:50 PM UTC

I have my own solution inspired by plausible.io and Simple analytics. See https://tildegit.org/severak/millions

I used Matomo before, but simple dashboard in style of plausible.io is more useful for me. I have a little traffic on my sites.

Re: Lightweight Alternatives to Google Analytics

#145

Post by css » Thu, Jun 18, 2020, 1:50 PM UTC

I have always used AWStats [0] and never thought I needed more information than that.

[0]: https://www.awstats.org/

Re: Lightweight Alternatives to Google Analytics

#146

Post by pcmaffey » Thu, Jun 18, 2020, 1:52 PM UTC

You can always roll your own basic analytics, eg https://www.pcmaffey.com/roll-your-own-analytics

Doing so is extremely helpful to understanding what events and data you actually need for your use case.

Re: Lightweight Alternatives to Google Analytics

#147

Post by lmkg » Thu, Jun 18, 2020, 1:52 PM UTC

huhtenberg wrote: post #9

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…

> that can track people as they go from one website to another

Note that even in Google Analytics, this requires extra set-up, has limitations, and tends to be pretty fragile in practice. GA identifies users by a first-party cookie and tracking cross-site visits requires decorating links with cookie values.

If you're interested just in aggregate traffic from one of your sites to another, rather than something that requires full-path analysis (like marketing attribute), then you can get that from looking at referrers. This should be more-or-less equally available in GA and server logs.

Re: Lightweight Alternatives to Google Analytics

#148

Post by FalconSensei » Thu, Jun 18, 2020, 1:55 PM UTC

Didn't know about GoatCounter. I think its the only free hosted alternative that I saw.

Having a small static blog hosted on GithubPages, GA was the only option for me. (Not going to pay for analytics while my blog has like, 10 visits a week)

Re: Lightweight Alternatives to Google Analytics

#149

Post by JackWritesCode » Thu, Jun 18, 2020, 1:56 PM UTC

sjwright wrote: post #140

JackWritesCode wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GA and AWStats are both awful products for a lot of people. For us, we check out Fathom dashboard daily to see referrers and popular content. And vitality (right now we can see a ton of traffic coming from HN). When I used GA, I never checked it.

I've looked at many reporting tools, most of them are probably great for corporate/enterprise stuff. I'm self-employed, so I have no boss or shareholders that need pretty reports with bar charts. In my case my site is deeply database driven and I can build engagement statistics directly from real data using complex SQL queries. And while there's only a few such 'reports' that I check regularly, most of them are tempo…

Well that’s a different story then. It sounds like you measure things your own way, so I agree that analytics are pointless in your edge case.

For us, we have generated a lot of revenue by measuring what works and what doesn’t. That’s why analytics are worth it for a lot of people.

Re: Lightweight Alternatives to Google Analytics

#150

Post by Carpetsmoker » Thu, Jun 18, 2020, 1:57 PM UTC

Hitton wrote: post #133

srg0 wrote: post #22

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

I'm kinda confused about that, because https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#EUPL-1.2 seems to say that it's possible to relicense the source to GPL which would go directly against Goatcounter's author who apparently wanted AGPL-ish license without ideological fluff.

GoatCounter author here: yeah, that's not perfect; this also came up in the HN discussion for the article a while ago[1]. I've been in touch with one of the authors of the EUPL since and the short of it is that they don't really think it's an issue.

I've thought about this for quite some time, and decided I'll use a slightly modified version of the EUPL which removes GPL from the compatible license appendix. Just haven't gotten around to that for no reason in particular.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21914245