Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Lightweight Alternatives to Google Analytics

lwn.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 320 posts

Re: Lightweight Alternatives to Google Analytics

#151

Post by infinitelurker »

neilsimp1 wrote: post #55

Off topic, but I used to run a website that had Google Analytics. This site and domain are now 100% down and have been for over a year. I still get monthly emails from Google about the analytics for this website. Apparently it's getting 200-300 visitors per month still. I have replied back to Google vie email about this several times but never heard any reply. I wonder what site they are tracking?

Ghost/spam traffic is a real problem for GA. UA codes are public and can be targeted with spam referrals or simply randomly hit (especially for UA codes that end in -1).

Filtering spam and getting useful data on GA is a never ending job that Google keeps making harder. (re removal of Service Provider / Network Domain [1])

[1]: https://support.google.com/analytics/thread/27808046?hl=en

Re: Lightweight Alternatives to Google Analytics

#152

Post by JackWritesCode »

steviedotboston wrote: post #143

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.

There’s a huge shift happening. People are realizing that Google Analytics isn’t “free”. You’re sending data to a company that has a huge amount of privacy scandals.

We have lots of agencies who use us, and their clients may differ from yours, but here’s what’s helped them: https://usefathom.com/blog/switch

Re: Lightweight Alternatives to Google Analytics

#153

Post by JackWritesCode »

pier25 wrote: post #139

In my blog I started using Netlify's analytics which are server based and cost $9 per month (up to a number of views) and I gotta say they are extremely basic and lackluster. I paid for the subscription for one month but I don't think I will keep on paying. Edit: Also it doesn't seem to be tracking referrers correctly.

Yes, Netlify Analytics are bad. Try Fathom.

Re: Lightweight Alternatives to Google Analytics

#154

Post by VadimPR »

Cenk wrote: post #14
VadimPR wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I’m surprised to hear that! Are you using a different theme?

I don't think so - just the default. The light version of https://themes.matomo.org/DarkTheme#preview.

Re: Lightweight Alternatives to Google Analytics

#155

Post by tutuca »

spockz wrote: post #110
jbrooksuk wrote: post #42

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!

From the site: > Our on-demand, auto-scaling servers will never slow your site down. Our tracker file is served via our super-fast CDN, with endpoints located around the world to ensure fast page loads. This suggests that this solution is not self hosted. Is there a solution like this which is really self hosted? This service is one small change away from actually tracking. Edit: Piwik/Matomo[1] appears to be the mos…

Fathom is open source https://github.com/usefathom/fathom

Re: Lightweight Alternatives to Google Analytics

#156

Post by mritchie712 »

bad_user wrote: post #115

I have my own self-hosted Matomo instance [1]. Via Docker & docker-compose it's quite easy to install and keep up to date and Matomo is open source, well maintained, very well behaved and pretty hands off. And I configured it on my websites with cookies turned off [2] and with IP anonymization [3]. In such an instance you don't need consent, or even a cookie banner, because you're not dropping cookies, or collecting…

Our SaaS runs on Google App Engine and sending the logs to BigQuery only takes a couple clicks[1]. From there you can write SQL to summarize the data by referrer, page viewed, etc. Here[0] is a starting point, though you'll need update the `WHERE` clause so it works for your use case.

You get IP and user agent in those logs if you want to roughly track visit to conversion metrics.

0 - https://gist.github.com/mike-seekwell/83ac75c82a943e287a7abe...

1 - https://cloud.google.com/appengine/docs/standard/python/logs

Re: Lightweight Alternatives to Google Analytics

#157

Post by chrismorgan »

bad_user wrote: post #115

I have my own self-hosted Matomo instance [1]. Via Docker & docker-compose it's quite easy to install and keep up to date and Matomo is open source, well maintained, very well behaved and pretty hands off. And I configured it on my websites with cookies turned off [2] and with IP anonymization [3]. In such an instance you don't need consent, or even a cookie banner, because you're not dropping cookies, or collecting…

I self-hosted Matomo for a year and a half (and took over the AUR package for it and improved it in the process). It was no trouble to run, but I ended up uninstalling it late last year, for a few reasons: its interface is painfully slow (and that’s nothing to do with my 1GB/1 vCPU VPS—I’ve interacted with a decent-sized instance at innocraft.cloud and it was similar), and I seldom looked at it, and I couldn’t think of any way in which anything I found in the analytics would change my behaviour, and server-side analytics are good enough (better on some ways, worse in others), and I value speed. So all up, I figured: why am I slowing all my users down with this 50KB of JavaScript (of which I frankly need less than 1KB), and why am I keeping this software going?

So now I pull out GoAccess (which reads the server logs) from time to time. I find that my Atom feed is the vast majority of traffic to my site, which Matomo couldn’t tell me. I should implement pagination on the feed and see if that helps. (Or limit the number of items in the feed, but conceptually I rather like everything being accessible from the feed. Wonder how many feed readers support pagination?)

Re: Lightweight Alternatives to Google Analytics

#159

Post by jwr »

srrr wrote: post #67
jwr wrote: post #28

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.…

Analytics may give you the number of paid subcriptions but that is not the reason it exists. Modern analytics systems are build to give you a statistical view of all events/interactions leading up to a conversion or, more important, to a conversion that did not happen. With this information it is possible to optimize all touchpoints a user has with your services. It is easy to track all aspects of subscriptions inclu…

> google analytics is really good in separating bots from human visits

That certainly wasn't my experience.

But more generally: I optimize touchpoints using automated Bernoulli bandits with multiple variants. And I track the metrics that really matter (like signups, MRR, churn, etc) very, very carefully. My point was that just adding GA doesn't bring much value, and makes the web worse.

Another example of how page visits don't matter: it's easy to get a huge spike of HN users clicking through. But if my SaaS has no relevance to HN users (except as a technical curiosity), this doesn't matter at all. It won't change my revenue, so it's irrelevant.

Unless you run a site with ads, focusing on page visits doesn't make sense: it's like measuring the performance of a supermarket and getting excited about increasing traffic on a nearby highway. Could it influence your sales? Possibly. Is it actionable? Nope.

Re: Lightweight Alternatives to Google Analytics

#160

Post by FalconSensei »

JackWritesCode wrote: post #152
steviedotboston wrote: post #143

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.

There’s a huge shift happening. People are realizing that Google Analytics isn’t “free”. You’re sending data to a company that has a huge amount of privacy scandals. We have lots of agencies who use us, and their clients may differ from yours, but here’s what’s helped them: https://usefathom.com/blog/switch

> There’s a huge shift happening. People are realizing that Google Analytics isn’t “free”.

Just be aware that, while that is true for HN, and some subreddits, that still doesn't apply to most people. It's the same as saying, based on comments on HN, that people are moving away from Chrome when its market share is not going down.

Post reply on HN