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Lightweight Alternatives to Google Analytics

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Re: Lightweight Alternatives to Google Analytics

#162
It’s great to see more alternatives to GA, and to see those alternatives getting attention.

For those interested, one other FOSS analytics tool is Shynet [0]. Modern, privacy-friendly, and detailed web analytics that works without cookies or JS. It also looks pretty slick. Disclosure: I’m a maintainer.

[0] https://github.com/milesmcc/shynet

Re: Lightweight Alternatives to Google Analytics

#164
I briefly tried Matomo, but didn't want the Javascript component and really just wanted log analysis. It's okay at log analysis, but it doesn't really shine unless you do javascript live tracking.

So I disabled it and went back to awstats. I've been using awstats for over a decade, and for my personal site and projects, it pretty much gives me the majority of the data I really care about.

I might look at shipping more complex nginx json logs to logstash/elastic search, but then I'd need to visualize them in Kibana and that just seems like a lot of heavy weight containers to run for stats I don't really need.

Re: Lightweight Alternatives to Google Analytics

#165

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…

> And I configured it on my websites with cookies turned off [2] and with IP anonymization [3].

Do you have a way to filter out your own visits in this case? On small pages I find that my own clicks and events during testing contaminates the statistics.

Re: Lightweight Alternatives to Google Analytics

#166
Snowplow is also an option. It’s an open-source data collection solution that, unlike GA, gives you full ownership of your event-level data and the freedom to define your own data structures. Not exactly what you’d call ‘lightweight’ but quite a few Snowplow users/customers have come from GA for the level of flexibility and control they can have over their data sets.

(Full disclosure: I work for Snowplow Analytics)

- https://github.com/snowplow/snowplow

- https://snowplowanalytics.com/

Re: Lightweight Alternatives to Google Analytics

#168

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-...

Thanks for the tutorial. Looks interesting. 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 o…

I use GoAccess too. If I want to filter by date (for example) I just run the log file through sed before feeding it to GoAccess.

Re: Lightweight Alternatives to Google Analytics

#169
post #159
post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 vi…

GA used to be good in separating the bots from the humans, but now I don't think so. I see a huge number of visitors from Dublin that seem to be AWS sourced bots (and Asburn, both have bounce rates like no other city). Millions of visits, from a place where we would expect thousands.
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