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Lightweight Alternatives to Google Analytics

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201–210 of 320 posts

Re: Lightweight Alternatives to Google Analytics

#201
post #155
post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Apparently this repo contains "Fathom Lite", a (from a codebase perspective) unrelated predecessor of what is currently being sold as a SaaS.

Re: Lightweight Alternatives to Google Analytics

#202
Has anyone used any of these with a proxy to avoid ad blocker blocking? What I mean is, I installed matomo and then saw my ad blocker blocked it. Is there a way to make any of these work by proxying through the same domain as the site, so those analytics requests look just like all other ajax requests?

I was surprised matomo wasn't listed here. Does anyone know if that was intentional? Seems like it fits the criteria of the post and the goals of open source.

Re: Lightweight Alternatives to Google Analytics

#203
post #196

I stick to GA because I fear that removing it could impact my site's ranking. Is it an unfounded fear, anyone knows?

We actually looked into this:

https://usefathom.com/blog/google-analytics-seo

Funny as it sounds, using Fathom instead of GA could increase your SEO rankings :)

Re: Lightweight Alternatives to Google Analytics

#205
post #169
post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

GA's "Filter bots" setting simply applies the IAB bot filtering list[1]. The resources required to operate a page rendering bot[2] used to be a high enough bar that the ones doing so were large actors and would make their way onto that list pretty quickly.

The IAB list is still a helpful baseline (if overpriced if you want to lease the list itself[3]), but all it's doing is applying suppression based on things like known bot IP ranges and user agents. It's far less effective than it used to be since it's so incredibly easy and cheap nowadays for anyone with an interest to spin up a rendering bot. Now you've got to supplement it actively with your own set of filters and heuristics if you really want to get rid of bot traffic polluting your data.

[1] https://iabtechlab.com/software/iababc-international-spiders...

[2] Scraping bots were cheap and easy to run before, but didn't render the GA javascript code so never showed up in analytics. It's only bots that use something like a headless browser to render the page that show up in GA, and those have only become commoditized and cheap/easy relatively recently.

[3] Google applies the IAB list to your traffic for free if you check the setting for it, but if you want to use the IAB list yourself you have to pay $4k - $14k annually to lease it from IAB.

Re: Lightweight Alternatives to Google Analytics

#206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks so much, glad you had such a good experience :)

When I try to view your demo page I get 'Secure Connection Failed' every time. Firefox 77.0.1 on Windows 10.

Strange. Fully valid certificate. Try hard refreshing a few times.

Re: Lightweight Alternatives to Google Analytics

#208
post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can easily set it up on a VPS with docker, check github for instructions.

Right, I found the official docker image https://github.com/matomo-org/docker But I was hoping for a simple DIY guide for setting everything up? I mean with Google Analytics a dummy can set it up very quickly. I know it'll take more work with matomo, but I need a little more details then just "use docker". I know I need a VPS, something like Digital Ocean. I know I need the matomo docker image.

I am not familiar with matomo, but aren't those instructions enough? You go to DO, create new droplet from that image, and done? I assume once you have it installed you will get more info on how to add the tracker on your site from their interface ?

Re: Lightweight Alternatives to Google Analytics

#209
post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can easily set it up on a VPS with docker, check github for instructions.

Right, I found the official docker image https://github.com/matomo-org/docker But I was hoping for a simple DIY guide for setting everything up? I mean with Google Analytics a dummy can set it up very quickly. I know it'll take more work with matomo, but I need a little more details then just "use docker". I know I need a VPS, something like Digital Ocean. I know I need the matomo docker image.

Matomo needs a database server (MySQL) and a way to execute cronjobs - that’s about it. There’s some gotchas if you’re running in a HA setup or if the database runs on a separate server.

I have a full deployment of Matomo in Kubernetes on gitlab [1] if anyone would find it useful (includes correct settings for running in multiple pods).

1: https://gitlab.com/pcgamingwiki/webanalytics/-/tree/master/

Re: Lightweight Alternatives to Google Analytics

#210
post #193

Countly [1] is another open source alternative to Google Analytics - suggest you try it on Digital Ocean [2] or deploy on your own [3]. It is self hosted, has support for desktop apps, mobile apps and web apps at the same time. [1] https://count.ly [2] https://marketplace.digitalocean.com/apps/countly-analytics [3] https://github.com/countly/countly-server

Interesting. Thanks. But I am not so sure about disabling SELinux: > Disable SELinux on Red Hat or CentOS if it has been enabled. Countly may not work on a server where SELinux is enabled. In order to disable SELinux, run "setenforce 0". https://support.count.ly/hc/en-us/articles/360036862332-Inst...

Unfortunately common on projects like these. Instead of guiding admins on how to properly configure SELinux it’s easiest to just throw your hands up and say “disable it”.
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