Lightweight Alternatives to Google Analytics • Hacker News Board

Re: Lightweight Alternatives to Google Analytics

#211

Post by zoomablemind » Thu, Jun 18, 2020, 4:27 PM UTC

JackWritesCode wrote: post #132

sjwright wrote: post #128

I run a reasonably large website and about two years ago it dawned on me that I never checked Google Analytics. It was completely useless. It wasn't telling me anything useful. I also knew that it was marginally user hostile (or at least perceived as such) and affecting page performance, even if only slightly. Removing it felt momentous and insane. But in November 2018 I finally plucked up the courage and removed it.…

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.

> GA and AWStats are both awful products for a lot of people.

Just wonder, what's awful about AWStats?

Sure it's dated, and "analog" in a way that it's log-based, not JS. But it does not send the tracking to the third party, can be used offline.

Re: Lightweight Alternatives to Google Analytics

#212

Post by JackWritesCode » Thu, Jun 18, 2020, 4:34 PM UTC

ksec wrote: post #189

JackWritesCode wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks James. You wait till we launch V3 ;)

What's new for V3?

We're not announcing anything just yet but it'll be our best release to date

Re: Lightweight Alternatives to Google Analytics

#213

Post by gramakri » Thu, Jun 18, 2020, 4:35 PM UTC

We have been using a self-hosted matomo for our company site for years now (back from when it was called piwik). Highly recommend it! The satisfaction you get out of not using any google product is unsurpassed.

Re: Lightweight Alternatives to Google Analytics

#214

Post by etewiah » Thu, Jun 18, 2020, 4:45 PM UTC

mhw wrote: post #85

If your app is already built with Rails, adding https://github.com/ankane/ahoy is pretty simple. Combine with https://github.com/ankane/blazer and you can build a reasonable set of reports as well. 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.

Yeah, ahoy is pretty awesome! In fact everything by ankane is inkanely great - I have no idea how he manages to be so productive....

Re: Lightweight Alternatives to Google Analytics

#215

Post by zoomablemind » Thu, Jun 18, 2020, 4:46 PM UTC

runxel wrote: post #26

Still no real alternative when on a Github page, or am I missing something? It's not that I really need statistics, but sometimes it would be nice to know if there is even anything going on or you're just screaming into a void. But I refuse to spam visitors of my pages with GA.

The GH pages are still in a repo, so the repo's Insights: Traffic can show some stats on visits.

https://github.blog/2014-01-07-introducing-github-traffic-an...

Re: Lightweight Alternatives to Google Analytics

#216

Post by bonestamp2 » Thu, Jun 18, 2020, 4:46 PM UTC

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.…

The main product I work on does not use google analytics, but we do use mixpanel to see what our paid users are actually doing with the SaaS. We actually don't care who each user is, we just want the aggregate data. We believe this data is important for retaining paid subscriptions and attracting new ones. Let me explain.

There's one feature that 100% of our subscribers use. I mean, it's the main thing we do and everyone who subscribes needs that function. Even without analytics, we know that we have to continually make that feature faster and smarter to stay ahead of our competition. We know that if we fall behind our competitors, our subscriptions will dwindle.

But, then we have a bunch of other features that help customers solve some edge case problems around that main thing. It's very important for us to know which of those functions are being tried, used, and reused (or not). Not all customers use these features, but some are tools we have that nobody else in our space does. So, having insights on which ones are getting traction and which ones need improvement help us spend our marketing and engineering time better to attract new customers and retain our existing ones.

I can't imagine not having any analytics. I feel like we need them to continually make small course corrections that ensure we're providing the best value to our existing customers.

Re: Lightweight Alternatives to Google Analytics

#217

Post by JackWritesCode » Thu, Jun 18, 2020, 4:48 PM UTC

xrd wrote: post #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…

Absolutely. We recommend custom domains (https://usefathom.com/support/custom-domains) but you could proxy through to the collector, no problem. It’s a great way of doing it

Re: Lightweight Alternatives to Google Analytics

#218

Post by GordonS » Thu, Jun 18, 2020, 4:53 PM UTC

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…

> 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 personal info. Profiling visitors is no longer possible, but you still get valuable data on visits.

Does this mean each page hit cannot linked to be any other? For example, can I see that a visitor viewed a particular sequence of pages?

Re: Lightweight Alternatives to Google Analytics

#219

Post by xorcist » Thu, Jun 18, 2020, 4:56 PM UTC

boromi wrote: post #190

johnchristopher wrote: post #183

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 haven't used the docker image, but Matomo is PHP in its simplest form.

You unzip it. Click through a setup wizard. Done.

(I also run in readonly noexec in an fpm chroot but that's not necessary.) I set it up for a couple of clients since the Piwik days and it's been pretty much set and forget, apart from the occasional upgrades.

There are plenty of advanced functionality which probably few people understand and use. For my personal projects I am fine with log analytics which I mostly use goaccess for.

Re: Lightweight Alternatives to Google Analytics

#220

Post by GordonS » Thu, Jun 18, 2020, 4:56 PM UTC

bonestamp2 wrote: post #216

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.…

The main product I work on does not use google analytics, but we do use mixpanel to see what our paid users are actually doing with the SaaS. We actually don't care who each user is, we just want the aggregate data. We believe this data is important for retaining paid subscriptions and attracting new ones. Let me explain. There's one feature that 100% of our subscribers use. I mean, it's the main thing we do and ever…

> We actually don't care who each user is, we just want the aggregate data.

> It's very important for us to know which of those functions are being tried, used, and reused (or not)

Aren't these 2 at odds with each other, or else how can you tell when the same person re-uses a feature? Surely you need some kind of user identifier for that?