Lightweight Alternatives to Google Analytics • Hacker News Board

Re: Lightweight Alternatives to Google Analytics

#221

Post by westicecoast32 » Thu, Jun 18, 2020, 4:57 PM UTC

drunkpotato wrote: post #98

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.…

I also don’t think google analytics is that useful. It’s one of many possible tools for user tracking, and far from the best one. Thought it’s “free” so I guess that’s why it’s more popular than much better tools. But the fundamental problem is that analytics provides data and information, when what people want is knowledge and wisdom. But you need to do the work to get it. No amount of analytics is going to tell you…

For a personal project everyone basically ignored every post I made about it. I used server logs to generate analytics and noticed people hit the first page and left (I assume they spent seconds and left).

I then broke up the main page to many smaller pages and notice people still leaving right away but my documentation page got more overall clicks since the main page didn't massively overload them

I guess analytics don't give you answers but know what pages they tend to click on and what happens when you make a page more simple/more heavy you can figure out a solution

However I didn't end up finding a solution and I'm planning to rewrite my project. I have a better idea how I should introduce it to people next time

Re: Lightweight Alternatives to Google Analytics

#222

Post by GordonS » Thu, Jun 18, 2020, 5:00 PM UTC

m90 wrote: post #201

tutuca wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And it seems that Fathom Lite misses one of the main selling points of Fathom - cookieless tracking.

Re: Lightweight Alternatives to Google Analytics

#223

Post by GordonS » Thu, Jun 18, 2020, 5:05 PM UTC

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!

> No tracking

Personally, I think that Fathom strikes a good balance between privacy and usability, but it does still use tracking (or at least it did when I was looking at it a few weeks back) - the difference is that it uses fingerprinting instead of cookies. I think it's implemented in a privacy-focused way, but it does look like they are ignoring some of the EU ePrivacy guidance, which explicitly states that consent should be obtained before using fingerprinting, even if PII can't be reverse-engineered from the fingerprint.

As I say, I think their implementation makes a lot of sense, and even as a privacy advocate myself I think those particular pieces of ePrivacy guidance focused on fingerprinting is excessive. But the EU doesn't seem to agree.

Re: Lightweight Alternatives to Google Analytics

#224

Post by tedivm » Thu, Jun 18, 2020, 5:09 PM UTC

tutuca wrote: post #155

spockz wrote: 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

That's the old project- they have decided not to open source the new one.

The open source project is barely maintained at this point- they update the readme and get the occasionally pull request, but it's not really being developed.

I unfortunately switched to Fathom back when they were telling people they were committed to open source, so now I'm looking to migrate off to something a bit more trustworthy.

Re: Lightweight Alternatives to Google Analytics

#225

Post by ent101 » Thu, Jun 18, 2020, 5:16 PM UTC

A lot of people may not care about this, but Google Analytics (and another 3rd party, hosted analytics platforms) are very important when trying to sell your website. Basically, it allows the buyer to access reliable historical data about your website which in turn makes it easier to arrive at a valuation.

Re: Lightweight Alternatives to Google Analytics

#226

Post by bonestamp2 » Thu, Jun 18, 2020, 5:22 PM UTC

GordonS wrote: post #220

bonestamp2 wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Yes, good point, I should have been more clear. You're right that we track unique users, but we do so in abstract. I suppose with some work we could pull together enough data from different sources to determine who a particular user was in a particular session. I just meant that we don't do that and it's not easy for us to do that because we don't care about that type of data. We only care about what each abstract user does in the sense that we want to know the aggregate of how many users did that thing.

Additionally, unlike google analytics, we do support the browser's "do not track" flag. So if a user doesn't want to be tracked at all, we completely respect that.

Re: Lightweight Alternatives to Google Analytics

#227

Post by clairity » Thu, Jun 18, 2020, 5:23 PM UTC

JackWritesCode wrote: post #212

ksec wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's new for V3?

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

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

not a knock on you or fathom, but it seems like you're in fast-response sales mode here (which is totally fine)... the above is a particularly empty statement. why would any next release not be the best to date?

maybe say it should be an exciting release, which is similarly anticipatory without being meaningless sales-speak.

Re: Lightweight Alternatives to Google Analytics

#228

Post by franky47 » Thu, Jun 18, 2020, 5:30 PM UTC

m90 wrote: post #184

franky47 wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firefox's settings (as of v77) still allow you to set (or unset) DNT, and I honor that. For Safari unfortunately, Apple chose to remove this feature because it could be used for fingerprinting, so there is not much to be done here.

Interesting, did Firefox revert their decision towards DNT? I remember being confronted with the behavior of it sending DNT headers no matter what, which must have been something around spring 2019.

Possibly, I'm not using the DNT header though, because of the encryption, I need to know about DNT before the analytics data is even sent. I use navigator.doNotTrack, and where it's set I only encrypt and send a minimal visit count event.

Re: Lightweight Alternatives to Google Analytics

#229

Post by nofunsir » Thu, Jun 18, 2020, 5:33 PM UTC

Here's the most lightweight alternative to Google Analytics:

Don't use analytics. You really don't need it. No. You really don't. No, No. I promise you. Just stop.

All tracking is evil. All ads (except those inside a store for a product inside the same store) are evil.

Re: Lightweight Alternatives to Google Analytics

#230

Post by nofunsir » Thu, Jun 18, 2020, 5:37 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.…

Good for you! This is the right method. Analytics -- in the sense of watching mouse clicks and reference urls -- are only trying to close the feedback loop FAR sooner than when it actually matters.