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Google Analytics alternative that protects your data and your customers' privacy

matomo.org

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Re: Google Analytics alternative that protects your data and your customers' privacy

#91
post #87

> Google Analytics alternative that protects your data and your customers' privacy It's not your data, this data about me. > Your customers will love you because their valuable personal data is protected. I guarantee you your customers will not love you for tracking them.

Your customers might love you for making a better website, and this is hard to do without feedback, of which analytics is one kind.

Re: Google Analytics alternative that protects your data and your customers' privacy

#92
Analytics platforms are a dime a dozen, and they all suffer from the same flaws. Either they are too expensive for everyone, or they add too much overhead for everyone. I've actually been debating getting into this space for a while due to this fact, especially after interviewing with one of the top companies in this space and noting how cocky the CTO was about their product.

Google Analytics is FREE and won't cost most us a dime. If you want to charge me a dime, you need to make your product worth that extra dime to ME. Note that even healthcare companies use Google Analytics here in the US.

Re: Google Analytics alternative that protects your data and your customers' privacy

#93
post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The terms on-premises and on-premise and on-prem are synonymous within enterprise lingo.

The one that grinds my gears is "bottoms up" instead of "bottom up."

>The one that grinds my gears is "bottoms up" instead of "bottom up."

Why does that "grind your gears?"

The term "bottoms up" is (unless I'm missing something important -- am I?) just the plural of "bottom up."

And given that the phrase is an admonition to drink what's in your container (hence seeing the bottom of the glass pointing up), it's usually (although I suppose it could be more prevalent when drinking alone, but I guess we'll never know) offered among a group (two or more) of folks, making "bottoms up" appropriate as it refers to more than one "bottom."

Again, I could be missing something important here. If so, please enlighten me.

Edit: Fixed typo.

Re: Google Analytics alternative that protects your data and your customers' privacy

#94
post #45

I tried Matomo. Self hosting is easy. That's a plus. I also like the interface. Took a while to get used to it but after that, I liked it even better than Google Analytics. But one problem that seems unsurmountable is that it tries to be clever. And while trying, it messes up your data. If you have pages with a parameter in the querystring that is called "q", Matomo does not count those as pageviews. It tries to be c…

Record tracking pings independently of any solution and figure things out later, a 1x1 GIF can absorb an unlimited number of query strings, and S3 storage for log files is extremely economical. It doesn't matter which analytics solution you end up with, you'll always be throwing away data. IIRC even GA enterprise doesn't allowing pulling the original click log back out of it, only some form of sampling or another. Put a 1x1 GIF in an S3 bucket, create a CloudFront distribution and enable logging for it into another bucket. Tada, unlimited scale achieved for pennies.

Matomo and GA's trackers both allow sending the query to a URL of your choice. Treat the analytics system as an index over the logs, rather than treating the logs as an auxiliary artefact of the analytics system

Re: Google Analytics alternative that protects your data and your customers' privacy

#95
post #63

A while back I built out a quick guide comparing all of these alternatives, because the core value prop was pretty similar and it was annoying to compare between pricing plans. (My personal vote goes to Fathom.) https://buttondown.email/comparison-guides/google-analytics-...

I'd love for you to add Amplitude (amplitude.com) to your guide. Ensuring we have the same easy out of the box experience GA does is a top priority for us this year. Let me know how I can us get added!

Re: Google Analytics alternative that protects your data and your customers' privacy

#96
post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Link?

https://github.com/WebKit/WebKit/pull/5347

Wow. OK, so the servers can just proxy the requests. Then what's Safari gonna do? Unless they totally eliminate all state and cookies in browsers, they can't prevent that!

Re: Google Analytics alternative that protects your data and your customers' privacy

#97
post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Last I checked, Fathom’s open source product hadn’t been updated for a couple of years. So, I switched to Plausible which is more reasonably updated.

How does Plausible compare to Google's Universal Analytics? And are there any SEO effects? GA4 migration seems not aimed at general users, so I'm looking at alternatives. Ideally could import my data.

No SEO effects. If anything there could be a slight advantage to using Plausible over GA because the JS tracker is much smaller, though in practice I would not expect any SEO impact.

Plausible is much simpler than UA, all the reporting is on one page and it has much more limited config options. It also can import your UA data. If you're looking for a simplified GA alternative it's a very good choice. (Full disclosure, I recently published an article on their blog about UA vs GA4: https://plausible.io/blog/ua-vs-ga4)

Re: Google Analytics alternative that protects your data and your customers' privacy

#98
post #35
post #4

More alternatives: https://european-alternatives.eu/alternative-to/google-analy...

This website is off to a bad start when the first item says > Because it does not use cookies there is no need to show cookie banner for this service. which is a blatant lie/misinformation. The ‘cookie law’ has nothing to do with the actual use of cookies.

The cookie law™ clearly lays out that technically required cookies can be set without explicit consent. Performance measurements are not a requirement though.

So if you are not using anything but essential cookies on your site, you don't need a banner.

Re: Google Analytics alternative that protects your data and your customers' privacy

#99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Matomo is decent, but my main issue with it is the performance when run at any sort of scale. It's PHP/MySQL, which is nice for ease of self-hosting, but it means a lot of things need to be pre-calculated. I've never actually run into performance issues, neither when using it in production professionally, nor for my self-hosted sites (with Matomo always running on-prem). I'd say the performance of PHP and MySQL/Mar…

The performance issues aren't with the measurement requests but with reporting. When I eval'd it for my book last fall there were big delays in reporting waiting for segments and then also issues with custom reports. I think they have changed the default behavior to get around some of the former, but with MySQL it's always going to be tough for larger queries. (if there's any performance issue on the measurement side…

> with MySQL it's always going to be tough for larger queries

MySQL was too slow for running analytics on a single website? How much data are we talking about?

Re: Google Analytics alternative that protects your data and your customers' privacy

#100
post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The performance issues aren't with the measurement requests but with reporting. When I eval'd it for my book last fall there were big delays in reporting waiting for segments and then also issues with custom reports. I think they have changed the default behavior to get around some of the former, but with MySQL it's always going to be tough for larger queries. (if there's any performance issue on the measurement side…

> with MySQL it's always going to be tough for larger queries MySQL was too slow for running analytics on a single website? How much data are we talking about?

For self-hosted, if you are doing into the tens of thousands of pageviews per day you may want to turn off real-time and switch to auto-archiving which pregens reports. That level of traffic depends a lot though on the report period you are running against and how big you've provisioned your MySQL server. YMMV and I haven't benchmarked at multiple traffic levels.
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