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

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

#101

Post by graeme »

jhpacker wrote: post #97
graeme wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Thanks! Hmm, can you drill down into sets of pages like you can in UA? That was a pretty key feature.

I'll have a look, seems promising.

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

#102

Post by ezekg »

skilled wrote: post #78
jmduke wrote: 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-...

Fathom is run by some goofy marketer who has openly slandered (on HN) other analytics products in this space. Sadly, can’t support anyone who does that. They’re not open-source either.

I wouldn't call Jack Ellis a goofy marketer. His technical expertise is vast, as are his writing abilities [0].

[0]: https://usefathom.com/blog/ddos-attack

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

#104

Post by trasz4 »

igor47 wrote: post #91
IanCal wrote: 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.

>hard to do without feedback, of which analytics is one kind

[citation needed]

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

#105

Post by Terretta »

nobody9999 wrote: post #93
TechBro8615 wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

It's not a plural, it's a different expression that happens to sound similar.

"bottoms up" means to turn your alcohol glass upside down, so the bottom is up, a euphemism for drinking from your glass

"bottom up" is an order of operation, starting at the bottom, working your way up

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

#106

Post by nobody9999 »

Terretta wrote: post #105
nobody9999 wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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,…

It's not a plural, it's a different expression that happens to sound similar. "bottoms up" means to turn your alcohol glass upside down, so the bottom is up, a euphemism for drinking from your glass "bottom up" is an order of operation, starting at the bottom, working your way up

> It's not a plural, it's a different expression that happens to sound similar.

>"bottoms up" means to turn your alcohol glass upside down, so the bottom is up, >a euphemism for drinking from your glass

>"bottom up" is an order of operation, starting at the bottom, working your way up

That makes more sense now. Thanks! Makes me wish I hadn't taken a tops-down approach to my initial reply. :)

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

#107

Post by pastage »

viraptor wrote: post #11
pastage wrote: post #8

Matomo is not trivial run on prem, there are lots of stuff that do not work on larger installs unless you do lots of manual optimization, what those optimizations are is not obvious. The problems only shows after some time when you have to redo reports for multiyear periods, or handle hug of death. That said people love analytics, it is a powerful tool.

Any links? I'm assuming you mean something more than the periodic rollups?

The biggest issue is actually that the analytic part is so removed from the performance part. There is no good way to know what will be a fast analytics report, no feedback in the UI for the creator of the report. I am stuck with policing that.

Not sure what you mean with rollups. And not sure what I am supposed to link.

These are just some of the things you have to manually install, this is except all the plugins you have to buy. Upgrade Matomo and not miss analytics. Good db performance. Secure installation. What is both bogging down performance.

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

#108

Post by XCSme »

jhpacker wrote: post #51

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. Most of the newer and more performant GA alternatives out there are using things like ClickHouse. ClickHouse: Piwik PRO, Plausible, PostHog, Yandex, Cloudflare Snowflake: Amplitude, Piano, Snowplow SingleStore: Fat…

What kind of scale are you looking at?

I'm building UXWizz, which is on the same stack, and in my experience on a single server you can track up to 10-15 million sessions total (~1M sessions per month, with 1 year retention). To scale, for now I made it so you can have one database per domain, so the data is sharded by domain (if you are tracking multiple domains).

The biggest bottleneck is querying a large dataset, the storing of data seems to work pretty well. You could of course archive the data and automatically create stats using cron jobs, but this leads to a lot less filtering options and not so fresh data.

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

#109

Post by jhpacker »

graeme wrote: post #101
jhpacker wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Thanks! Hmm, can you drill down into sets of pages like you can in UA? That was a pretty key feature. I'll have a look, seems promising.

You've probably already discovered this, but the only way you drill down is with filters. You can ad-hoc define a page filter with multiple URLs, but you can't (to my knowledge) save that filter set, and content grouping UA-style doesn't exist. Their live demo is with their own site's data: https://plausible.io/plausible.io

Good luck!

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

#110

Post by jhpacker »

XCSme wrote: post #108
jhpacker wrote: post #51

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. Most of the newer and more performant GA alternatives out there are using things like ClickHouse. ClickHouse: Piwik PRO, Plausible, PostHog, Yandex, Cloudflare Snowflake: Amplitude, Piano, Snowplow SingleStore: Fat…

What kind of scale are you looking at? I'm building UXWizz, which is on the same stack, and in my experience on a single server you can track up to 10-15 million sessions total (~1M sessions per month, with 1 year retention). To scale, for now I made it so you can have one database per domain, so the data is sharded by domain (if you are tracking multiple domains). The biggest bottleneck is querying a large dataset,…

The scaling issues I'm talking about are on the reporting side, not the measurement side. With Clickhouse you can do complex analytics queries on live data, with MySQL as you say you may need to pre-gen with cronjobs, etc.
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