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An alternative to using Google Analytics on your website

plausible.io

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Re: An alternative to using Google Analytics on your website

#101

Post by munk-a »

mikeg8 wrote: post #36
burkaman wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pricing is close to the bottom of the home page.

Thanks. I didn't check the homepage and looked for pricing info in the navigation links, felt it was needlessly difficult. Pricing should be easy to locate from every page for a product like this.

Discovering that users are having difficulty finding pricing information... might be one useful piece of data you could garner with a good analytics tool.

Also I just checked out the pricing's placement and that is utterly terrible UI - the site uses light greyshade striping in the background for difference sections and then has the pricing block proceeded by a very dark background block with no information immediately visible - this is a clear visual flag for the rest of a page being irrelevant and a footer.

And, just to clarify, the site's actual footer uses the exact same coloring for the footer along with a similar amount of excessive top-padding.

Re: An alternative to using Google Analytics on your website

#102

Post by throwaway894345 »

I have a hobby blog that I'm trying to run for Browser (~3 lines of JS) -> API Gateway -> SQS Queue -> Lambda (ETLs queue into) -> Athena.

I was originally just going to use Postgres, but RDS/Aurora are expensive and running Postgres in EC2 is going to be at least as much work (configuring SSH, process management, backups, monitoring, logging, image building, networking, etc).

My custom plan is ~$3/month all-in provided I stay below ~1M requests per month, and even then it scales very cheaply. Also, this design is highly scalable, although I doubt I'll ever take advantage of it; it's mostly just icing on the cake. The main motivation is that these components are available on the free plan ("forever", not just the first 12 months) and/or the pricing model makes the charges negligible for my super-low-volume use case.

Note that this doesn't give me pretty dashboards; the interface is SQL. Fortunately, there are other analysis tools that I have at my disposal which can plug in to SQL.

Lastly, of course my $5 budget doesn't do justice to the actual value of my time; it's more of a fun challenge. If I really just wanted web analytics, I should shell out the $6/month for plausible or similar.

Re: An alternative to using Google Analytics on your website

#103

Post by dkersten »

y-c-o-m-b wrote: post #39
tachion wrote: post #18

It sounds like a nice product, but sadly it's not exactly why GA is so popular (being a 'nice' product, that is). It is popular, because it's free, relatively easy to implement on any website, requires no self-hosting and powerful, once running. I've checked your website for pricing, but not only there's no word about free tiers, but there isn't even anything on the pricing at all. So, when it comes to majority of GA…

There's a big blue button at the top of the page that says "Start Free Trial". Click it and you get this: - Quick and easy to set up - No credit card required - Unlimited use during the trial - From just $6/mo after the trial Looks like a flat fee? Hard to tell from that wording. They should make this more visible on the front-page and elaborate on the " from just $6/mo".

“From X” doesn’t sound like a flat fee, but either tiered or usage based, where the $6/m is the lowest possible you can pay.

Re: An alternative to using Google Analytics on your website

#104

Post by jefftk »

londons_explore wrote: post #68
lucideer wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It is popular, because it's free, relatively easy to implement on any website, requires no self-hosting and powerful, once running Tbh, I disagree. While a lot of the above is true, it's largely popular because it's a recognisable brand, and because the majority of frontend devs are already familiar with it and haven't felt the need to explore an alternative (network effect). While an alternative does really need t…

Photoshop is the defacto-standard in image editing, yet clones which are free and copy the photoshop UI are rapidly catching up for a segment of the userbase, eg. photopea.com If someone set up a Scroogle Analoytics which had a simple code snippet, was free, and had near-identical looking dashboard, I'd use it.

In general, you should be very careful about what third parties you allow on your page because you're delegating to them the ability to do anything that can be done from JS. I trust Google to take this seriously and not open me up to XSS, but I would be much more skeptical about Scroogle Analoytics.

(Disclosure: I work for Google, and have run Google Analytics on my site since before I joined)

Re: An alternative to using Google Analytics on your website

#105

Post by benbristow »

lucideer wrote: post #58
tachion wrote: post #18

It sounds like a nice product, but sadly it's not exactly why GA is so popular (being a 'nice' product, that is). It is popular, because it's free, relatively easy to implement on any website, requires no self-hosting and powerful, once running. I've checked your website for pricing, but not only there's no word about free tiers, but there isn't even anything on the pricing at all. So, when it comes to majority of GA…

> It is popular, because it's free, relatively easy to implement on any website, requires no self-hosting and powerful, once running Tbh, I disagree. While a lot of the above is true, it's largely popular because it's a recognisable brand, and because the majority of frontend devs are already familiar with it and haven't felt the need to explore an alternative (network effect). While an alternative does really need t…

GA also has support from many third party libraries because of the popularity that you can just plug-in and get started with.

e.g.

https://github.com/react-ga/react-ga

https://github.com/angulartics/angulartics2

https://github.com/MatteoGabriele/vue-gtag

Re: An alternative to using Google Analytics on your website

#106

Post by munk-a »

throwaway894345 wrote: post #102

I have a hobby blog that I'm trying to run for Browser (~3 lines of JS) -> API Gateway -> SQS Queue -> Lambda (ETLs queue into) -> Athena. I was originally just going to use Postgres, but RDS/Aurora are expensive and running Postgres in EC2 is going to be at least as much work (configuring SSH, process management, backups, monitoring, logging, image building, networking, etc). My custom plan is ~$3/month all-in provi…

Your choice is, of course, your choice, but I'd strongly suggest GA for this use case. I understand and agree that Google is in fact evil and we should avoid feeding the beast, but a hobby website using GA is too minor to care about for any of the privacy reasons the author states and if it's fully static pages then ideally the performance will already be light enough that the bloat of GA isn't going to make a difference.

Re: An alternative to using Google Analytics on your website

#107

Post by numbers »

throwaway894345 wrote: post #102

I have a hobby blog that I'm trying to run for Browser (~3 lines of JS) -> API Gateway -> SQS Queue -> Lambda (ETLs queue into) -> Athena. I was originally just going to use Postgres, but RDS/Aurora are expensive and running Postgres in EC2 is going to be at least as much work (configuring SSH, process management, backups, monitoring, logging, image building, networking, etc). My custom plan is ~$3/month all-in provi…

I've done something similar to this that has worked for me without a lot of effort besides the first time setup. I use Fathom which is open-source and available to use on any hosting service. I use it with DigitalOcean so it's $5/mo and I get to run it on as many websites I have.

Might not be very helpful in your case but I'd recommend thinking about using a simpler setup than SQS Queue + Lambda, if that works for you ️

Re: An alternative to using Google Analytics on your website

#108

Post by carlisle_ »

abhisuri97 wrote: post #57
carlisle_ wrote: post #35

If you're going to tear down a competitor's product and shill your own you should probably be up front about it.

I think that if a blog shilling a company/product is hosted on said company's website, they're already sufficiently up-front about it.

I really don't think so, I've never heard of this company I didn't know what they sell. I had to poke around the website and read the comments here to realize. That's really the exact opposite of being up front.

Re: An alternative to using Google Analytics on your website

#110

Post by jefftk »

coldpie wrote: post #88
rchaud wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Anecdotally, if you put your email at the bottom of the page you’ll get a pretty good idea just from the number of people who send you one. You can't be serious. Who in this day and age reads an article and thinks "Hmm, that was useful, I'll send the author a note of thanks"? This might have been the case in 1995 when there were only a few websites around, and Internet use was considered leisure time and not part a…

> Who in this day and age reads an article and thinks "Hmm, that was useful, I'll send the author a note of thanks"? I do. Maybe you should, too?

For what it's worth I find it minorly annoying when people send me emails about my posts. I'm happy for people to comment on them, but typically an email is an invitation to have a private discussion and I'd much rather talk publicly (https://www.jefftk.com/p/comment-dont-message)
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