Lightweight Alternatives to Google Analytics • Hacker News Board

Re: Lightweight Alternatives to Google Analytics

#131

Post by hackernewsn00b » Thu, Jun 18, 2020, 1:32 PM UTC

JackWritesCode wrote: post #91

chaosite wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the reason Google Analytics (and logging solutions like it) is popular is that people don't have access to server logs.

Server side logs aren’t an accurate way of doing analytics and bring up compliance challenges (storing access logs and using them for purposes other than security etc.)

Can you talk a little bit more about why server side logs aren't accurate for analytics? I was planning on doing basic analytics (pageviews mostly) using Cloudfront access logs stored in an S3 bucket and queried through Athena for a site I'm working on which uses the AWS stack.

I know Cloudfront logs can sometimes drop, but is there a more important reason you're talking about?

Re: Lightweight Alternatives to Google Analytics

#132

Post by JackWritesCode » Thu, Jun 18, 2020, 1:32 PM UTC

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.

Re: Lightweight Alternatives to Google Analytics

#133

Post by Hitton » Thu, Jun 18, 2020, 1:33 PM UTC

srg0 wrote: post #22

TIL about European Union Public License: https://joinup.ec.europa.eu/collection/eupl/introduction-eup... OSI-certified, copyleft, non-viral, GPL-compatible, SaaS-aware, multilingual

I'm kinda confused about that, because https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#EUPL-1.2 seems to say that it's possible to relicense the source to GPL which would go directly against Goatcounter's author who apparently wanted AGPL-ish license without ideological fluff.

Re: Lightweight Alternatives to Google Analytics

#134

Post by franky47 » Thu, Jun 18, 2020, 1:33 PM UTC

m90 wrote: post #114

franky47 wrote: post #87

I'm working on an end-to-end encrypted analytics SaaS, to try and solve the "putting your eggs in someone else's basket" problem, while offering something simpler than self-hosting. I'm collecting feedback and looking to open it for beta in the next couple of weeks, but there's already a preview signup link in the newsletter, where I share my progress on building the platform on a weekly basis. https://chiffre.io

Out of interest, if you say you honor DNT, how exactly do you handle browsers that do not allow setting this as a user preference anymore (Firefox, Safari)?

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.

Re: Lightweight Alternatives to Google Analytics

#135

Post by XCSme » Thu, Jun 18, 2020, 1:34 PM UTC

spockz wrote: post #110

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!

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…

I am also buliding something similar: https://usertrack.net/

I think the main differences compared to Matomo is that it's simpler (less features), but provides for much cheaper some of their premium features (heatmaps, session recordings).

Let me know if you have any questions about userTrack or any suggestions! :)

Re: Lightweight Alternatives to Google Analytics

#136

Post by JackWritesCode » Thu, Jun 18, 2020, 1:34 PM UTC

pkalinowski wrote: post #125

JackWritesCode wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Server side Analytics are far from reliable. Go and try Netlify, then you’ll see how unreliable they really are. For us nerds, we can always block things using DNS level blocking but Fathom’s custom domain feature has done really well for the majority: https://usefathom.com/blog/custom-domains-embed-code

Good adblockers do DNS lookup to see if subdomain points to tracking server anyway. Only completely self-hosted (your domain, your tracking server) solutions are resilient to adblocking

For now

Re: Lightweight Alternatives to Google Analytics

#137

Post by geerlingguy » Thu, Jun 18, 2020, 1:35 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.

Fathom being so quick to load and simple to use, I glance at it here and there. I had given up on trying to find a good 'light' way to navigate Analytics.

Re: Lightweight Alternatives to Google Analytics

#138

Post by Carpetsmoker » Thu, Jun 18, 2020, 1:39 PM UTC

pkalinowski wrote: post #125

JackWritesCode wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Server side Analytics are far from reliable. Go and try Netlify, then you’ll see how unreliable they really are. For us nerds, we can always block things using DNS level blocking but Fathom’s custom domain feature has done really well for the majority: https://usefathom.com/blog/custom-domains-embed-code

Good adblockers do DNS lookup to see if subdomain points to tracking server anyway. Only completely self-hosted (your domain, your tracking server) solutions are resilient to adblocking

You can set up a proxy, which isn't too hard (and operating a proxy is a lot simpler than operating an analytics service)

Re: Lightweight Alternatives to Google Analytics

#139

Post by pier25 » Thu, Jun 18, 2020, 1:40 PM UTC

In my blog I started using Netlify's analytics which are server based and cost $9 per month (up to a number of views) and I gotta say they are extremely basic and lackluster. I paid for the subscription for one month but I don't think I will keep on paying.

Edit:

Also it doesn't seem to be tracking referrers correctly.

Re: Lightweight Alternatives to Google Analytics

#140

Post by sjwright » Thu, Jun 18, 2020, 1:41 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.

I've looked at many reporting tools, most of them are probably great for corporate/enterprise stuff.

I'm self-employed, so I have no boss or shareholders that need pretty reports with bar charts. In my case my site is deeply database driven and I can build engagement statistics directly from real data using complex SQL queries.

And while there's only a few such 'reports' that I check regularly, most of them are temporally incongruous—I think that's how you'd describe it—in that they look at what happened in the past contextualised by what's known in the present. (E.g. tracking engagements from new/irregular users, while they were new/irregular users, but which subsequently became regular users.)