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Stop donating your customers' data to Google Analytics

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Re: Stop donating your customers' data to Google Analytics

#151

Post by Carpetsmoker »

awb wrote: post #136
Carpetsmoker wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can do it with one of the hosted services. I don't know which ones support it exactly, but GoatCounter does (although it's kind of an undocumented feature until I merge PR #122).

Cool, I saw GoatCounter on HN a few days ago. I've looked into ways to get a user count without JS and without paying for hosting, but no luck yet. If you find out what free services support it I'd love to know.

Well, GoatCounter does :-)

But any service that sends something like "GET example.com/collect?path=/foo" can be loaded with an . It's perhaps not an explicitly documented feature, but it will still work :-)

Re: Stop donating your customers' data to Google Analytics

#152

Post by Diesel555 »

dvko wrote: post #104
gramakri wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you know if fathom will remain opensource and/or self-hostable ? ( https://github.com/usefathom/fathom/issues/268 )

The open-source (self-hosted) version of Fathom is dead. The only commits they have been pushing to it in the last 12 months have been upsells for their closed-source & centralized paid offering.

Agreed. They were super nice on their GitHub issues about removing cookies as a requirement (required on mobile) and then it was released to non open source. Don't use Fathom if you don't want to pay. I made that mistake for home projects.

Re: Stop donating your customers' data to Google Analytics

#153

Post by Diesel555 »

eitland wrote: post #86
gramakri wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you know if fathom will remain opensource and/or self-hostable ? ( https://github.com/usefathom/fathom/issues/268 )

Nice answer from developer!: > We are keeping this version open-source, forever, and committing to maintain it. We also have a business to run, and while we love open-source, it isn't paying our bills (and Fathom takes a lot of work from 2 people to keep going) and we're not a charity. > If this repo was full of contributions and other folks pitching in, this would be a different story, but it's not—which is totally…

Kind of a nice answer. Their comment about contributing is not really valid, I'm not going to contribute to something they have already solved and not released to open source. They already have the answer. And I understand the fact that open source is incredibly difficult to make money and maintaining it sucks. But just stop being open source and be another analytic company. Trying to pretend you are both and want contributions to things you've already written in your private repo doesn't work.

Re: Stop donating your customers' data to Google Analytics

#154

Post by JosIJntema »

Interesting topic. This among others is one of the reasons we started building Harvest. Just as with Google Analytics, you can start tracking data with just a small snippet of Javascript.

We use Splunk as our data engine and you can install it on your own server. This way you have full control, access and ownership of your data without letting third parties get any data. In that sense Harvest is basically the infrastructure that allows you to collect, store, use and visualize your data.

Besides that, we have been focusing on features that will help companies comply with privacy regulations. It is proven that this is not always easy in the complex world of online data.

For more information check https://harvest.graindata.com/en.

Re: Stop donating your customers' data to Google Analytics

#155

Post by eitland »

Diesel555 wrote: post #153
eitland wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nice answer from developer!: > We are keeping this version open-source, forever, and committing to maintain it. We also have a business to run, and while we love open-source, it isn't paying our bills (and Fathom takes a lot of work from 2 people to keep going) and we're not a charity. > If this repo was full of contributions and other folks pitching in, this would be a different story, but it's not—which is totally…

Kind of a nice answer. Their comment about contributing is not really valid, I'm not going to contribute to something they have already solved and not released to open source. They already have the answer. And I understand the fact that open source is incredibly difficult to make money and maintaining it sucks. But just stop being open source and be another analytic company. Trying to pretend you are both and want co…

I think we read it differently. In my view this is as about as nice as one can be:

> We are keeping this version open-source, forever, ...

Here they are committing to keeping their existing Open Source around instead of taking their toys and go home.

> If this repo was full of contributions and other folks pitching in, this would be a different story, but it's not—which is totally fine and accepted.

I think they aren't asking for contributions to v2 but rather for contributions to v1 which they are committed to keeping Open Source. But even then they acknowledge that users are free to use it without contributing in any way.

Re: Stop donating your customers' data to Google Analytics

#156

Post by pixelbath »

lern_too_spel wrote: post #83
pixelbath wrote: post #67

I see a lot of suggestions for free or open-source analytics packages, but I would refrain from recommending anything you haven't personally used. I've tried to separate myself from Google in various ways, and one of those was to replace Google Analytics with open source software. I tried several; they're all either non-functional out of the box, or require significant time investment to even start approaching Google…

If you're using AdSense, you're already giving Google your visitor data, no matter what visitor analytics package you use.

> I've tried to separate myself from Google in various ways

I'm aware of this. The next logical step is to find a better ad network.

Re: Stop donating your customers' data to Google Analytics

#157

Post by gramakri »

Carpetsmoker wrote: post #76
gramakri wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I gave many of these a visit. fathom - Looks great. I am OK with closed source products (my motivation is self-hosting/privacy) but the direction is not clear to me. Maybe they will have a blog about it at some point - https://github.com/usefathom/fathom/issues/268 . Having multiple code bases is going to be super hard. goaccess.io - this analyses web logs google-analytics-proxy - project is dead matomo - this is wha…

GoatCounter author here: doing some form of session tracking is on the roadmap; check back in a few months. The project is still quite new, with the first "real" release only being last week :-) As for Fathom, I find that last "since that people are confused"-comment rather funny, since their messaging on this has been confused for almost a year, haha

Will do! I am already following your project :)

Re: Stop donating your customers' data to Google Analytics

#158

Post by awb »

Carpetsmoker wrote: post #151
awb wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cool, I saw GoatCounter on HN a few days ago. I've looked into ways to get a user count without JS and without paying for hosting, but no luck yet. If you find out what free services support it I'd love to know.

Well, GoatCounter does :-) But any service that sends something like "GET example.com/collect?path=/foo" can be loaded with an . It's perhaps not an explicitly documented feature, but it will still work :-)

Perfect! I'll give it a go :)

Re: Stop donating your customers' data to Google Analytics

#159

Post by joshyi »

anderspitman wrote: post #143
xorcist wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many of the common web log analyzers are a bit long in the tooth. I've have used GoAccess for a while now and is mostly happy with it. It's fast enough and can generate pretty good looking static html which is mostly what you want for those simple use cases. A side effect of processing log files is that you can freely try software on historical data.

Do you have a recommendation on log format for GoAccess? I run a lot of custom services with no nginx etc in front, so I'll have to figure out the logging myself.

You can always create an issue on their github page, lots of help in there: https://github.com/allinurl/goaccess/issues

Re: Stop donating your customers' data to Google Analytics

#160

Post by IdontRememberIt »

While running my first business GA was not really usefull (We used internal tools easier to integrate in the code and adapt to our needs).

However GA data showed its usefullness when selling the business. The data was considered as a trusted source of information for the buyer. And all the definitions (unique user, etc) were aligned with the buyer's, so it was easier for them to assess the metrics.

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