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An alternative to using Google Analytics on your website

plausible.io

161–170 of 311 posts

Re: An alternative to using Google Analytics on your website

#161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does Cloudflare NS deal with caching resolvers?

It tells you even percentage and absolute number of cached dns queries. Cloudflare is dope!

I think he meant queries from caching nameservers that cloudflare does not control. I would argue the majority of queries would be fulfilled by these caching nameservers.

Re: An alternative to using Google Analytics on your website

#162
post #110
post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 )

I think comments are probably easier to interact with, but they're more hassle to set up and maintain :( FWIW, I often take interesting points from emails I get and add them as "updates" to blog posts.

Re: An alternative to using Google Analytics on your website

#163
post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is not an option if you are a profit driven enterprise. There is no alternative that is as good/optimized as Google Ads is. You are literally bidding on search intent.

I find that for information search intent is a poor pre-qualifier for sales leads.

What would you recommend is better than someone literally searching for something you could provide?

Re: An alternative to using Google Analytics on your website

#164
post #126
post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With any website it's important to know how many visitors it is receiving. In the context of a blog knowing you're getting a lot of traffic can motivate you to publish more content and knowing more about your visitors can also feed into what sort of content you publish. You could look at your server logs, of course, but analytics is easier to set up and gives you higher quality data than something like AWStats. Since…

How does embedded script provide better data? You mean if the page is delivered from network cache you still get analytics or something else?

By filtering out bots and giving you the number of visits rather than just pageviews, and also giving you data on things like screen resolution and time on page that can only be retrieved in javascript.

Re: An alternative to using Google Analytics on your website

#165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I’ve never heard of Plausible either but the instant I browsed to the article I suspected they were a competitor. I skimmed the table of contents and saw the last item was recommending a product with the same name as the website, and my suspicion was confirmed. They’re perfectly up front and obvious about it, not hiding anything.

>They’re perfectly up front and obvious about it, not hiding anything.

Wtf, this is the opposite of "up front." You had to poke around and figure it out yourself based on a suspicion. Up front means that they just tell you, no figuring out required.

Re: An alternative to using Google Analytics on your website

#166
Plausible was hovering less than 50 users on its own web site, and I wouldn't risk sending my visitors to this relatively new web service either.

Analytics requires a lot of trust to not screw you up. It's a third party script that you add in pretty much every page of your web site. I'm still looking for a provider that I can tame with CSP rules, and comes with the most minimal things I need to know. A pixel tracker would have suited majority of us.

Re: An alternative to using Google Analytics on your website

#167
post #81
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…

Also, unlike many smaller analytics providers, Google Analytics doesn't have glaring CSRF vulnerabilities and doesn't have creepy features that let you spy on individual users (no idea if this applies to Plausible or not).

Google Analytics consultant here.

Actually, GA does have a creepy feature that lets you spy on individual users. It's called the User Explorer report (under Audience in the left-hand nav). It lets you page through each hit from a particular user. This is also the report that lets you process Data Subject Access or Deletion requests under GDPR or CCPA.

Re: An alternative to using Google Analytics on your website

#168
post #143
post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No idea if that's true or not regarding Google Analytics, but you can opt out of all data sharing and I imagine Google would be in a lot of trouble if they didn't honour that.

There is no comprehensive opt out to Google tracking. If you disagree, show me the button that opts out of doubleclick (and all Google subsidiaries and data sharing partners) targeting ads at my home IP address, cell phone, car, etc.

You can opt out of all data sharing in Google Analytics on the account settings page.

There are also ways to opt out of ad targeting but that's irrelevant to this discussion.

Re: An alternative to using Google Analytics on your website

#170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

A free trial isn't the same as "free for low volume / hobby usage". Not sure if that's what the OP is after, but it's what I'm after. And to head off a couple of popular distortions/digressions: 1. There's a difference between wanting a free hobby tier and believing that I'm owed a free hobby tier. 2. Just because a company should be paid for their work doesn't imply that I'm obligated to use their product.

In this space I think wordpress.com provides a decent free tier, obviously only for wordpress sites, they have the pay for premium features instead of googles usage based policy.
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