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A list of privacy-friendly Google Analytics alternatives

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Re: A list of privacy-friendly Google Analytics alternatives

#21

Post by decremental »

edenhyacinth wrote: post #4

>Google Analytics is free, although it is not. Google Analytics makes money off the personal data they collect from their customers. This isn't strictly true though. Google Analytics has a free and a paid tier with GA360, which is for larger businesses. More to the point, half of these aren't suitable for marketing decisions when you have multiple paid entrypoints to your site. The major, but simple, ones for marketi…

> Bot Removal & IP removal

People who advocate for alternatives to GA I suspect miss this very crucial aspect of the service. When you have a long running site, especially one that has user accounts or conducts ecommerce, it can be dominated by automated traffic. The longer the site has existed and the more popular it is, the more this is the case.

I'm not even referring to legitimate search engine crawlers but the automated exploit bots, the spam bots, the people running site suckers, and who even knows how many other things people get up to for malicious purposes.

Any GA alternatives that rely on server logs is instantly never going to be a viable alternative. Alternatives that don't rely on logs still cannot do a sufficient job of weeding out the automated traffic. I have never, not even once, heard of a solution that can tackle this overwhelmingly critical problem.

Re: A list of privacy-friendly Google Analytics alternatives

#22

Post by mattboulos »

There are two major challenges with building a robust analytics solution for the privacy era: architecture and privacy operations.

In terms of architecture, things that are cross-site (i.e., a script that sends a data to a service that is not yours) are getting blocked by ad blockers and browsers like Brave. This is because, even with the best of publicly stated intentions, there is no way to know what the third-party will do with the data.

Privacy operations itself is exceptionally challenging, because you need to manage consent and purpose, provide auditability, support DSAR, etc. -- unless you operate at the strict minimum (typically what falls within “legitimate interest” under the GDPR).

My company, Blotout (YC W21), approaches this with a cloud native privacy data engineering platform that lets you ingest event and ETL data into to your own lake, and provides a complete privacy operations suite. Since it’s same-site, you’re not blocked as a tracker. And because it pulls and unifies all of your data in your own infra, it’s vastly more efficient than a third-party stack and it lets you do things with you data that you can’t when it’s spread across providers.

Of course, for your personal blog this might be overkill. :)

Re: A list of privacy-friendly Google Analytics alternatives

#23

Post by philipptemmel »

edm0nd wrote: post #18
philipptemmel wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did indeed think about adding Matomo to the list, but my main focus was to highlight products by Indie hackers, Solopreneurs, and small teams. But you are right, as Matomo is open-source and probably one of the biggest (if not the) competitor to GA I should definitely include in the list.

I think it at least should get a mention since it's one of the largest.

Yeah, I just mentioned exactly that.

Re: A list of privacy-friendly Google Analytics alternatives

#24

Post by AnonHP »

This seems like a good list. But I find analytics services to be quite expensive (considering that the plans are based on page views and the starting tiers are quite low on that count).

If the author of this post is still checking comments here, I’d suggest adding some labels next to each heading that indicate if it’s free, paid, open source, self-hosting option available, etc. That would make it easier to read only those that fit some basic criteria.

Re: A list of privacy-friendly Google Analytics alternatives

#26

Post by philipptemmel »

AnonHP wrote: post #24

This seems like a good list. But I find analytics services to be quite expensive (considering that the plans are based on page views and the starting tiers are quite low on that count). If the author of this post is still checking comments here, I’d suggest adding some labels next to each heading that indicate if it’s free, paid, open source, self-hosting option available, etc. That would make it easier to read only…

Hey, author of the blog post here! Thank you for your suggestion, I really like the idea, I will consider adding it to the post.

If you want you can also check out the Airtable database I have created, which lets you conveniently browse and sort all the services mentioned within the post.

Re: A list of privacy-friendly Google Analytics alternatives

#27

Post by AndrewStephens »

decremental wrote: post #21
edenhyacinth wrote: post #4

>Google Analytics is free, although it is not. Google Analytics makes money off the personal data they collect from their customers. This isn't strictly true though. Google Analytics has a free and a paid tier with GA360, which is for larger businesses. More to the point, half of these aren't suitable for marketing decisions when you have multiple paid entrypoints to your site. The major, but simple, ones for marketi…

> Bot Removal & IP removal People who advocate for alternatives to GA I suspect miss this very crucial aspect of the service. When you have a long running site, especially one that has user accounts or conducts ecommerce, it can be dominated by automated traffic. The longer the site has existed and the more popular it is, the more this is the case. I'm not even referring to legitimate search engine crawlers but the a…

This is a big problem and exactly why I had to abandon log-based analytics for my personal blog. Some bots are easy to spot but others seem to be running real browsers, or as good as, which makes it impossible to weed out bad actors from logs alone.

I ended up coding a simple hit tracker (that was all I wanted) with a javascript beacon which worked well for a couple of years. But recently my blog was hit by an ongoing attack[0] that even executed the beacon code - I have no idea why. I am not convinced that any of these services would discount this type of traffic, I ended up having to use Cloudflare and even then needed some custom firewall rules.

[0] https://sheep.horse/2021/6/botnets%2C_or_this_is_why_we_cann...

Re: A list of privacy-friendly Google Analytics alternatives

#29

Post by decremental »

AndrewStephens wrote: post #27
decremental wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Bot Removal & IP removal People who advocate for alternatives to GA I suspect miss this very crucial aspect of the service. When you have a long running site, especially one that has user accounts or conducts ecommerce, it can be dominated by automated traffic. The longer the site has existed and the more popular it is, the more this is the case. I'm not even referring to legitimate search engine crawlers but the a…

This is a big problem and exactly why I had to abandon log-based analytics for my personal blog. Some bots are easy to spot but others seem to be running real browsers, or as good as, which makes it impossible to weed out bad actors from logs alone. I ended up coding a simple hit tracker (that was all I wanted) with a javascript beacon which worked well for a couple of years. But recently my blog was hit by an ongoin…

I can't recommend Cloudflare enough. It has become a critical service to me. It recently helped me out a ton when bot traffic increased dramatically out of nowhere. I was getting hit 5 million times a week by one type of bot alone and Cloudflare's automated bad bot detection completely mitigated it with a single click. It has also been my experience that automated traffic has become so much more sophisticated in recent years.

Re: A list of privacy-friendly Google Analytics alternatives

#30

Post by AndrewStephens »

decremental wrote: post #29
AndrewStephens wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a big problem and exactly why I had to abandon log-based analytics for my personal blog. Some bots are easy to spot but others seem to be running real browsers, or as good as, which makes it impossible to weed out bad actors from logs alone. I ended up coding a simple hit tracker (that was all I wanted) with a javascript beacon which worked well for a couple of years. But recently my blog was hit by an ongoin…

I can't recommend Cloudflare enough. It has become a critical service to me. It recently helped me out a ton when bot traffic increased dramatically out of nowhere. I was getting hit 5 million times a week by one type of bot alone and Cloudflare's automated bad bot detection completely mitigated it with a single click. It has also been my experience that automated traffic has become so much more sophisticated in rece…

Cloudflare is a great service but I hate that I have to use it due to factors beyond my control.

I was disappointed that Cloudflare didn't automatically detect the traffic as malicious but feeding the bots a captcha almost completely mopped up the problem.

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