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Using analytics on my website

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Re: Using analytics on my website

#31

Post by marvinblum »

I was also looking for server-side analytics, created my own, and now it's a product! The idea is that tracking can be done from both, a JS snippet (for easy integration) and an API. Both rely on fingerprinting and almost provide the same set of features. The API just lacks screen resolution. The method is GDPR (and CCPA and whatnot) compliant [0].

Original article: https://marvinblum.de/blog/server-side-tracking-without-cook...

Product: https://pirsch.io

[0] Before this comes up again: Yes, we checked professionally with an external DPO and it was checked by some companies you've probably heard of externally.

Re: Using analytics on my website

#32

Post by marvinblum »

captn3m0 wrote: post #16

I’ve been looking to add some analytics to the endoflife.date API (JS obviously doesn’t work) and my no-JS options are: 1. Netlify analytics, which I’ve tried in the past and found under-powered 2. CloudFlare analytics (yes, there’s a No-JS variant in the Pro plan) 3. get your raw access logs from your host, and throw them at GoAccess/…. BunnyCDN seemed like the simplest provider for this with access to raw logs in t…

Maybe Pirsch is an option for your use case?

https://docs.pirsch.io/get-started/backend-integration

Re: Using analytics on my website

#33

Post by wcrossbow »

blowski wrote: post #10

I can understand the need for analytics on an advertising-supported site with >1M DAU, on a complex web application. But anything smaller than that and analytics are mostly vanity metrics. A lot of the traffic is going to be bots anyway. Write for pleasure. If you must, look for qualitative signals like discussions of the article on HN or Twitter.

> But anything smaller than that and analytics are mostly vanity metrics

I removed any analytics from my blog because I'm already obsessed enough with silly star counts. It manages to completely suck away all the joy; ignorance is bliss here. I found that the rare email or comment from some random person saying that they found something useful is much more fulfilling and at the same time less invasive of my brain activity.

Re: Using analytics on my website

#34

Post by captn3m0 »

marvinblum wrote: post #32
captn3m0 wrote: post #16

I’ve been looking to add some analytics to the endoflife.date API (JS obviously doesn’t work) and my no-JS options are: 1. Netlify analytics, which I’ve tried in the past and found under-powered 2. CloudFlare analytics (yes, there’s a No-JS variant in the Pro plan) 3. get your raw access logs from your host, and throw them at GoAccess/…. BunnyCDN seemed like the simplest provider for this with access to raw logs in t…

Maybe Pirsch is an option for your use case? https://docs.pirsch.io/get-started/backend-integration

Static-site hosted on netlify, so no. We could trigger a netlify function on every request, but that wouldn't scale.

Re: Using analytics on my website

#35

Post by AndrewStephens »

the_gipsy wrote: post #2

[flagged]

GoAccess is nice but when I tried it a few years ago I found that the results were not accurate. Maybe on a large site the signal rises way above the noise but I found for my blog/project site (with maybe 20 hits a day) the counts consisted of obvious bots that GoAccess didn't filter correctly.

Google Search Console is also widely inaccurate in the other direction.

I ended up just implementing a simple hit counter[0] which was fine for what I wanted.

[0] https://sheep.horse/visitor_statistics.html

Re: Using analytics on my website

#36

Post by 101008 »

zoidb wrote: post #18

I suggest using analytics that you can self-host, like https://www.goatcounter.com/ and renting a cheap vm to run it on along with your blog. It is way better, you have more control and you can be sure that javascript tracking is working for 100% of people using the site since you have full control over it not getting blocked by adblockers.

I use Google Analytics (I know, I know, it's bad, sorry for that, but I tried Matomo and it didn't work for me). I noticed in recent years the amount of visitors got down by a lot. Would it be possible to know that the reason is because the users are blocking Analytics JS?

To compare, my website gets around 600 visitors per day according to Analytics, while Cloudflare says something around 4k. Who should I trust?

Also, if Cloudflare would add visitors per page, I would completely remove Analytics. I only want to know visitors per day, country, and the most visited webpages. That's more than enough.

Re: Using analytics on my website

#37

Post by joshmanders »

wcrossbow wrote: post #33
blowski wrote: post #10

I can understand the need for analytics on an advertising-supported site with >1M DAU, on a complex web application. But anything smaller than that and analytics are mostly vanity metrics. A lot of the traffic is going to be bots anyway. Write for pleasure. If you must, look for qualitative signals like discussions of the article on HN or Twitter.

> But anything smaller than that and analytics are mostly vanity metrics I removed any analytics from my blog because I'm already obsessed enough with silly star counts. It manages to completely suck away all the joy; ignorance is bliss here. I found that the rare email or comment from some random person saying that they found something useful is much more fulfilling and at the same time less invasive of my brain act…

I don't use analytics on my personal sites for vanity metrics. I use it to see where people are coming to my site from and the stuff they seem to resonate with.

Re: Using analytics on my website

#38

Post by ebiester »

blowski wrote: post #10

I can understand the need for analytics on an advertising-supported site with >1M DAU, on a complex web application. But anything smaller than that and analytics are mostly vanity metrics. A lot of the traffic is going to be bots anyway. Write for pleasure. If you must, look for qualitative signals like discussions of the article on HN or Twitter.

Vanity or not, knowing that a few hundred people checked out a post I made when I linked it from an HN comment is valuable to me. It helps motivate me to write the next one, because I'm writing for others rather than myself.

Maybe others create in a void, but I'll play my piano poorly rather than write about software documentation if I'm doing something for pleasure.

Re: Using analytics on my website

#39

Post by sofixa »

account42 wrote: post #27
sofixa wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Just use GoAcces for fuck's sake. You don't need more than access logs. What are you going to do with that analytics data anyway? How much can you even trust that it's real and not bots that are getting better every day? I can provide you a very simple example. You have a blog, with articles. On a multi-thousand word article, you know that traffic that spent You get the point, I hope. Access logs are useless for th…

You don't need analytics to know that you should build a responsive website and use best practices to keep it resource usage small enough for old devices.

> You don't need analytics to know that you should build a responsive website

You do need to know if you have users using their fridge's custom browser developed by some intern long since retired in 2012 that doesn't support HTML5 properly and needs weird hacks to actually be responsive.

> resource usage small enough for old devices

Which can prevent you from adding new features, or even just video in good quality which can choke an old device's browser. Graceful degradation is nice, and should be preferred whenever possible, but sometimes not possible. So knowing how many, and if any, of your users are using such things you have to go out of your way to support, is important.

Re: Using analytics on my website

#40

Post by radlad »

account42 wrote: post #27
sofixa wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Just use GoAcces for fuck's sake. You don't need more than access logs. What are you going to do with that analytics data anyway? How much can you even trust that it's real and not bots that are getting better every day? I can provide you a very simple example. You have a blog, with articles. On a multi-thousand word article, you know that traffic that spent You get the point, I hope. Access logs are useless for th…

You don't need analytics to know that you should build a responsive website and use best practices to keep it resource usage small enough for old devices.

I don't think the Nintendo DS / handheld gaming device comments were about keeping resource usage small. Outdated browsers don't support all the same APIs that the ones today do. Typically, businesses will choose a cutoff that supports most traffic they receive from their users. Without analytics, you can't determine this cutoff.

It varies wildly from product to product.

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