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My Messy Analytics Breakup

digitalinklingsblog.com

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Re: My Messy Analytics Breakup

#2

Post by XCSme »

Great article! Your dashboard is not ugly, it's special :)

I also broke up from Google Analytics, but I didn't sacrifice the insights, I even gained more. I created a self-hosted analytics[0] platform to replace Google Analytics which is not as complex, but powerful enough to give you all the data the you need. I also had the fear of missing out if I removed GA, but I realized that I only use a small subset of the data they store, and after implementing those in my dashboard I no longer found the need to check out GA. Today I rely solely on userTrack and removed all Google 3rd party includes from my site (just yesterday I uploaded the Google fonts files to my server, so I no longer include them from Google's domain). Another surprising benefit is that my dashboard loads a lot faster that the GA dashboard.

[0]: https://www.usertrack.net/

Re: My Messy Analytics Breakup

#5

Post by putsjoe »

johannes1813 wrote: post #4
therestapi wrote: post #3

And at the bottom of the page I see a Google Captcha. Facepalm...

This is fair criticism — Captcha is more of a stopgap measure to fix input field spam until I can get around to finding a better way

This may be a better alternative (no affiliation):

https://www.hcaptcha.com/

Re: My Messy Analytics Breakup

#6

Post by zomglings »

XCSme wrote: post #2

Great article! Your dashboard is not ugly, it's special :) I also broke up from Google Analytics, but I didn't sacrifice the insights, I even gained more. I created a self-hosted analytics[0] platform to replace Google Analytics which is not as complex, but powerful enough to give you all the data the you need. I also had the fear of missing out if I removed GA, but I realized that I only use a small subset of the da…

usertrack looks pretty cool. I am looking to move away from Google Analytics as well and may give this a try.

It looks like paying for usertrack gives access to the source code, but not much else?

Re: My Messy Analytics Breakup

#7

Post by stevekemp »

Ironically I decided to ditch analytics largely because I wanted a faster site. Google's PageSpeed Insights page shows my site gets 100/100 on mobile/desktop, which was not the case when I had analytics available.

Of course such measurements are meaningless, but I had already come to the conclusion that I was adding analytics snippets to my sites as a cargo-cult thing; I never actually viewed the stats, and when I wanted to get a quick feel of the level of traffic I was receiving I'd just tail the server-log.

These days with CDNs, caches, and similar, I don't really have a single specific server-log to look at. But if the site is up I know if it became unexpectedly popular, because it was featured somewhere, when I get spontaneous emails from strangers..

Re: My Messy Analytics Breakup

#8

Post by XCSme »

zomglings wrote: post #6
XCSme wrote: post #2

Great article! Your dashboard is not ugly, it's special :) I also broke up from Google Analytics, but I didn't sacrifice the insights, I even gained more. I created a self-hosted analytics[0] platform to replace Google Analytics which is not as complex, but powerful enough to give you all the data the you need. I also had the fear of missing out if I removed GA, but I realized that I only use a small subset of the da…

usertrack looks pretty cool. I am looking to move away from Google Analytics as well and may give this a try. It looks like paying for usertrack gives access to the source code, but not much else?

Thanks!

Yes, it's a self-hosted platform, so you pay a one-time fee and you can download the product. You then have to upload it to a web server (I use a $5/mo DigitalOcean droplet) and use the auto-installer. There is short installation guide here: https://docs.usertrack.net/installation

If your already have a server running the LAMP stack you can add userTrack to it instead of getting a new server, as it's pretty efficient.

I was planning to also add a hosted (SaaS) variant, but if you think about it, it doesn't really make sense: you can just spin up your own DigitalOcean VPS (for cheaper than I would offer it to you) with a few clicks and have userTrack already installed on it. It's better for you for privacy, cost and performance. I am thus trying instead to educate the public more and promote the self-hosting movement, as nowdays it's really easy to run your own services (Docker, cloud-init and image marketplaces make it very easy to setup a server in a few clicks with the software that you need). I see this as the future, where every person can just run one or more virtual servers with the software that they use, instead of paying large monthly fees to big companies for a worse experience, companies that also sell their private data.

Re: My Messy Analytics Breakup

#10

Post by zomglings »

XCSme wrote: post #8
zomglings wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

usertrack looks pretty cool. I am looking to move away from Google Analytics as well and may give this a try. It looks like paying for usertrack gives access to the source code, but not much else?

Thanks! Yes, it's a self-hosted platform, so you pay a one-time fee and you can download the product. You then have to upload it to a web server (I use a $5/mo DigitalOcean droplet) and use the auto-installer. There is short installation guide here: https://docs.usertrack.net/installation If your already have a server running the LAMP stack you can add userTrack to it instead of getting a new server, as it's pretty e…

Have you considered releasing configurations for the VPS setup on the Cloud marketplaces?

I would much rather deploy onto my infrastructure with one click and pay you a few dollars a month than have to set things up myself.

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