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What do you guys think of this solution? I've considered it in the past but never tried it. https://matomo.org/ https://matomo.org/ This way you get data analy

What do you guys think of this solution? I've considered it in the past but never tried it. https://matomo.org/ https://matomo.org/ This way you get data analytics without dispensing user data to third parties.

cdubzzz 9y ago
I used a self-hosted Piwik (Matomo) instance for analytics at my previous job for a few years. It worked fine for my basic needs and has a great API that I used for custom reports, but I wasn’t doing anything terribly complex. I recommend it, especially if you have full control of the decision and time to learn a bit about it.
mysterypie 9y ago
Self-hosted analytics like Matomo tell you who visited your site for how long and from what IP address and what country, etc. But is this the only reason that people run trackers? I thought people ran trackers for the following reasons (in addition to analytics): (1) To get targeted ads, and thereby money because you showed a targeted ad. So if the Doubleclick tracker you embedded on your site sees that your visitors are watching lots of dog videos, they can serve you ads for dog food. I suppose (in theory) you could not embed the Doubleclick tracker and instead send Doubleclick the info you collected with your own self-hosted analytics, and get Doubleclick to send you the dog food ad which you insert into your site yourself. (2) To improve ranking on Google search. I've read that running Google Analytics improves your search ranking as opposed to letting Google simply crawl your site. And other reasons too? I welcome any corrections if I'm gravely misunderstanding the technology and motivations.
- gnode 9y ago
  Google and Facebook also have personal information about users which a self-hosted / privacy respecting solution inherently doesn't, such as gender, age, "likes", etc. I haven't used these analytics platforms myself, so I don't know how much of such data they reveal to customers.

cdubzzz 9y ago

I used a self-hosted Piwik (Matomo) instance for analytics at my previous job for a few years. It worked fine for my basic needs and has a great API that I used for custom reports, but I wasn’t doing anything terribly complex. I recommend it, especially if you have full control of the decision and time to learn a bit about it.

mysterypie 9y ago

Self-hosted analytics like Matomo tell you who visited your site for how long and from what IP address and what country, etc. But is this the only reason that people run trackers? I thought people ran trackers for the following reasons (in addition to analytics): (1) To get targeted ads, and thereby money because you showed a targeted ad. So if the Doubleclick tracker you embedded on your site sees that your visitors are watching lots of dog videos, they can serve you ads for dog food. I suppose (in theory) you could not embed the Doubleclick tracker and instead send Doubleclick the info you collected with your own self-hosted analytics, and get Doubleclick to send you the dog food ad which you insert into your site yourself. (2) To improve ranking on Google search. I've read that running Google Analytics improves your search ranking as opposed to letting Google simply crawl your site. And other reasons too? I welcome any corrections if I'm gravely misunderstanding the technology and motivations.

gnode 9y ago
Google and Facebook also have personal information about users which a self-hosted / privacy respecting solution inherently doesn't, such as gender, age, "likes", etc. I haven't used these analytics platforms myself, so I don't know how much of such data they reveal to customers.