6 ms·

Nobody looks at logs anymore? Strange, those are very useful. Google Analytics isn't the only analytics tool and as blockers have become more prevalent relying

by zaarn 7y ago

Nobody looks at logs anymore? Strange, those are very useful. Google Analytics isn't the only analytics tool and as blockers have become more prevalent relying on GA as your sole source of truth is becoming increasingly desperate to worship Google. Ideally you run a simple analytics tool alongside that is lightweight and doesn't get blocked (ie, privacy friendly) as well as running a log analyzer on your apache/webserver logs.

geraltofrivia 7y ago
I host my personal site (https://priyansh.page https://priyansh.page) on Netlify and they give me analytics computed from server side logs. [Link to Netlify Analytics](https://www.netlify.com/products/analytics/ https://www.netlify.com/products/analytics/). They don't provide a lot of demographic information (even browser used, afaik) but provide sufficient information for my purpose. edit: I should mention that this a paid feature ($9 a month). edit2: I do notice a higher number of traffic when compared to some free analytics which work on the client side, and respect Do Not Track.
oarsinsync 7y ago
> Nobody looks at logs anymore? Apparently not, as one other comment on this site lists one of the apparent benefits of using cloudflare as that they provide "the exact numbers on how many people requested or visited my site" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21243135 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21243135
- Spivak 7y ago
  (Not speaking to CF specifically.) I think we need to nail down what we mean by unique visitors -- we're talking about an estimation which pools from many different sources to calculate as best we can the number of different real human visitors. There is good data in the server logs but if that's your only source of data then your estimation is going to be coarse. This can be good enough for certain applications, and is plenty for sites with simple access models but you do lose information compared to what you get from client-side tracking.
diafygi 7y ago
Does anyone have a list of self-hosted server-side analytics tools with conversion funnel tracking? The only self-hosted one I can find that has a funnel feature is Matomo.
LinuxBender 7y ago
> Nobody looks at logs anymore? Nope. It blew my mind as well. I used to work for a company that spent about 70 million per quarter on advertising and they most certainly wanted every .. last .. access log .. line. They would scrutinize the way I did log rotation to ensure nothing was lost. At my current gig, the web marketing team didn't even know what access logs were. I don't think they left out a single tracker on the site.

by zaarn 7y ago

geraltofrivia 7y ago

I host my personal site (https://priyansh.page https://priyansh.page) on Netlify and they give me analytics computed from server side logs. [Link to Netlify Analytics](https://www.netlify.com/products/analytics/ https://www.netlify.com/products/analytics/). They don't provide a lot of demographic information (even browser used, afaik) but provide sufficient information for my purpose. edit: I should mention that this a paid feature ($9 a month). edit2: I do notice a higher number of traffic when compared to some free analytics which work on the client side, and respect Do Not Track.

oarsinsync 7y ago

> Nobody looks at logs anymore? Apparently not, as one other comment on this site lists one of the apparent benefits of using cloudflare as that they provide "the exact numbers on how many people requested or visited my site" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21243135 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21243135

Spivak 7y ago
(Not speaking to CF specifically.) I think we need to nail down what we mean by unique visitors -- we're talking about an estimation which pools from many different sources to calculate as best we can the number of different real human visitors. There is good data in the server logs but if that's your only source of data then your estimation is going to be coarse. This can be good enough for certain applications, and is plenty for sites with simple access models but you do lose information compared to what you get from client-side tracking.

diafygi 7y ago

Does anyone have a list of self-hosted server-side analytics tools with conversion funnel tracking? The only self-hosted one I can find that has a funnel feature is Matomo.

LinuxBender 7y ago

> Nobody looks at logs anymore? Nope. It blew my mind as well. I used to work for a company that spent about 70 million per quarter on advertising and they most certainly wanted every .. last .. access log .. line. They would scrutinize the way I did log rotation to ensure nothing was lost. At my current gig, the web marketing team didn't even know what access logs were. I don't think they left out a single tracker on the site.