11 ms·

So the solution is to use Amazon's tracker? I appreciate the problem and I would like to stop using GA in my static pages as well, but trading one privately-ow

by lbrito 7y ago

So the solution is to use Amazon's tracker? I appreciate the problem and I would like to stop using GA in my static pages as well, but trading one privately-owned software from a tech giant for another privately-owned software from a different tech giant seems a bit ludicrous. I would readily swap GA for some decent open-source solution though.

akie 7y ago
I'm only aware of https://matomo.org/ https://matomo.org/ (formerly Piwik) as a good open source alternative to Google Analytics. Are there others?
- jka 7y ago
  I can vouch for Countly ( https://github.com/countly https://github.com/countly ) which is open source, supports a few different platforms (web, iOS, Android), and has a nice administrative web interface. The web SDK also supports collection of client-side JavaScript errors, which is neat for tracking down bugs and things which might harm user experience.
- eldridgea 7y ago
  I'm a fan of Fathom[0]. The amount of data and insight is light compared to GA and others but if it meets your needs it's pretty great. [0] https://github.com/usefathom/fathom https://github.com/usefathom/fathom
  - gramakri 7y ago
    Do you know if fathom will remain opensource and/or self-hostable ? (https://github.com/usefathom/fathom/issues/268 https://github.com/usefathom/fathom/issues/268)
    - eitland 7y ago
      Nice answer from developer!: > We are keeping this version open-source, forever, and committing to maintain it. We also have a business to run, and while we love open-source, it isn't paying our bills (and Fathom takes a lot of work from 2 people to keep going) and we're not a charity. > If this repo was full of contributions and other folks pitching in, this would be a different story, but it's not—which is totally fine and accepted. But, since we want to keep going with Fathom, we have to separate V1 and V2 so we can make it sustainable. Otherwise we'd have to abandon it (which serves no one). > If you truly want your complaint heard, maybe contribute to what you're complaining about (financially, time, effort, etc). My wife always tells me that I'm not allowed to gripe unless I'm also taking action.
      - Diesel555 7y ago
        Kind of a nice answer. Their comment about contributing is not really valid, I'm not going to contribute to something they have already solved and not released to open source. They already have the answer. And I understand the fact that open source is incredibly difficult to make money and maintaining it sucks. But just stop being open source and be another analytic company. Trying to pretend you are both and want contributions to things you've already written in your private repo doesn't work.
        eitland 7y ago
        I think we read it differently. In my view this is as about as nice as one can be: > We are keeping this version open-source, forever, ... Here they are committing to keeping their existing Open Source around instead of taking their toys and go home. > If this repo was full of contributions and other folks pitching in, this would be a different story, but it's not—which is totally fine and accepted. I think they aren't asking for contributions to v2 but rather for contributions to v1 which they are committed to keeping Open Source. But even then they acknowledge that users are free to use it without contributing in any way.
    - dvko 7y ago
      The open-source (self-hosted) version of Fathom is dead. The only commits they have been pushing to it in the last 12 months have been upsells for their closed-source & centralized paid offering.
      - Diesel555 7y ago
        Agreed. They were super nice on their GitHub issues about removing cookies as a requirement (required on mobile) and then it was released to non open source. Don't use Fathom if you don't want to pay. I made that mistake for home projects.
clarry 7y ago
> I would like to stop using GA in my static pages Why don't you? Do you really need this tracking at all?
- exotree 7y ago
  Depends on the job, purpose of site, and goals being accomplished. Hard to demonstrate value and improve digital business outcomes without GA (and other tools like HEAP Analytics).
  - tomrod 7y ago
    Yeah, the "value" being shown rarely actually investigates causal impact. Else they'd recognize that the literature shows that digital advertising has no measurable (provable) impact.[0] I recognize that there is more to digital business than adds, such as paternalistic commercial guidance, dark patterns, web traversal, and so on. However, I haven't seen proof that these patterns matter, especially given recent critiques on A/B testing (relative to multi-armed bandit). [0] https://www.gwern.net/docs/traffic/2015-lewis.pdf https://www.gwern.net/docs/traffic/2015-lewis.pdf
    - CrazyStat 7y ago
      > Else they'd recognize that the literature shows that digital advertising has no measurable (provable) impact.[0] This is a gross mischaracterization of what the linked paper says. "It's extremely difficult to measure the impact" (the claim that the cited paper puts forward) has quite a different meaning from "no measurable impact." The paper is entirely about the difficulty of measuring the impact, and studiously avoids, as far as I can tell, any inference about what the impact actually was in these experiments. For example, Table I gives the mean of the control group sales and a standard deviation, but no mean of the treatment group sales, which you would need to do a statistical test of whether there was an impact; similarly, Table II reports standard deviations of the sales effect and ROI, but not means; Table III presents power calculations based on hypothetical ROIs and the real measured standard deviations, but gives no clue to the real ROIs were. Nowhere does the paper support your claim that there is no measurable impact. In addition, the situation is very different for small companies that most people have never heard of. The article is citing studies done with major corporations with millions of customers and that are already well established in the collective consciousness. Measuring the effect of an advertising campaign taking you from 3.23 million customers to 3.231 million customers is indeed very difficult, particularly when you might fluctuate by tens of thousands of customers on a weekly basis. Measuring the effect of an AdWords campaign taking you from 200 customers to 250 customers is much easier.
lgrebe 7y ago
Check out https://simpleanalytics.com/ https://simpleanalytics.com/
C1sc0cat 7y ago
And the freebie GA doesn't limit you to a 25% sample across the board basically the bigger the date range and amount of sessions the more sampling you get. Id be interested to see how amazons et up would handle the set up I am backup analytics nerd for. Major beverage brand hundreds of websites, multiple locales per site (a dozen or more for the big brands) on and has to handle roll up as well as well as custom metrics and dimensions.
falcolas 7y ago
I'd say the following to this (very reasonable) argument against using AWS: AWS makes money by selling services, not collecting data. Should Amazon make the leap and start harvesting data from AWS for marketing purposes, the data from their analytics platform will be the least of our worries. Thus far, AWS has proven to be safe for companies to host their data upon, and there have been no leaks of data stored in AWS into Amazon's marketing program. The HIPPA, PCI, and FedRamp certifications help back up their claims that a company's AWS data stays in AWS.
- thrav 7y ago
  This is why I use Prime photos, instead of Google photos. I need one, so I’ll take the paid one.
  - mceachen 7y ago
    I wouldn't conflate their general motives nor their data handling policies between their b2b offerings and their b2c offerings.
  - choward 7y ago
    The idea that just because you're paying for something it means they're not sharing your data or won't sell your data in the future send a but naive. If you don't control the server you have no idea what they are doing. You're just hoping they don't sell your data.
- adreamingsoul 7y ago
  Or is that wishful thinking? AWS and Amazon are in the buisness of collecting, storing, and processing data.
  - falcolas 7y ago
    Can you provide a citation about that with AWS and its customers? Amazon itself, I have no problem believing (and have seen it in action. However, AWS is run separately from Amazon('s storefront, specifically). If AWS were really aggregating customer's data stored in AWS' platform, I think we'd be seeing a lot more about it in the news. And there would be a lot more than just Walmart advocating against its use.
lern_too_spel 7y ago
In this case, AWS is contractually obliged not to use your data. My criticism of the article is that the author mentions that users are blocking access to third party trackers, but that means AWS Pinpoint set up in the way he suggests will get blocked as well. People who have that concern have to expose Pinpoint endpoints on their own domains or implement some other first party tracking solution.

by lbrito 7y ago

akie 7y ago

I'm only aware of https://matomo.org/ https://matomo.org/ (formerly Piwik) as a good open source alternative to Google Analytics. Are there others?

jka 7y ago
I can vouch for Countly ( https://github.com/countly https://github.com/countly ) which is open source, supports a few different platforms (web, iOS, Android), and has a nice administrative web interface. The web SDK also supports collection of client-side JavaScript errors, which is neat for tracking down bugs and things which might harm user experience.
eldridgea 7y ago
I'm a fan of Fathom[0]. The amount of data and insight is light compared to GA and others but if it meets your needs it's pretty great. [0] https://github.com/usefathom/fathom https://github.com/usefathom/fathom
- gramakri 7y ago
  Do you know if fathom will remain opensource and/or self-hostable ? (https://github.com/usefathom/fathom/issues/268 https://github.com/usefathom/fathom/issues/268)
  - eitland 7y ago
    Nice answer from developer!: > We are keeping this version open-source, forever, and committing to maintain it. We also have a business to run, and while we love open-source, it isn't paying our bills (and Fathom takes a lot of work from 2 people to keep going) and we're not a charity. > If this repo was full of contributions and other folks pitching in, this would be a different story, but it's not—which is totally fine and accepted. But, since we want to keep going with Fathom, we have to separate V1 and V2 so we can make it sustainable. Otherwise we'd have to abandon it (which serves no one). > If you truly want your complaint heard, maybe contribute to what you're complaining about (financially, time, effort, etc). My wife always tells me that I'm not allowed to gripe unless I'm also taking action.
    - Diesel555 7y ago
      Kind of a nice answer. Their comment about contributing is not really valid, I'm not going to contribute to something they have already solved and not released to open source. They already have the answer. And I understand the fact that open source is incredibly difficult to make money and maintaining it sucks. But just stop being open source and be another analytic company. Trying to pretend you are both and want contributions to things you've already written in your private repo doesn't work.
      - eitland 7y ago
        I think we read it differently. In my view this is as about as nice as one can be: > We are keeping this version open-source, forever, ... Here they are committing to keeping their existing Open Source around instead of taking their toys and go home. > If this repo was full of contributions and other folks pitching in, this would be a different story, but it's not—which is totally fine and accepted. I think they aren't asking for contributions to v2 but rather for contributions to v1 which they are committed to keeping Open Source. But even then they acknowledge that users are free to use it without contributing in any way.
  - dvko 7y ago
    The open-source (self-hosted) version of Fathom is dead. The only commits they have been pushing to it in the last 12 months have been upsells for their closed-source & centralized paid offering.
    - Diesel555 7y ago
      Agreed. They were super nice on their GitHub issues about removing cookies as a requirement (required on mobile) and then it was released to non open source. Don't use Fathom if you don't want to pay. I made that mistake for home projects.

clarry 7y ago

> I would like to stop using GA in my static pages Why don't you? Do you really need this tracking at all?

exotree 7y ago
Depends on the job, purpose of site, and goals being accomplished. Hard to demonstrate value and improve digital business outcomes without GA (and other tools like HEAP Analytics).
- tomrod 7y ago
  Yeah, the "value" being shown rarely actually investigates causal impact. Else they'd recognize that the literature shows that digital advertising has no measurable (provable) impact.[0] I recognize that there is more to digital business than adds, such as paternalistic commercial guidance, dark patterns, web traversal, and so on. However, I haven't seen proof that these patterns matter, especially given recent critiques on A/B testing (relative to multi-armed bandit). [0] https://www.gwern.net/docs/traffic/2015-lewis.pdf https://www.gwern.net/docs/traffic/2015-lewis.pdf
  - CrazyStat 7y ago
    > Else they'd recognize that the literature shows that digital advertising has no measurable (provable) impact.[0] This is a gross mischaracterization of what the linked paper says. "It's extremely difficult to measure the impact" (the claim that the cited paper puts forward) has quite a different meaning from "no measurable impact." The paper is entirely about the difficulty of measuring the impact, and studiously avoids, as far as I can tell, any inference about what the impact actually was in these experiments. For example, Table I gives the mean of the control group sales and a standard deviation, but no mean of the treatment group sales, which you would need to do a statistical test of whether there was an impact; similarly, Table II reports standard deviations of the sales effect and ROI, but not means; Table III presents power calculations based on hypothetical ROIs and the real measured standard deviations, but gives no clue to the real ROIs were. Nowhere does the paper support your claim that there is no measurable impact. In addition, the situation is very different for small companies that most people have never heard of. The article is citing studies done with major corporations with millions of customers and that are already well established in the collective consciousness. Measuring the effect of an advertising campaign taking you from 3.23 million customers to 3.231 million customers is indeed very difficult, particularly when you might fluctuate by tens of thousands of customers on a weekly basis. Measuring the effect of an AdWords campaign taking you from 200 customers to 250 customers is much easier.

lgrebe 7y ago

Check out https://simpleanalytics.com/ https://simpleanalytics.com/

C1sc0cat 7y ago

And the freebie GA doesn't limit you to a 25% sample across the board basically the bigger the date range and amount of sessions the more sampling you get. Id be interested to see how amazons et up would handle the set up I am backup analytics nerd for. Major beverage brand hundreds of websites, multiple locales per site (a dozen or more for the big brands) on and has to handle roll up as well as well as custom metrics and dimensions.

falcolas 7y ago

I'd say the following to this (very reasonable) argument against using AWS: AWS makes money by selling services, not collecting data. Should Amazon make the leap and start harvesting data from AWS for marketing purposes, the data from their analytics platform will be the least of our worries. Thus far, AWS has proven to be safe for companies to host their data upon, and there have been no leaks of data stored in AWS into Amazon's marketing program. The HIPPA, PCI, and FedRamp certifications help back up their claims that a company's AWS data stays in AWS.

thrav 7y ago
This is why I use Prime photos, instead of Google photos. I need one, so I’ll take the paid one.
- mceachen 7y ago
  I wouldn't conflate their general motives nor their data handling policies between their b2b offerings and their b2c offerings.
- choward 7y ago
  The idea that just because you're paying for something it means they're not sharing your data or won't sell your data in the future send a but naive. If you don't control the server you have no idea what they are doing. You're just hoping they don't sell your data.
adreamingsoul 7y ago
Or is that wishful thinking? AWS and Amazon are in the buisness of collecting, storing, and processing data.
- falcolas 7y ago
  Can you provide a citation about that with AWS and its customers? Amazon itself, I have no problem believing (and have seen it in action. However, AWS is run separately from Amazon('s storefront, specifically). If AWS were really aggregating customer's data stored in AWS' platform, I think we'd be seeing a lot more about it in the news. And there would be a lot more than just Walmart advocating against its use.

lern_too_spel 7y ago

In this case, AWS is contractually obliged not to use your data. My criticism of the article is that the author mentions that users are blocking access to third party trackers, but that means AWS Pinpoint set up in the way he suggests will get blocked as well. People who have that concern have to expose Pinpoint endpoints on their own domains or implement some other first party tracking solution.