5 ms·
The headline is wrong, it should be changed to "Stop donating your customers' data to Google Analytics ... donate to another large corporation instead!" There
by AndrewStephens 7y ago
The headline is wrong, it should be changed to "Stop donating your customers' data to Google Analytics ... donate to another large corporation instead!"
There are much better options out there. Quite apart from the solutions listed in these comments, a better option is to reconsider whether you really need analytics at all. Maybe the answer is yes if you are a business trying to understand your customers. But not every blog and project page needs analytics.
- runninganyways 7y agoOr you could write the 10 lines of JavaScript that'll do what 99% of people use Google analytics for
- bibobap 7y agoFeel free to post those lines
- quickthrower2 7y agoI reckon you'd need more than 9 "\n" characters to get it done. But in seriousness the 10 lines would be just use local storage or wotnot to store a tag, then call tracker.com?tag=... on each page load. "Rest is done on the server (TM)"
- mateus1 7y agoIf you think you can replicate that with 10 lines you have no idea what Google Analytics is used for.
- freehunter 7y agoThose 10 lines probably depend on an npm package that relies on 100 other npm packages.
- anderspitman 7y agoI'm ashamed to admit that I use GA on my blog to essentially count page views. The other information is interesting but mostly unused (by me). I would be far better served by a tool or service handling server logs (any recommendations?). But GA is 0 friction, so it's what I picked up back in the day. I suspect there are a lot of people in this boat.
- allendoerfer 7y agoMatomo can also be used to analyze server logs.
- anderspitman 7y ago19USD/mo for 3 sites seems pretty steep, and I have 0 interest in managing my own PHP service. Is there anything cheaper in this space?
- projproj 7y agoJust a shot in the dark, but if you use Cloudflare already, their stats include view counts. It's also probably more accurate than relying on JS tracking tools because they can count the actual requests to your site.
- anderspitman 7y agoMy CloudFlare stats show multiple times as many hits as GA. I'm guessing it's not handling bots/spiders or something.
- TomGullen 7y agoWe put this down to people with JavaScript disabled or ad blockers. CF does filter bot traffic but will capture all hits as it’s tracking through network requests. For us it’s around a 35% increase in what GA reports.
- Avamander 7y agoThis really reminds me of the infamous "you can just use FTP instead of Dropbox" comment.
- tombert 7y agoI don't disagree, but in a bit of fairness, a lot of people just use GA for page-counts and basic correlation stuff...you could do that in a relatively small amount of frontend JS stuff and a slightly-more-complex backend API to handle the basic correlation stuff. That said, that will only do about .01% of all the features of GA; like the infamous "FTP vs. Dropbox" the premise itself isn't exactly "wrong", just missing a bigger point.
- MadWombat 7y agoCould you link me to the FTP vs. Dropbox discussion? I am curious. I haven't used either for years and the implication seems to be that there is a profound difference, so I wonder what it is.
- cltsang 7y agoA wild 10x engineer appeared