25 ms·

An alternative to using Google Analytics on your website

462 points by markosaric 7y ago

dagenix 7y ago
> These two tracking scripts combined add 45.7 KB of page weight to each and every page load. Which is only true is there is no caching and I highly doubt that these files are configured not to be cached after the first load
- lmkg 7y ago
  The Google Analytics script itself, analytics.js, is cachable and cached. By design, Google Tag Manager and gtag should not be cached. The behavior of those scripts can be configured from wizard interfaces, and there is an expectation that published changes take effect immediately. Also, all of these scripts are deeply and thoroughly asynchronous. They are designed not to impact site speed. Not to say that they can't or won't (I've seen GTM do horrendous things when used improperly), but I would trust an actual timing metric over a file size metric.
addcninblue 7y ago
It seems like plausible is a GA competitor (and I didn't see disclaimers, but could have missed them). It seems very clean and well thought though!
duxup 7y ago
I like that they gave some alternatives. With the web there are a lot of crusade like topics that while technically correct the maelstrom of finger waving blog posts really don't seem to change much and few really offer workable solutions to accomplish the goals that doing the thing they don't want you to do accomplishes.
- coldpie 7y ago
  One alternative that should be seriously considered is not having analytics at all. I don't doubt that they're useful for many people in many situations, but consider whether they're useful to you in your situation. When was the last time you look at analytics? What did you learn from it? What actions did you take? Are you really gaining anything from them? I think most personal blogs, for example, gain nothing from having analytics running. In fact I'd argue almost all non-commercial activity has no reason to gather analytics.
  - duxup 7y ago
    I think that's a valid argument that is there in the blog post. I do like that they did actually include some alternatives that still were analytics.
  - snowwrestler 7y ago
    If you don't care if people are reading your blog, why bother posting it online at all? Why not just blog into a local Word document, like the character Creed on "The Office"? If you do care whether people are reading what you write, then analytics is the obvious way to find out.
    - coldpie 7y ago
      I think "analytics" and "traffic stats" are different things.
      - LunaSea 7y ago
        They are not.
      - snowwrestler 7y ago
        Traffic stats are a subset of all possible analytics you can gather about a website. But even if all you want are traffic stats, a client-side analytics package is still a better way to gather that information. Google Analytics--and similar client-side analytics packages--supplanted server-side log analysis for a reason. It's much easier to implement, and gives you much more accurate counts of real people visiting your site, as opposed to spiders, bots, scripts, and other automated traffic that doesn't matter.
- y-c-o-m-b 7y ago
  Even better is how they listed their own product last in the list of alternatives. Personally I think the self-hosted open source alternative will yield the appropriate compromise between what the business wants and preserving (some) privacy. In my experience these kinds of changes are unfortunately at the mercy of a top-down request which often trickles down from the C-level executives. Maybe if you turn this article into a pretty power-point presentation, you'll get their audience.
  - duxup 7y ago
    Yeah I was a lot less 'oh man it's an advertisement' when I saw multiple options listed.
shripadk 7y ago
The biggest drawback to not having Google Analytics on your website is if you choose to run Google Ads for your site and you have to retarget/remarket on Google properties. Without Google Analytics you are out of luck as you can enable remarketing only in Google Analytics (and you would need Analytics linked to Google Ads). If you have a personal website or a business that grows organically without needing to use Advertising then you can go ahead with any analytics provider of your choice. But the value add provided by using Google Analytics far outweighs other negatives from a business point of view.
- chadlavi 7y ago
  don't run google ads either
  - shripadk 7y ago
    That is not an option if you are a profit driven enterprise. There is no alternative that is as good/optimized as Google Ads is. You are literally bidding on search intent.
    - dhimes 7y ago
      I find that for information search intent is a poor pre-qualifier for sales leads.
      - booi 7y ago
        What would you recommend is better than someone literally searching for something you could provide?
        dhimes 7y ago
        Oh, that's too easy: Something that indicates the person is willing to make a purchase. My guess is you do searched all day long, and if you saw ads (you probably block them) you wouldn't buy much. Where do you go when you want to buy something? Google? Probably not. That's why Amazon is dominating. Google can be used for branding, I'm told, and that's important- but requires a different mindset.
dabei 7y ago
Is this an ad?
- smileysteve 7y ago
  Yes > Give Plausible Analytics a try Plausible Analytics is built with simplicity, speed and privacy in mind. We’ve used Google Analytics for years and understand its pitfalls
- y-c-o-m-b 7y ago
  Yes, but you really have to read the whole thing to see it. Even then, they listed their own product last on a list of alternatives. I equate it to how Privacy Badger approached their product (although it's free): your privacy is compromised, so try their product which will protect your privacy. This type of "honorable" advertising is OK in my book.
- ec109685 7y ago
  Yeah, this article was submitted by a SaaS marketing expert: https://markosaric.com/ https://markosaric.com/ There are some misleading parts of the article, which makes it even worse (e.g. by default Google uses the data from GA to profile users).
- SkyMarshal 7y ago
  It’s an ad but not a hidden/submarine one. It’s a blog post on the company’s blog giving a long list of reasons to try their product instead of their major competitor.
mopsi 7y ago
What are good self-hosted alternatives? Something like Webalizer, but a bit more modern.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- nick_meister 7y ago
  https://goaccess.io/ https://goaccess.io/ ?
- smacktoward 7y ago
  Matomo: https://matomo.org/ https://matomo.org/
- lharries 7y ago
  https://posthog.com https://posthog.com is another good one
- XCSme 7y ago
  I have been working on one for many years now as a side-project (not free): https://www.usertrack.net https://www.usertrack.net Since October I started working on it full-time and I'm really excited about the future updates. I want people to start using it not only because it's self-hosted but because it should lead faster to actionable insights than Google Analytics. I am also planning to provide a free version after I manage to earn enough to keep working on it.
- gorkemcetin 7y ago
  Countly (https://count.ly https://count.ly) is open source, push notifications, analytics, A/B testing, performance management and deployable on-prem. You can also install a limited, free-to-use version on Digital Ocean also.
- datcrack 7y ago
  We're been using Countly for years. It's got more than you'll ever need. Highly recommended.
elliebike 7y ago
I've been using Simple Analytics* and it's been great so far! Tbh I just want to see how many page views, on which pages, and where they're coming from. None of the google tracking bs Plausible looks nice though, so maybe I'll check that out too *: https://simpleanalytics.com/ https://simpleanalytics.com/
- AdriaanvRossum 7y ago
  Thanks for the mention elliebike!
- BubRoss 7y ago
  Why would you need a third party for that? That is basic information your web server already knows.
- tachion 7y ago
  I've seen them, and they do seem to have a nice product, but similarly to plausible, it isn't a direct competitor. Having to pay $19 per month for a website analytics that doesn't (perhaps yet, but aspires to, hence the need for analytics in first place) bring any income is most basic and huge disadvantage versus GA.
eli 7y ago
Google Analytics data isn’t tied to ad targeting. Google doesn’t profile you based on data from sites you visit with GA.
- zepto 7y ago
  According to google, it is: “Google uses the information shared by sites and apps to deliver our services, maintain and improve them, develop new services, measure the effectiveness of advertising, protect against fraud and abuse, and personalize content and ads you see on Google and on our partners’ sites and apps”.
  - snowwrestler 7y ago
    I can't find this language in the GA terms and conditions.
    - barbegal 7y ago
      Section 6 of https://marketingplatform.google.com/about/analytics/terms/us/ https://marketingplatform.google.com/about/analytics/terms/u... says >Google and its wholly owned subsidiaries may retain and use, subject to the terms of its privacy policy (located at https://www.google.com/policies/privacy/ https://www.google.com/policies/privacy/), information collected in Your use of the Service. and https://www.google.com/policies/privacy/ https://www.google.com/policies/privacy/ says under "Provide personalized services, including content and ads" >We use the information we collect to customize our services for you, including providing recommendations, personalized content, and customized search results.
      - lmkg 7y ago
        On the other hand, take a look at this: https://privacy.google.com/businesses/rdp/ https://privacy.google.com/businesses/rdp/ Google's usage of Analytics data is restricted unless GA is integrated with Google Ads. I think section 6 may actually be referring to collecting data about the Google Analytics user's usage of analytics, not data about the website visitor. I.e. if Bob puts GA on his website and Alice visits the website, then the sentence you quoted is about Google tracking Bob's usage of GA, not about Alice's visit. But I am very unsure about that.
tachion 7y ago
It sounds like a nice product, but sadly it's not exactly why GA is so popular (being a 'nice' product, that is). It is popular, because it's free, relatively easy to implement on any website, requires no self-hosting and powerful, once running. I've checked your website for pricing, but not only there's no word about free tiers, but there isn't even anything on the pricing at all. So, when it comes to majority of GA users, it's not a competitive solution.
- burkaman 7y ago
  Pricing is close to the bottom of the home page.
  - tachion 7y ago
    Indeed it is, I stand corrected :) However, when I was looking at it, I've skimmed through the top menu (nothing), scrolled down to the footer (noting) and finally clicked the Documentation link (nothing). Apparently the pricing info isn't exposed well enough.
  - mikeg8 7y ago
    Thanks. I didn't check the homepage and looked for pricing info in the navigation links, felt it was needlessly difficult. Pricing should be easy to locate from every page for a product like this.
    - munk-a 7y ago
      Discovering that users are having difficulty finding pricing information... might be one useful piece of data you could garner with a good analytics tool. Also I just checked out the pricing's placement and that is utterly terrible UI - the site uses light greyshade striping in the background for difference sections and then has the pricing block proceeded by a very dark background block with no information immediately visible - this is a clear visual flag for the rest of a page being irrelevant and a footer. And, just to clarify, the site's actual footer uses the exact same coloring for the footer along with a similar amount of excessive top-padding.
garraeth 7y ago
>It’s a bloated script that affects your site speed Once I removed GA, the speed increase was surprisingly very noticeable. That alone was enough for me to keep it off.
tmikaeld 7y ago
Some open source alternatives: - https://ackee.electerious.com/ https://ackee.electerious.com/ (Node.js based) - https://github.com/zgoat/goatcounter https://github.com/zgoat/goatcounter (Golang) (Commercial Licensed) - https://snowplowanalytics.com https://snowplowanalytics.com (Core-ware) - https://count.ly https://count.ly (Core-ware) https://www.visitor-analytics.io https://www.visitor-analytics.io is also a great GDPR compliant alternative (Not open source).
- rfergie 7y ago
  What is crippleware? Does it mean it doesn't work?
  - tmikaeld 7y ago
    I changed it to the more friendly "core-ware", means you get the basics - the rest is licensed.
- owenshen24 7y ago
  Shout-out to GoatCounter which was both free and easy for me to set up for my blog.
  - bewuethr 7y ago
    Another happy GoatCounter user here!
- Carpetsmoker 7y ago
  > - https://github.com/zgoat/goatcounter https://github.com/zgoat/goatcounter (Golang) (Commercial Licensed) Small correction: it's not really "commercial licensed", it's completely Open Source/Free Software according to the OSI definition and "four freedoms", and can be used for any purpose including commercial (EUPL license, roughly similar to the AGPL). Only the hosted goatcounter.com SaaS operates on a "free for personal use, pay for commercial use" basis, but there is nothing stopping you from running your own instance for commercial purposes. I think I need to clarify the README on this a little bit, as I had someone else ask the same question yesterday as well :-)
dandare 7y ago
The million-dollar question: will removing GA hurt my search raanking?
- kgwxd 7y ago
  If the answer is yes, then the next call to action should be stop using Google.
- tantalor 7y ago
  No. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CgBw9tbAQhU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CgBw9tbAQhU
- rchaud 7y ago
  No. Hacker News does not use GA. Yet it ranks at the top for many searches.
  - saagarjha 7y ago
    Hacker News also happens to have a monopoly on certain search terms ;)
donohoe 7y ago
Take this post with a pinch of salt... Out of the 10 points made, I'd argue only 2 are actually valid and another 2 are "technically correct but..." It’s owned by Google, the largest ad-tech company in the world Yes. Google provides a free service and in return gets a view into your traffic. Very fair point, but not terribly controversial IMHO It’s a bloated script that affects your site speed Um, not really. I'm a big web performance advocate but 45.7KB of JS is small for the service provided. You do not need to use Google Tag Manager either so if you care you can reduce the JS footprint to 18KB. It’s overkill for the majority of site owners Yes. I'd agree with this. You probably do not need it if you are not a business.(Given the source of this point I'm guessing they do not offer most of the features of GA) It’s a liability considering GDPR, CCPA and other privacy regulations Hard disagree. You can limit PII in GA to large degree like not gathering full IP address, and reduce logging. If GA is your only reason to have a Consent option then fine, its a burden to do. However if you have any other analytics or services that use cookies its a minor check-list item to cover this. It uses cookies so you must obtain consent to store cookies They are repeating their previous claim in a different form here... skipping. It’s blocked by many plugins and browsers so the data is not very accurate Technically correct, but you don't need highly accurate data to make product decisions. GA does sampling after a certain threshold anyway. It requires an extensive privacy policy No. It does not. You should acknowledge it and talk about why you use GA and you can link to GA's privacy policy. Plenty of boilerplate text you can copy to cover this if you really care. It’s abused by referral spam that skews the data Maybe your experience if different but this is hardly a problem worth noting. Certainly not a GA specific issue. It’s a proprietary product so you need to put your trust in Google Yeah. Same with any service you use, but ok. It worsens the user experience due to the necessity for the annoying prompts Again, most 3rd-party services on your site mean you need to go this path. There are good and bad ways to do this. I'm sure this service is worth trying. I would also recommend looking at Simple Analytics: https://simpleanalytics.com/ https://simpleanalytics.com/
- zepto 7y ago
  If it weren’t controversial nobody would be discussing it.
saagarjha 7y ago
If this is your personal website, one option to consider is dropping the analytics completely. Do you really need to know exactly (and it’s not even that exact, since people block or can’t load your analytics) how many people viewed your blog posts? Anecdotally, if you put your email at the bottom of the page you’ll get a pretty good idea just from the number of people who send you one.
- augusto-moura 7y ago
  You are right, you don't need to know it in a small blog or site But metrics and statistics are the very foundation of science, and the graal of software engineering. I can't resist the temptation of knowing which browsers and the countries of the users of my website, or how many hacker news visitors come to it every other season, so many possibilities... sigh
  - saagarjha 7y ago
    You really don’t need to know that. I mean, it’s often (but not always: see the perils of optimizing for “clicks”) nice if you could, but you are actively trading the privacy of your visitors for that information.
  - josteink 7y ago
    And you can determine all that from regular web-server logs. No need to snitch on your visitors to big G.
- smacktoward 7y ago
  Or just do it the old fashioned way - have the server keep an access log, then use something like GoAccess (https://goaccess.io/ https://goaccess.io/) to produce reports from it. It’s not real-time reporting, but then you probably don’t need real-time reporting for your personal site anyway.
  - saagarjha 7y ago
    Alas, I don’t control my server, but if I did I would say you might not even need this. If you’re using Google Analytics right now it’s probably better than that, though.
carlisle_ 7y ago
If you're going to tear down a competitor's product and shill your own you should probably be up front about it.
- Clubber 7y ago
  In the type of capitalism the US employs, transparency such as this often puts one at a competitive disadvantage. We have an entire industry dedicated to misleading consumers: advertising and marketing.
  - stronglikedan 7y ago
    That industry has existed everywhere for most of civilization. Perhaps even the second oldest profession.
    - jayd16 7y ago
      Hmm is this a fair assessment? Seems like most consider modern advertising to originate in the late 1800s. At the very least you'd say there was an inflection point sometime after the printing press, no?
- abhisuri97 7y ago
  I think that if a blog shilling a company/product is hosted on said company's website, they're already sufficiently up-front about it.
  - carlisle_ 7y ago
    I really don't think so, I've never heard of this company I didn't know what they sell. I had to poke around the website and read the comments here to realize. That's really the exact opposite of being up front.
    - SkyMarshal 7y ago
      I’ve never heard of Plausible either but the instant I browsed to the article I suspected they were a competitor. I skimmed the table of contents and saw the last item was recommending a product with the same name as the website, and my suspicion was confirmed. They’re perfectly up front and obvious about it, not hiding anything.
werds 7y ago
all of these alternatives which people are posting: simpleanalytics.com plausible.io are not free, which is the main reason people use Google Analytics
8ivek 7y ago
It looks like a nice product but GA is free!
seapunk 7y ago
We use Simple Analytics [https://simpleanalytics.com/ https://simpleanalytics.com/] as alternative to GA and it's also privacy-friendly. I saw Plausible appeared after Simple Analytics launched their product. I'm glad to see GA alternatives becoming popular.
Etheryte 7y ago
The correct proposition instead would be to stop analytics on your website, period. There's many sites that benefit greatly from the insight, but I'd argue they're a minority. Your personal blog doesn't need analytics. Let's be honest, for many people, analytics is just a way to feed their ego — my ramblings reached 100 people, so you could say I'm kind of a big deal. Google is, obviously, very well aware of this target market, and tries to feed back into this loop as well. It's not without reason you get weekly summaries and more into your inbox by default. The reality, of course, is that it's serving them while hooking you, much like social media notifications driving engagement etc.
- tanderson92 7y ago
  Analytics can absolutely be useful for your personal blog / website. Imagine you're an academic on the postdoctoral fellow / tenure track job market and you want to both numbers and see locations of where your hits are coming from, google analytics can help. For universities the ISP entry is often "X university" which makes things even clear than the broad Geo category of which city the hit comes from. This can be very informative in terms of what leads are likely to come up.
  - Etheryte 7y ago
    What is the created value from that data extraction, though? That you know that the uni you applied to looked at your website? That's nice, but again, simply a way to reinforce your ego as far as I see — you get insurance that you're important enough to get through the first filter. But what actionable data does this interaction give you?
    - tanderson92 7y ago
      The academic job market can be unforgiving, and for those who also have industry leads/offers it can be helpful to know whether there may be future offers from academic institutions when deciding whether to commit elsewhere. Even without industry offers, it isn't like all academic job offers come in at the same time and you may be second pick at your preferred institution so it could take some time for a possible offer to come through. If you're still getting website hits from a place it's a fair bet you're still under consideration and you maybe don't want to commit elsewhere. It's not really about an ego boost, and in any case, egos can take a pretty major bruising during the very anxious weeks.
addedlovely 7y ago
Looks nice. Is the account multiuser with separation between sites? If it is, it's a service I'd consider throwing into my maintenance packages as an added value. Most clients don't need the complexity of Google Analytics and with GDPR the data is increasingly out of line with reality, given we load GA based on consent.
- markosaric 7y ago
  Thanks! At the moment, it's one user per account. However, you can create password-protected links to share the stats with your clients. Each link/password combination only gives access to the stats for a single site without having to create an account.
mark242 7y ago
Not sure who makes Plausible, but if the "live demo" is reflective of the actual product, it's sorely lacking. The reason that GA so popular is because of the free tier, sure, but also because GA 360, the really amazingly expensive version, has features that let you really get insights about your visitors. Here's a popular question these days: "when can I stop supporting IE 11?" With GA, the answer comes in a couple of clicks; revenue generated sliced by browser version. I don't even see the revenue generated section of Plausible, or really any way to associate any metadata with custom events. GA gives you this functionality without any coding. If you don't want to use GA, try something like Amplitude, which has a lot more data manipulation options than Plausible.
duiker101 7y ago
Slightly off-topic, but are there any analytics for open source projects? Even if they require the actual data to be public (which would actually be pretty nice)
Yizahi 7y ago
"Nobody was fired for using Google Analytics" (c) Is financial burden to change any part of your product, including GA, and 99.99% of all companies in the world don't give a damn about users of their products, so it will never happen unless some global power restructure happens and Google will fall out of grace. And even then most likely it will be simply replaced with even worse GA-2.
- asdfasgasdgasdg 7y ago
  I would say that 99.99% of businesses do give a damn about their customers. And particularly they care about their customers' preferences as demonstrated by their economic behavior. Very few customers care whether a business uses GA enough to change their purchasing decisions. Businesses therefore rightly view the decision as neutral with respect to customer preferences.
  - Yizahi 7y ago
    That customer model is a mental construct of said companies. Just because customer does not proactively ask/request/mention something don't mean that he doesn't care about this. People implicitly assume that their personal information is not used for malicious purposes, despite that it is not true anymore for most of the companies. And in the era of monopolies/doupolies customers don't have vote with their wallet anymore, unless going full luddite and live in a cave.
    - asdfasgasdgasdg 7y ago
      So, a few objections. Most sites that use Google Analytics are not owned by monopolies or duopolies, so that aspect of your comment does not really apply. I also don't know if your claim r.e. malicious purposes is true. Probably depends on whose definition of malicious you're talking about. > That customer model is a mental construct of said companies. Well enough, but as I said, it's the one they care about. You seem to have a dualist view of customers where there are some things they care about that do affect economic behavior, and others they care about but which do not affect their economic behavior. I don't buy that model. I prefer the monist model where in competitive markets the customer expresses the totality of their preferences through economic behavior. I know it's incorrect, like all models, but I think it's least incorrect. I doubt there's more than a tiny fraction of customers that even knows the existence of Google Analytics. Of them, only a small fraction of those has any idea of its capabilities. And of those customers, only an even smaller fraction even checks whether a site is using it before deciding whether to shop. The notion that a large fraction of customers care about the use of GA just doesn't fit with these other observations and conjectures. Please correct me with data if you think I'm wrong. And anyway, whether you're right or me, the monist model encompasses everything companies have any incentive to care about, so it's the one that will be used to drive decisions. It's also the one that we can use to predict company behavior.
fourstar 7y ago
I've been relying on Cloudflare lately for analytics. Gives me a rough idea, and "good enough".
- fitzn 7y ago
  Oh, nice. I didn't think of this. But good idea. I'll look into their analytics.
jhabdas 7y ago
Those looking for more ethical alternatives to the Spyware you're using see https://switching.software https://switching.software.
hidiegomariani 7y ago
Yes! I've just removed GA from one of my pet projects (shameless plug https://golang.cafe https://golang.cafe) - And started using Cloudflare NS https://www.cloudflare.com/dns/ https://www.cloudflare.com/dns/. Now I get users/analytics reports at DNS level. No bloated JS trackers, no privacy policies and weird stuff and I can track visits even when adblockers are enabled. This would definitely be overestimated as bots would be counted in but it seems pretty accurate so far! It also has unique users count (although this is overestimated)
- skrtskrt 7y ago
  Is this somehow different than what you get from hosting on Cloudflare Dash? I have my GitHub pages DNS through Dash and the only additional thing I wish I had was referrer analytics. Nice site, too. Bookmarked :)
- ec109685 7y ago
  How does Cloudflare NS deal with caching resolvers?
  - hidiegomariani 7y ago
    It tells you even percentage and absolute number of cached dns queries. Cloudflare is dope!
    - booi 7y ago
      I think he meant queries from caching nameservers that cloudflare does not control. I would argue the majority of queries would be fulfilled by these caching nameservers.
      - mschuster91 7y ago
        Setting a sufficiently low DNS TTL will take most caching servers out of the question.
frankzander 7y ago
Great if it's not written in some sort of exotic language and just in php. Don't get me wrong I'm not a fan of php but if it's written in php it would be run anywhere but not only on your private special configured VPS.
fitzn 7y ago
I really dislike the user experience of GA. I literally know 1% of the functionality it offers and I only _need_ 1% of what it offers. But I do like that it's free. Was planning to one day give https://simpleanalytics.com/ https://simpleanalytics.com/ a shot.
- rchaud 7y ago
  GA is complete overkill for hobby websites that get ~100s of visits/day. If you have a commercial website selling stuff, or conduct A/B testing, or have marketing channels funnelling traffic to the site, then you pretty much have to use something like GA or Adobe Analytics.
  - munk-a 7y ago
    I'm actually of the exact opposite opinion - for the majority of websites just shoving GA on it and calling it a day is quite sufficient... It's only if your website really lives and dies by making sure users are hitting the important components and converting into paying customers that a more feature-full analytics tool may be valuable.
nkkollaw 7y ago
GA can't really be replaced easily. There is an army of web consultants ready to help you set up and track your marketing with GA, and just as many marketing consultants that can only work with GA. While it's nice that someone works on alternatives—although I don't really see anything wrong with GA—it's here to stay. Reminds me of Excel, people have been trying to replace Excel for 20 years now.
lharries 7y ago
Posthog.com is another solid option for privacy-focused analytics. They too have a self-hosted version
tanilama 7y ago
No I won't. It is free and fine.
CrankyBear 7y ago
"It's owned by Google." Who knew!?
geocrasher 7y ago
"Here are completely legit reasons to stop using Google Analytics." <gains credibility> <gains more credibility> <gets me thinking about switching to something else> "Try our product instead!" <closes tab in disgust>
throwaway894345 7y ago
I have a hobby blog that I'm trying to run for <$5/month. I run it on Github Pages because it's a static site and GH takes care of just about everything. The only thing I don't get is analytics or server logs, I'm planning to build that myself with standard AWS components. I considered other options, but I didn't want to use GA (for many of the reasons mentioned in the blog), other tools like Plausible were outside of my budget, and the open source tools looked like more hassle to self-host than reinventing the wheel myself: Browser (~3 lines of JS) -> API Gateway -> SQS Queue -> Lambda (ETLs queue into) -> Athena. I was originally just going to use Postgres, but RDS/Aurora are expensive and running Postgres in EC2 is going to be at least as much work (configuring SSH, process management, backups, monitoring, logging, image building, networking, etc). My custom plan is ~$3/month all-in provided I stay below ~1M requests per month, and even then it scales very cheaply. Also, this design is highly scalable, although I doubt I'll ever take advantage of it; it's mostly just icing on the cake. The main motivation is that these components are available on the free plan ("forever", not just the first 12 months) and/or the pricing model makes the charges negligible for my super-low-volume use case. Note that this doesn't give me pretty dashboards; the interface is SQL. Fortunately, there are other analysis tools that I have at my disposal which can plug in to SQL. Lastly, of course my $5 budget doesn't do justice to the actual value of my time; it's more of a fun challenge. If I really just wanted web analytics, I should shell out the $6/month for plausible or similar.
- munk-a 7y ago
  Your choice is, of course, your choice, but I'd strongly suggest GA for this use case. I understand and agree that Google is in fact evil and we should avoid feeding the beast, but a hobby website using GA is too minor to care about for any of the privacy reasons the author states and if it's fully static pages then ideally the performance will already be light enough that the bloat of GA isn't going to make a difference.
  - saagarjha 7y ago
    For a light site, Google Analytics may be the majority of its “weight”. It’s not huge, but I’d like to think my readers came to my site for the content and not the analytics so it’s a bit ironic that the ratio doesn’t match that.
spking 7y ago
How is this different than Fathom? (https://usefathom.com/ https://usefathom.com/)
ksec 7y ago
Plausible, Fathom [1] and Simple Analytics [2] are very similar in features. While self hosting is not supported, plausible is Open Source [3] running on Elixir and Postgre. It is also the most affordable out of three, starting at $6 only. I am not sure why HN are so negative about this post, when two years ago everyone were cheering for GA alternatives. Although I do agree it needs to add "Pricing" in the Navigation section. [1] https://usefathom.com https://usefathom.com [2] https://simpleanalytics.com https://simpleanalytics.com [3] https://github.com/plausible-insights/plausible https://github.com/plausible-insights/plausible
- vikramkr 7y ago
  I think everyone is so negative on the post because the post is a sleazy ad in disguise. If it had opened with "these are the reasons that we are unsatisfied with analytics which led us to launch our own alternate service, plausible" or even just "why we made plausible.io" then we would know up front that it's an ad but maybe still a worthwhile read. This hides the fact that they want you to maybe try plausible to the last section and the last bullet of the table of contents. Its nothing about the product and everything about the underhanded advertising.
  - animalgonzales 7y ago
    Where's the sleaze? GA does shady shit, Plausible has a competitor product and they're making the pitch on their company blog. What am I missing?
    - meowface 7y ago
      They used a clickbaity title and deeply buried the lede by disclosing that this is an advertisement for a competing (paid, non-self-hosted, proprietary) product only at the very bottom of a long list. I would bet 95% of readers did not realize this was an advertisement until getting to the bottom.
- meowface 7y ago
  >plausible is Open Source >self hosting is not supported Ok, then how do you prove it's open source?
varelaz 7y ago
If you're so concerned about GDPR, probably hotjar is a good choice. It's free for personal use and it's all EU based.
uk_programmer 7y ago
The first reason is about Google being evil. They may well be. However unless your alternative is as good, or better or has a unique selling point that GA doesn't have you will find people won't use it. Don't tell me about how your competitor is bad. Tell me what you offer in comparison to your competitor.
AndrewStephens 7y ago
Congratulations on getting your subtle advertising on the front page. I admire your restraint in only mentioning your product at the conclusion of a long article - nicely done! That said, you state what many have been been saying for years - GA is overkill for most sites and gives a stupid amount of information to Google. But sites are giving up their users information to any 3rd party analytics package, not just GA. Hosting your own analytics is the only ethical way to go, unless you really, really need the demographic data that GA provides (which you probably don't). Having passive feedback that people are actually reading your posts is nice but a simple hit-counter would probably do the job and relieve your readers of losing another little slice of their privacy. I'm going to take a leaf out of the poster's book and mention my own project in passing: https://sheep.horse/visitor_statistics.html https://sheep.horse/visitor_statistics.html
mathieupassenau 7y ago
I wrote a blogpost about webanalytics and authentication. https://www.mathieupassenaud.fr/webanalytics_enemy/ https://www.mathieupassenaud.fr/webanalytics_enemy/ Using "authorization code grant" is not as secure as we imagine with those kind of analytics
Ayesh 7y ago
Plausible was hovering less than 50 users on its own web site, and I wouldn't risk sending my visitors to this relatively new web service either. Analytics requires a lot of trust to not screw you up. It's a third party script that you add in pretty much every page of your web site. I'm still looking for a provider that I can tame with CSP rules, and comes with the most minimal things I need to know. A pixel tracker would have suited majority of us.
- andrewzah 7y ago
  You can self host your own analytics, like matomo. [0] [0]: https://matomo.org/ https://matomo.org/
hk__2 7y ago
Their own analytics dashboard is public: https://plausible.io/plausible.io https://plausible.io/plausible.io
- twsted 7y ago
  And it's really interesting: see the HN effect!
tyre 7y ago
What's the best server-side only, self-hosted analytics platform if I don't want to add any JS to the front-end? Running nginx here
- lgl 7y ago
  In my opinion there are no longer any really viable server side analytics/log processing that's equivalent to what you get with GA unless you want to either install some kind of server with a ton of features and dependencies or use a tool that will most likely also require the use of js. The amount of crawlers, botnet spam, hacking or scanning activity and other non-visitor related hits you get these days will require a lot of filtering, updating spamlists, blacklisting, etc and you'll probably end up spending more time tweaking your webserver and analytics setup than actually gathering any relevant information from said analytics. That said, the "old" log processing tools like AWStats, Analog, Webalizer, etc are still available although I'm not sure if they've been kept updated. I'm sure there is also a lot of more competition on self hosted tools that try to replicate what GA does but I'm not that familiar with any either.
  - tyre 7y ago
    This is helpful, thank you. You mean to say that spambots don't respect robots.txt?? Good to think about. I'll check these out and see what they've done (if much) to mitigate that issue. I'd imagine that would need to be front and center, unless they're focused more on internal services.
- slenk 7y ago
  GoAccess - https://goaccess.io/ https://goaccess.io/
seanwilson 7y ago
What do people suggest if you have a website that sells something? Knowing where your traffic is coming from, if your new redesign helped or hindered users in finding content, and knowing which traffic sources result in the most sales sounds business critical to me. I've seen lots of situations where when we look into analytics, it becomes obvious users are having trouble finding content or don't know the content is there to be found (e.g. putting an important link behind a navigation menu was a bad idea). I feel people can overly focus on the more manipulative side of A/B test, but analytics is useful for improving your UX as well. Not everyone runs a personal blog without a care for monetisation or viewership either.
- whoisjuan 7y ago
  Hotjar, Fullstory, Crazyegg.
- XCSme 7y ago
  You can look over the product I'm building (self-hosted analytics): usertrack.net. It's not free though.
huxflux 7y ago
Stop using Google Analytics and pay for your project? Sorry. I'm not convinced by the logic.
MrCheese 7y ago
Is that Tailwind UI that you're using? First time I've seen that in the wild in that case!
paulcole 7y ago
For the average modern website, how much load time does shaving off 44kb save?
blauditore 7y ago
>Google, the world’s largest ad-tech company, [...] This is kind of snarky, especially in the light that the author is writing this post solely to sell something in competition with Google.
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ChrisArchitect 7y ago
everyone hating on this in the comments, yet it's getting upvoted. Silent support is a bit annoying. I'd also rather not be told what to do with these titles "Stop doing this, etc" sigh
ivrrimum 7y ago
I have this setup https://matomo.org/ https://matomo.org/ And when i have a new project, i just add the matomo script to it. It's pretty easy on the resources if you set it up right.
tobilg 7y ago
If you have access to an AWS account, you can host your own website statistics with very little costs. That’s why I built https://ownstats.cloud/ https://ownstats.cloud/ Would love to get some feedback.
andreyk 7y ago
As someone who still uses GA for multiple sites, can we actually discuss the claims of the article and not the broad idea of it? > " > These two tracking scripts combined add 45.7 KB of page weight to each and every page load." Google makes fantastic products that are available for free (with limits) because they make most of their money from ads. I may not like it, but gmail, Drive, YouTube are all great and I would prefer people who can't pay for such products have the free option. > "It’s a bloated script that affects your site speed" As others have said, no? Not with caching? Anyway my websites are probably bloated by all sorts of bigger things, I am no web dev and have had no time to optimize them overmuch, and the still work fine. So guilt tripping me about GA Analytics aint gonna work. > "It’s overkill for the majority of site owners" I like having the flexibility ; I seriously doubt this is a good pitch for any growing company or even project. > "It’s a liability considering GDPR, CCPA and other privacy regulations" Is it? It's not like Google is not addressing GDPR concerns (https://www.cookiebot.com/en/google-analytics-gdpr/ https://www.cookiebot.com/en/google-analytics-gdpr/) > "It uses cookies so you must obtain consent to store cookies" Okay, finally a good one -- nobody likes the cookie popup, so removing GA analytics would improve user experience. Then again, it's so common that people maybe are used to it? > "It’s blocked by many plugins and browsers so the data is not very accurate" 'There’s no definite answer on how many people block Google Analytics as that depends on the audience of your site, but for a tech audience, you shouldn’t be surprised to see 50% or more of the visitors blocking Google Analytics.' Really? I kind of doubt it.......... > "It requires an extensive privacy policy" Any analytics should have privacy disclosure, presumably. > "It’s abused by referral spam that skews the data" And other analytics aren't? > "It’s a proprietary product so you need to put your trust in Google" Fair, Open Source is preferable. > "It worsens the user experience due to the necessity for the annoying prompts" A repeat ----------- So yeah. Look, I am uncomfortable with big huge giant companies like Google ruling the earth. But I also have quite limited time and money, and already use gmail and Drive. So far Google has not done anything to seriously hurt my trust and I think their products are excellent. Most of these points seem weak to me, as someone already using GA analytics. Still, for someone building a new website, I could see this being enough to make the point. But, I think it would be far more effective if it was more concise and less easy to point out holes in the arguments.
tobiaslins 7y ago
I'm also working on an analytics & A/B testing tool (https://splitbee.io https://splitbee.io). The big difference is that it needs to pin unique users for A/B testing. It is a mix out of mixpanel & google analytics & optimizely!
vikramkr 7y ago
Why dont they just title this "why we made plausible.io?" Make it clear up front that this is content marketing. It would still be a worthwhile read but it wouldn't be nearly as sleazy feeling as disguising an ad as a blog post type thing. I think a lot of people on this forum would enjoy reading about how the founders approached the problem and what they see as the solution, either out of curiosity about new tech being developed or to evaluate the product by reading about what the founders were trying to fix with competing solutions. This just doesnt read as an honest marketing attempt.
deleted 7y ago
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jamieweb 7y ago
For those interested, my own solution to this was to use AWStats with an anonymization script [1]. It provides high-level analytics such as unique visitors, referring sites and most viewed pages, without having to store any personal data such as IP addresses, and it's 100% server-side. IP addresses are compared against a Bloom filter in order to count unique visitors, without actually permanently storing them. [1] https://gitlab.com/jamieweb/web-server-log-anonymizer-bloom-filter/ https://gitlab.com/jamieweb/web-server-log-anonymizer-bloom-...
computator 7y ago
Can you be penalized for not running Google Analytics? If you have a website with no analytics or non-Google analytics, will your Google ranking be worse?
KerryJones 7y ago
These posts are the trash of the internet. Why? This post... 1 - Fails to explain until the end that they are a competitor writing a "bash" piece 2 - Gives conclusions based on incomplete data and comparisons (website speed is barely affected by 45kb these days, many websites have much bigger reductions on multi-mb loads) 3 - States giant scary click-baitish claim in bold and then in smaller print gives the real story. "It's a liability..." to "it is a potential liability" 4 - Gives a false sense of "many reasons" ("It's a liability" and "It uses cookies" are the same complaint) 5 - States opinions as facts ("It worsens the UX...") -- it might, but the vast majority of websites use cookies, and so this doesn't add anything that you wouldn't have to deal with anyway.
brandon272 7y ago
Some pricing feedback: The limitation of *K views per month only serves to introduce confusion into the buying process for me: - I don't know how many thousand views per month my website gets, to begin with. This is not something I have ever had to be concerned about but with this product, suddenly I need to keep an eye on this? - The first question that comes to mind is that what happens when I go over? I see you have a FAQ answer dedicated to this. (A lot of people won't bother to read the FAQ) - According to the FAQ, a one time "spike" is OK, but if it happens two months in a row someone will contact me? This seems murky and introduces uncertainty. And not sure I want to sign up for a $6/mo. product where a vendor is going to be contacting me to "discuss upgrade options". - That said, I don't know what "discuss upgrade options" means. Does this mean you'll contact me to force me to upgrade? Or is it just a suggestion? Is there a time frame in which I'd have to do it or will you cut off the service if a decision isn't made in a timely fashion? - Your highest plan allows 1M pageviews per month. What happens if I go over that? Is there a higher, unlisted plan that I would be asked to upgrade to? A lot of the above may seem silly but I'm trying to illustrate the kind of murkiness that might cause a user to think, "I don't know exactly what I'm signing up for" and move on to other solutions.
dyeje 7y ago
How does this compare to SimpleAnalytics?
andrethegiant 7y ago
Segment integration?
secfirstmd 7y ago
Or Matamo. Its free and I've found it to be excellent.
hkai 7y ago
I stopped reading after the words "surveillance capitalism".
lukaszkups 7y ago
Does using cloudflare counts in as well? I've been using cloudflare for some time now, because I've wanted to save some of my static website bandwidth & it offered https setup pretty easily. I've setup google analytics just to compare visitor statistics and this is what I've found over 1 month: GA unique visitors: ~350 Cloudflare unique visitors: ~2900 So the difference is pretty overwhelming - I assume that cloudflare count some bot traffic as well or something? Is it even a reliable source of stats (cloudflare)? If not, why?
G0ther 7y ago
Thanks but no thanks And stop using this type of advertisement to your products. I would rather stick to GA. And, you never pay for analytics on personal website.
shubidubi 7y ago
I liked it when you announce it's open source till I checked your Github page: > At the moment we don't provide support for easily self-hosting the code. Currently, the purpose of keeping the code open-source is to be transparent with the community about how we collect and process data. So basically you ask people to work for free on something only you can use? No thank you.

462 points by markosaric 7y ago

> These two tracking scripts combined add 45.7 KB of page weight to each and every page load. Which is only true is there is no caching and I highly doubt that these files are configured not to be cached after the first load

lmkg 7y ago
The Google Analytics script itself, analytics.js, is cachable and cached. By design, Google Tag Manager and gtag should not be cached. The behavior of those scripts can be configured from wizard interfaces, and there is an expectation that published changes take effect immediately. Also, all of these scripts are deeply and thoroughly asynchronous. They are designed not to impact site speed. Not to say that they can't or won't (I've seen GTM do horrendous things when used improperly), but I would trust an actual timing metric over a file size metric.

addcninblue 7y ago

It seems like plausible is a GA competitor (and I didn't see disclaimers, but could have missed them). It seems very clean and well thought though!

duxup 7y ago

I like that they gave some alternatives. With the web there are a lot of crusade like topics that while technically correct the maelstrom of finger waving blog posts really don't seem to change much and few really offer workable solutions to accomplish the goals that doing the thing they don't want you to do accomplishes.

coldpie 7y ago
One alternative that should be seriously considered is not having analytics at all. I don't doubt that they're useful for many people in many situations, but consider whether they're useful to you in your situation. When was the last time you look at analytics? What did you learn from it? What actions did you take? Are you really gaining anything from them? I think most personal blogs, for example, gain nothing from having analytics running. In fact I'd argue almost all non-commercial activity has no reason to gather analytics.
- duxup 7y ago
  I think that's a valid argument that is there in the blog post. I do like that they did actually include some alternatives that still were analytics.
- snowwrestler 7y ago
  If you don't care if people are reading your blog, why bother posting it online at all? Why not just blog into a local Word document, like the character Creed on "The Office"? If you do care whether people are reading what you write, then analytics is the obvious way to find out.
  - coldpie 7y ago
    I think "analytics" and "traffic stats" are different things.
    - LunaSea 7y ago
      They are not.
    - snowwrestler 7y ago
      Traffic stats are a subset of all possible analytics you can gather about a website. But even if all you want are traffic stats, a client-side analytics package is still a better way to gather that information. Google Analytics--and similar client-side analytics packages--supplanted server-side log analysis for a reason. It's much easier to implement, and gives you much more accurate counts of real people visiting your site, as opposed to spiders, bots, scripts, and other automated traffic that doesn't matter.
y-c-o-m-b 7y ago
Even better is how they listed their own product last in the list of alternatives. Personally I think the self-hosted open source alternative will yield the appropriate compromise between what the business wants and preserving (some) privacy. In my experience these kinds of changes are unfortunately at the mercy of a top-down request which often trickles down from the C-level executives. Maybe if you turn this article into a pretty power-point presentation, you'll get their audience.
- duxup 7y ago
  Yeah I was a lot less 'oh man it's an advertisement' when I saw multiple options listed.

shripadk 7y ago

The biggest drawback to not having Google Analytics on your website is if you choose to run Google Ads for your site and you have to retarget/remarket on Google properties. Without Google Analytics you are out of luck as you can enable remarketing only in Google Analytics (and you would need Analytics linked to Google Ads). If you have a personal website or a business that grows organically without needing to use Advertising then you can go ahead with any analytics provider of your choice. But the value add provided by using Google Analytics far outweighs other negatives from a business point of view.

chadlavi 7y ago
don't run google ads either
- shripadk 7y ago
  That is not an option if you are a profit driven enterprise. There is no alternative that is as good/optimized as Google Ads is. You are literally bidding on search intent.
  - dhimes 7y ago
    I find that for information search intent is a poor pre-qualifier for sales leads.
    - booi 7y ago
      What would you recommend is better than someone literally searching for something you could provide?
      - dhimes 7y ago
        Oh, that's too easy: Something that indicates the person is willing to make a purchase. My guess is you do searched all day long, and if you saw ads (you probably block them) you wouldn't buy much. Where do you go when you want to buy something? Google? Probably not. That's why Amazon is dominating. Google can be used for branding, I'm told, and that's important- but requires a different mindset.

dabei 7y ago

Is this an ad?

smileysteve 7y ago
Yes > Give Plausible Analytics a try Plausible Analytics is built with simplicity, speed and privacy in mind. We’ve used Google Analytics for years and understand its pitfalls
y-c-o-m-b 7y ago
Yes, but you really have to read the whole thing to see it. Even then, they listed their own product last on a list of alternatives. I equate it to how Privacy Badger approached their product (although it's free): your privacy is compromised, so try their product which will protect your privacy. This type of "honorable" advertising is OK in my book.
ec109685 7y ago
Yeah, this article was submitted by a SaaS marketing expert: https://markosaric.com/ https://markosaric.com/ There are some misleading parts of the article, which makes it even worse (e.g. by default Google uses the data from GA to profile users).
SkyMarshal 7y ago
It’s an ad but not a hidden/submarine one. It’s a blog post on the company’s blog giving a long list of reasons to try their product instead of their major competitor.

mopsi 7y ago

What are good self-hosted alternatives? Something like Webalizer, but a bit more modern.

deleted 7y ago
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nick_meister 7y ago
https://goaccess.io/ https://goaccess.io/ ?
smacktoward 7y ago
Matomo: https://matomo.org/ https://matomo.org/
lharries 7y ago
https://posthog.com https://posthog.com is another good one
XCSme 7y ago
I have been working on one for many years now as a side-project (not free): https://www.usertrack.net https://www.usertrack.net Since October I started working on it full-time and I'm really excited about the future updates. I want people to start using it not only because it's self-hosted but because it should lead faster to actionable insights than Google Analytics. I am also planning to provide a free version after I manage to earn enough to keep working on it.
gorkemcetin 7y ago
Countly (https://count.ly https://count.ly) is open source, push notifications, analytics, A/B testing, performance management and deployable on-prem. You can also install a limited, free-to-use version on Digital Ocean also.
datcrack 7y ago
We're been using Countly for years. It's got more than you'll ever need. Highly recommended.

elliebike 7y ago

I've been using Simple Analytics* and it's been great so far! Tbh I just want to see how many page views, on which pages, and where they're coming from. None of the google tracking bs Plausible looks nice though, so maybe I'll check that out too *: https://simpleanalytics.com/ https://simpleanalytics.com/

AdriaanvRossum 7y ago
Thanks for the mention elliebike!
BubRoss 7y ago
Why would you need a third party for that? That is basic information your web server already knows.
tachion 7y ago
I've seen them, and they do seem to have a nice product, but similarly to plausible, it isn't a direct competitor. Having to pay $19 per month for a website analytics that doesn't (perhaps yet, but aspires to, hence the need for analytics in first place) bring any income is most basic and huge disadvantage versus GA.

eli 7y ago

Google Analytics data isn’t tied to ad targeting. Google doesn’t profile you based on data from sites you visit with GA.

zepto 7y ago
According to google, it is: “Google uses the information shared by sites and apps to deliver our services, maintain and improve them, develop new services, measure the effectiveness of advertising, protect against fraud and abuse, and personalize content and ads you see on Google and on our partners’ sites and apps”.
- snowwrestler 7y ago
  I can't find this language in the GA terms and conditions.
  - barbegal 7y ago
    Section 6 of https://marketingplatform.google.com/about/analytics/terms/us/ https://marketingplatform.google.com/about/analytics/terms/u... says >Google and its wholly owned subsidiaries may retain and use, subject to the terms of its privacy policy (located at https://www.google.com/policies/privacy/ https://www.google.com/policies/privacy/), information collected in Your use of the Service. and https://www.google.com/policies/privacy/ https://www.google.com/policies/privacy/ says under "Provide personalized services, including content and ads" >We use the information we collect to customize our services for you, including providing recommendations, personalized content, and customized search results.
    - lmkg 7y ago
      On the other hand, take a look at this: https://privacy.google.com/businesses/rdp/ https://privacy.google.com/businesses/rdp/ Google's usage of Analytics data is restricted unless GA is integrated with Google Ads. I think section 6 may actually be referring to collecting data about the Google Analytics user's usage of analytics, not data about the website visitor. I.e. if Bob puts GA on his website and Alice visits the website, then the sentence you quoted is about Google tracking Bob's usage of GA, not about Alice's visit. But I am very unsure about that.

tachion 7y ago

It sounds like a nice product, but sadly it's not exactly why GA is so popular (being a 'nice' product, that is). It is popular, because it's free, relatively easy to implement on any website, requires no self-hosting and powerful, once running. I've checked your website for pricing, but not only there's no word about free tiers, but there isn't even anything on the pricing at all. So, when it comes to majority of GA users, it's not a competitive solution.

burkaman 7y ago
Pricing is close to the bottom of the home page.
- tachion 7y ago
  Indeed it is, I stand corrected :) However, when I was looking at it, I've skimmed through the top menu (nothing), scrolled down to the footer (noting) and finally clicked the Documentation link (nothing). Apparently the pricing info isn't exposed well enough.
- mikeg8 7y ago
  Thanks. I didn't check the homepage and looked for pricing info in the navigation links, felt it was needlessly difficult. Pricing should be easy to locate from every page for a product like this.
  - munk-a 7y ago
    Discovering that users are having difficulty finding pricing information... might be one useful piece of data you could garner with a good analytics tool. Also I just checked out the pricing's placement and that is utterly terrible UI - the site uses light greyshade striping in the background for difference sections and then has the pricing block proceeded by a very dark background block with no information immediately visible - this is a clear visual flag for the rest of a page being irrelevant and a footer. And, just to clarify, the site's actual footer uses the exact same coloring for the footer along with a similar amount of excessive top-padding.

garraeth 7y ago

>It’s a bloated script that affects your site speed Once I removed GA, the speed increase was surprisingly very noticeable. That alone was enough for me to keep it off.

tmikaeld 7y ago

Some open source alternatives: - https://ackee.electerious.com/ https://ackee.electerious.com/ (Node.js based) - https://github.com/zgoat/goatcounter https://github.com/zgoat/goatcounter (Golang) (Commercial Licensed) - https://snowplowanalytics.com https://snowplowanalytics.com (Core-ware) - https://count.ly https://count.ly (Core-ware) https://www.visitor-analytics.io https://www.visitor-analytics.io is also a great GDPR compliant alternative (Not open source).

rfergie 7y ago
What is crippleware? Does it mean it doesn't work?
- tmikaeld 7y ago
  I changed it to the more friendly "core-ware", means you get the basics - the rest is licensed.
owenshen24 7y ago
Shout-out to GoatCounter which was both free and easy for me to set up for my blog.
- bewuethr 7y ago
  Another happy GoatCounter user here!
Carpetsmoker 7y ago
> - https://github.com/zgoat/goatcounter https://github.com/zgoat/goatcounter (Golang) (Commercial Licensed) Small correction: it's not really "commercial licensed", it's completely Open Source/Free Software according to the OSI definition and "four freedoms", and can be used for any purpose including commercial (EUPL license, roughly similar to the AGPL). Only the hosted goatcounter.com SaaS operates on a "free for personal use, pay for commercial use" basis, but there is nothing stopping you from running your own instance for commercial purposes. I think I need to clarify the README on this a little bit, as I had someone else ask the same question yesterday as well :-)

dandare 7y ago

The million-dollar question: will removing GA hurt my search raanking?

kgwxd 7y ago
If the answer is yes, then the next call to action should be stop using Google.
tantalor 7y ago
No. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CgBw9tbAQhU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CgBw9tbAQhU
rchaud 7y ago
No. Hacker News does not use GA. Yet it ranks at the top for many searches.
- saagarjha 7y ago
  Hacker News also happens to have a monopoly on certain search terms ;)

donohoe 7y ago

Take this post with a pinch of salt... Out of the 10 points made, I'd argue only 2 are actually valid and another 2 are "technically correct but..." It’s owned by Google, the largest ad-tech company in the world Yes. Google provides a free service and in return gets a view into your traffic. Very fair point, but not terribly controversial IMHO It’s a bloated script that affects your site speed Um, not really. I'm a big web performance advocate but 45.7KB of JS is small for the service provided. You do not need to use Google Tag Manager either so if you care you can reduce the JS footprint to 18KB. It’s overkill for the majority of site owners Yes. I'd agree with this. You probably do not need it if you are not a business.(Given the source of this point I'm guessing they do not offer most of the features of GA) It’s a liability considering GDPR, CCPA and other privacy regulations Hard disagree. You can limit PII in GA to large degree like not gathering full IP address, and reduce logging. If GA is your only reason to have a Consent option then fine, its a burden to do. However if you have any other analytics or services that use cookies its a minor check-list item to cover this. It uses cookies so you must obtain consent to store cookies They are repeating their previous claim in a different form here... skipping. It’s blocked by many plugins and browsers so the data is not very accurate Technically correct, but you don't need highly accurate data to make product decisions. GA does sampling after a certain threshold anyway. It requires an extensive privacy policy No. It does not. You should acknowledge it and talk about why you use GA and you can link to GA's privacy policy. Plenty of boilerplate text you can copy to cover this if you really care. It’s abused by referral spam that skews the data Maybe your experience if different but this is hardly a problem worth noting. Certainly not a GA specific issue. It’s a proprietary product so you need to put your trust in Google Yeah. Same with any service you use, but ok. It worsens the user experience due to the necessity for the annoying prompts Again, most 3rd-party services on your site mean you need to go this path. There are good and bad ways to do this. I'm sure this service is worth trying. I would also recommend looking at Simple Analytics: https://simpleanalytics.com/ https://simpleanalytics.com/

zepto 7y ago
If it weren’t controversial nobody would be discussing it.

saagarjha 7y ago

If this is your personal website, one option to consider is dropping the analytics completely. Do you really need to know exactly (and it’s not even that exact, since people block or can’t load your analytics) how many people viewed your blog posts? Anecdotally, if you put your email at the bottom of the page you’ll get a pretty good idea just from the number of people who send you one.

augusto-moura 7y ago
You are right, you don't need to know it in a small blog or site But metrics and statistics are the very foundation of science, and the graal of software engineering. I can't resist the temptation of knowing which browsers and the countries of the users of my website, or how many hacker news visitors come to it every other season, so many possibilities... sigh
- saagarjha 7y ago
  You really don’t need to know that. I mean, it’s often (but not always: see the perils of optimizing for “clicks”) nice if you could, but you are actively trading the privacy of your visitors for that information.
- josteink 7y ago
  And you can determine all that from regular web-server logs. No need to snitch on your visitors to big G.
smacktoward 7y ago
Or just do it the old fashioned way - have the server keep an access log, then use something like GoAccess (https://goaccess.io/ https://goaccess.io/) to produce reports from it. It’s not real-time reporting, but then you probably don’t need real-time reporting for your personal site anyway.
- saagarjha 7y ago
  Alas, I don’t control my server, but if I did I would say you might not even need this. If you’re using Google Analytics right now it’s probably better than that, though.

carlisle_ 7y ago

If you're going to tear down a competitor's product and shill your own you should probably be up front about it.

Clubber 7y ago
In the type of capitalism the US employs, transparency such as this often puts one at a competitive disadvantage. We have an entire industry dedicated to misleading consumers: advertising and marketing.
- stronglikedan 7y ago
  That industry has existed everywhere for most of civilization. Perhaps even the second oldest profession.
  - jayd16 7y ago
    Hmm is this a fair assessment? Seems like most consider modern advertising to originate in the late 1800s. At the very least you'd say there was an inflection point sometime after the printing press, no?
abhisuri97 7y ago
I think that if a blog shilling a company/product is hosted on said company's website, they're already sufficiently up-front about it.
- carlisle_ 7y ago
  I really don't think so, I've never heard of this company I didn't know what they sell. I had to poke around the website and read the comments here to realize. That's really the exact opposite of being up front.
  - SkyMarshal 7y ago
    I’ve never heard of Plausible either but the instant I browsed to the article I suspected they were a competitor. I skimmed the table of contents and saw the last item was recommending a product with the same name as the website, and my suspicion was confirmed. They’re perfectly up front and obvious about it, not hiding anything.

werds 7y ago

all of these alternatives which people are posting: simpleanalytics.com plausible.io are not free, which is the main reason people use Google Analytics

8ivek 7y ago

It looks like a nice product but GA is free!

seapunk 7y ago

We use Simple Analytics [https://simpleanalytics.com/ https://simpleanalytics.com/] as alternative to GA and it's also privacy-friendly. I saw Plausible appeared after Simple Analytics launched their product. I'm glad to see GA alternatives becoming popular.

Etheryte 7y ago

The correct proposition instead would be to stop analytics on your website, period. There's many sites that benefit greatly from the insight, but I'd argue they're a minority. Your personal blog doesn't need analytics. Let's be honest, for many people, analytics is just a way to feed their ego — my ramblings reached 100 people, so you could say I'm kind of a big deal. Google is, obviously, very well aware of this target market, and tries to feed back into this loop as well. It's not without reason you get weekly summaries and more into your inbox by default. The reality, of course, is that it's serving them while hooking you, much like social media notifications driving engagement etc.

tanderson92 7y ago
Analytics can absolutely be useful for your personal blog / website. Imagine you're an academic on the postdoctoral fellow / tenure track job market and you want to both numbers and see locations of where your hits are coming from, google analytics can help. For universities the ISP entry is often "X university" which makes things even clear than the broad Geo category of which city the hit comes from. This can be very informative in terms of what leads are likely to come up.
- Etheryte 7y ago
  What is the created value from that data extraction, though? That you know that the uni you applied to looked at your website? That's nice, but again, simply a way to reinforce your ego as far as I see — you get insurance that you're important enough to get through the first filter. But what actionable data does this interaction give you?
  - tanderson92 7y ago
    The academic job market can be unforgiving, and for those who also have industry leads/offers it can be helpful to know whether there may be future offers from academic institutions when deciding whether to commit elsewhere. Even without industry offers, it isn't like all academic job offers come in at the same time and you may be second pick at your preferred institution so it could take some time for a possible offer to come through. If you're still getting website hits from a place it's a fair bet you're still under consideration and you maybe don't want to commit elsewhere. It's not really about an ego boost, and in any case, egos can take a pretty major bruising during the very anxious weeks.

addedlovely 7y ago

Looks nice. Is the account multiuser with separation between sites? If it is, it's a service I'd consider throwing into my maintenance packages as an added value. Most clients don't need the complexity of Google Analytics and with GDPR the data is increasingly out of line with reality, given we load GA based on consent.

markosaric 7y ago
Thanks! At the moment, it's one user per account. However, you can create password-protected links to share the stats with your clients. Each link/password combination only gives access to the stats for a single site without having to create an account.

mark242 7y ago

Not sure who makes Plausible, but if the "live demo" is reflective of the actual product, it's sorely lacking. The reason that GA so popular is because of the free tier, sure, but also because GA 360, the really amazingly expensive version, has features that let you really get insights about your visitors. Here's a popular question these days: "when can I stop supporting IE 11?" With GA, the answer comes in a couple of clicks; revenue generated sliced by browser version. I don't even see the revenue generated section of Plausible, or really any way to associate any metadata with custom events. GA gives you this functionality without any coding. If you don't want to use GA, try something like Amplitude, which has a lot more data manipulation options than Plausible.

duiker101 7y ago

Slightly off-topic, but are there any analytics for open source projects? Even if they require the actual data to be public (which would actually be pretty nice)

Yizahi 7y ago

"Nobody was fired for using Google Analytics" (c) Is financial burden to change any part of your product, including GA, and 99.99% of all companies in the world don't give a damn about users of their products, so it will never happen unless some global power restructure happens and Google will fall out of grace. And even then most likely it will be simply replaced with even worse GA-2.

asdfasgasdgasdg 7y ago
I would say that 99.99% of businesses do give a damn about their customers. And particularly they care about their customers' preferences as demonstrated by their economic behavior. Very few customers care whether a business uses GA enough to change their purchasing decisions. Businesses therefore rightly view the decision as neutral with respect to customer preferences.
- Yizahi 7y ago
  That customer model is a mental construct of said companies. Just because customer does not proactively ask/request/mention something don't mean that he doesn't care about this. People implicitly assume that their personal information is not used for malicious purposes, despite that it is not true anymore for most of the companies. And in the era of monopolies/doupolies customers don't have vote with their wallet anymore, unless going full luddite and live in a cave.
  - asdfasgasdgasdg 7y ago
    So, a few objections. Most sites that use Google Analytics are not owned by monopolies or duopolies, so that aspect of your comment does not really apply. I also don't know if your claim r.e. malicious purposes is true. Probably depends on whose definition of malicious you're talking about. > That customer model is a mental construct of said companies. Well enough, but as I said, it's the one they care about. You seem to have a dualist view of customers where there are some things they care about that do affect economic behavior, and others they care about but which do not affect their economic behavior. I don't buy that model. I prefer the monist model where in competitive markets the customer expresses the totality of their preferences through economic behavior. I know it's incorrect, like all models, but I think it's least incorrect. I doubt there's more than a tiny fraction of customers that even knows the existence of Google Analytics. Of them, only a small fraction of those has any idea of its capabilities. And of those customers, only an even smaller fraction even checks whether a site is using it before deciding whether to shop. The notion that a large fraction of customers care about the use of GA just doesn't fit with these other observations and conjectures. Please correct me with data if you think I'm wrong. And anyway, whether you're right or me, the monist model encompasses everything companies have any incentive to care about, so it's the one that will be used to drive decisions. It's also the one that we can use to predict company behavior.

fourstar 7y ago

I've been relying on Cloudflare lately for analytics. Gives me a rough idea, and "good enough".

fitzn 7y ago
Oh, nice. I didn't think of this. But good idea. I'll look into their analytics.

jhabdas 7y ago

Those looking for more ethical alternatives to the Spyware you're using see https://switching.software https://switching.software.

hidiegomariani 7y ago

Yes! I've just removed GA from one of my pet projects (shameless plug https://golang.cafe https://golang.cafe) - And started using Cloudflare NS https://www.cloudflare.com/dns/ https://www.cloudflare.com/dns/. Now I get users/analytics reports at DNS level. No bloated JS trackers, no privacy policies and weird stuff and I can track visits even when adblockers are enabled. This would definitely be overestimated as bots would be counted in but it seems pretty accurate so far! It also has unique users count (although this is overestimated)

skrtskrt 7y ago
Is this somehow different than what you get from hosting on Cloudflare Dash? I have my GitHub pages DNS through Dash and the only additional thing I wish I had was referrer analytics. Nice site, too. Bookmarked :)
ec109685 7y ago
How does Cloudflare NS deal with caching resolvers?
- hidiegomariani 7y ago
  It tells you even percentage and absolute number of cached dns queries. Cloudflare is dope!
  - booi 7y ago
    I think he meant queries from caching nameservers that cloudflare does not control. I would argue the majority of queries would be fulfilled by these caching nameservers.
    - mschuster91 7y ago
      Setting a sufficiently low DNS TTL will take most caching servers out of the question.

frankzander 7y ago

Great if it's not written in some sort of exotic language and just in php. Don't get me wrong I'm not a fan of php but if it's written in php it would be run anywhere but not only on your private special configured VPS.

fitzn 7y ago

I really dislike the user experience of GA. I literally know 1% of the functionality it offers and I only _need_ 1% of what it offers. But I do like that it's free. Was planning to one day give https://simpleanalytics.com/ https://simpleanalytics.com/ a shot.

rchaud 7y ago
GA is complete overkill for hobby websites that get ~100s of visits/day. If you have a commercial website selling stuff, or conduct A/B testing, or have marketing channels funnelling traffic to the site, then you pretty much have to use something like GA or Adobe Analytics.
- munk-a 7y ago
  I'm actually of the exact opposite opinion - for the majority of websites just shoving GA on it and calling it a day is quite sufficient... It's only if your website really lives and dies by making sure users are hitting the important components and converting into paying customers that a more feature-full analytics tool may be valuable.

nkkollaw 7y ago

GA can't really be replaced easily. There is an army of web consultants ready to help you set up and track your marketing with GA, and just as many marketing consultants that can only work with GA. While it's nice that someone works on alternatives—although I don't really see anything wrong with GA—it's here to stay. Reminds me of Excel, people have been trying to replace Excel for 20 years now.

lharries 7y ago

Posthog.com is another solid option for privacy-focused analytics. They too have a self-hosted version

tanilama 7y ago

No I won't. It is free and fine.

CrankyBear 7y ago

"It's owned by Google." Who knew!?

geocrasher 7y ago

"Here are completely legit reasons to stop using Google Analytics." <gains credibility> <gains more credibility> <gets me thinking about switching to something else> "Try our product instead!" <closes tab in disgust>

throwaway894345 7y ago

I have a hobby blog that I'm trying to run for <$5/month. I run it on Github Pages because it's a static site and GH takes care of just about everything. The only thing I don't get is analytics or server logs, I'm planning to build that myself with standard AWS components. I considered other options, but I didn't want to use GA (for many of the reasons mentioned in the blog), other tools like Plausible were outside of my budget, and the open source tools looked like more hassle to self-host than reinventing the wheel myself: Browser (~3 lines of JS) -> API Gateway -> SQS Queue -> Lambda (ETLs queue into) -> Athena. I was originally just going to use Postgres, but RDS/Aurora are expensive and running Postgres in EC2 is going to be at least as much work (configuring SSH, process management, backups, monitoring, logging, image building, networking, etc). My custom plan is ~$3/month all-in provided I stay below ~1M requests per month, and even then it scales very cheaply. Also, this design is highly scalable, although I doubt I'll ever take advantage of it; it's mostly just icing on the cake. The main motivation is that these components are available on the free plan ("forever", not just the first 12 months) and/or the pricing model makes the charges negligible for my super-low-volume use case. Note that this doesn't give me pretty dashboards; the interface is SQL. Fortunately, there are other analysis tools that I have at my disposal which can plug in to SQL. Lastly, of course my $5 budget doesn't do justice to the actual value of my time; it's more of a fun challenge. If I really just wanted web analytics, I should shell out the $6/month for plausible or similar.

munk-a 7y ago
Your choice is, of course, your choice, but I'd strongly suggest GA for this use case. I understand and agree that Google is in fact evil and we should avoid feeding the beast, but a hobby website using GA is too minor to care about for any of the privacy reasons the author states and if it's fully static pages then ideally the performance will already be light enough that the bloat of GA isn't going to make a difference.
- saagarjha 7y ago
  For a light site, Google Analytics may be the majority of its “weight”. It’s not huge, but I’d like to think my readers came to my site for the content and not the analytics so it’s a bit ironic that the ratio doesn’t match that.

spking 7y ago

How is this different than Fathom? (https://usefathom.com/ https://usefathom.com/)

ksec 7y ago

Plausible, Fathom [1] and Simple Analytics [2] are very similar in features. While self hosting is not supported, plausible is Open Source [3] running on Elixir and Postgre. It is also the most affordable out of three, starting at $6 only. I am not sure why HN are so negative about this post, when two years ago everyone were cheering for GA alternatives. Although I do agree it needs to add "Pricing" in the Navigation section. [1] https://usefathom.com https://usefathom.com [2] https://simpleanalytics.com https://simpleanalytics.com [3] https://github.com/plausible-insights/plausible https://github.com/plausible-insights/plausible

vikramkr 7y ago
I think everyone is so negative on the post because the post is a sleazy ad in disguise. If it had opened with "these are the reasons that we are unsatisfied with analytics which led us to launch our own alternate service, plausible" or even just "why we made plausible.io" then we would know up front that it's an ad but maybe still a worthwhile read. This hides the fact that they want you to maybe try plausible to the last section and the last bullet of the table of contents. Its nothing about the product and everything about the underhanded advertising.
- animalgonzales 7y ago
  Where's the sleaze? GA does shady shit, Plausible has a competitor product and they're making the pitch on their company blog. What am I missing?
  - meowface 7y ago
    They used a clickbaity title and deeply buried the lede by disclosing that this is an advertisement for a competing (paid, non-self-hosted, proprietary) product only at the very bottom of a long list. I would bet 95% of readers did not realize this was an advertisement until getting to the bottom.
meowface 7y ago
>plausible is Open Source >self hosting is not supported Ok, then how do you prove it's open source?

varelaz 7y ago

If you're so concerned about GDPR, probably hotjar is a good choice. It's free for personal use and it's all EU based.

uk_programmer 7y ago

The first reason is about Google being evil. They may well be. However unless your alternative is as good, or better or has a unique selling point that GA doesn't have you will find people won't use it. Don't tell me about how your competitor is bad. Tell me what you offer in comparison to your competitor.

AndrewStephens 7y ago

Congratulations on getting your subtle advertising on the front page. I admire your restraint in only mentioning your product at the conclusion of a long article - nicely done! That said, you state what many have been been saying for years - GA is overkill for most sites and gives a stupid amount of information to Google. But sites are giving up their users information to any 3rd party analytics package, not just GA. Hosting your own analytics is the only ethical way to go, unless you really, really need the demographic data that GA provides (which you probably don't). Having passive feedback that people are actually reading your posts is nice but a simple hit-counter would probably do the job and relieve your readers of losing another little slice of their privacy. I'm going to take a leaf out of the poster's book and mention my own project in passing: https://sheep.horse/visitor_statistics.html https://sheep.horse/visitor_statistics.html

mathieupassenau 7y ago

I wrote a blogpost about webanalytics and authentication. https://www.mathieupassenaud.fr/webanalytics_enemy/ https://www.mathieupassenaud.fr/webanalytics_enemy/ Using "authorization code grant" is not as secure as we imagine with those kind of analytics

Ayesh 7y ago

Plausible was hovering less than 50 users on its own web site, and I wouldn't risk sending my visitors to this relatively new web service either. Analytics requires a lot of trust to not screw you up. It's a third party script that you add in pretty much every page of your web site. I'm still looking for a provider that I can tame with CSP rules, and comes with the most minimal things I need to know. A pixel tracker would have suited majority of us.

andrewzah 7y ago
You can self host your own analytics, like matomo. [0] [0]: https://matomo.org/ https://matomo.org/

hk__2 7y ago

Their own analytics dashboard is public: https://plausible.io/plausible.io https://plausible.io/plausible.io

twsted 7y ago
And it's really interesting: see the HN effect!

tyre 7y ago

What's the best server-side only, self-hosted analytics platform if I don't want to add any JS to the front-end? Running nginx here

lgl 7y ago
In my opinion there are no longer any really viable server side analytics/log processing that's equivalent to what you get with GA unless you want to either install some kind of server with a ton of features and dependencies or use a tool that will most likely also require the use of js. The amount of crawlers, botnet spam, hacking or scanning activity and other non-visitor related hits you get these days will require a lot of filtering, updating spamlists, blacklisting, etc and you'll probably end up spending more time tweaking your webserver and analytics setup than actually gathering any relevant information from said analytics. That said, the "old" log processing tools like AWStats, Analog, Webalizer, etc are still available although I'm not sure if they've been kept updated. I'm sure there is also a lot of more competition on self hosted tools that try to replicate what GA does but I'm not that familiar with any either.
- tyre 7y ago
  This is helpful, thank you. You mean to say that spambots don't respect robots.txt?? Good to think about. I'll check these out and see what they've done (if much) to mitigate that issue. I'd imagine that would need to be front and center, unless they're focused more on internal services.
slenk 7y ago
GoAccess - https://goaccess.io/ https://goaccess.io/

seanwilson 7y ago

What do people suggest if you have a website that sells something? Knowing where your traffic is coming from, if your new redesign helped or hindered users in finding content, and knowing which traffic sources result in the most sales sounds business critical to me. I've seen lots of situations where when we look into analytics, it becomes obvious users are having trouble finding content or don't know the content is there to be found (e.g. putting an important link behind a navigation menu was a bad idea). I feel people can overly focus on the more manipulative side of A/B test, but analytics is useful for improving your UX as well. Not everyone runs a personal blog without a care for monetisation or viewership either.

whoisjuan 7y ago
Hotjar, Fullstory, Crazyegg.
XCSme 7y ago
You can look over the product I'm building (self-hosted analytics): usertrack.net. It's not free though.

huxflux 7y ago

Stop using Google Analytics and pay for your project? Sorry. I'm not convinced by the logic.

MrCheese 7y ago

Is that Tailwind UI that you're using? First time I've seen that in the wild in that case!

paulcole 7y ago

For the average modern website, how much load time does shaving off 44kb save?

blauditore 7y ago

>Google, the world’s largest ad-tech company, [...] This is kind of snarky, especially in the light that the author is writing this post solely to sell something in competition with Google.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

ChrisArchitect 7y ago

everyone hating on this in the comments, yet it's getting upvoted. Silent support is a bit annoying. I'd also rather not be told what to do with these titles "Stop doing this, etc" sigh

ivrrimum 7y ago

I have this setup https://matomo.org/ https://matomo.org/ And when i have a new project, i just add the matomo script to it. It's pretty easy on the resources if you set it up right.

tobilg 7y ago

If you have access to an AWS account, you can host your own website statistics with very little costs. That’s why I built https://ownstats.cloud/ https://ownstats.cloud/ Would love to get some feedback.

andreyk 7y ago

As someone who still uses GA for multiple sites, can we actually discuss the claims of the article and not the broad idea of it? > " > These two tracking scripts combined add 45.7 KB of page weight to each and every page load." Google makes fantastic products that are available for free (with limits) because they make most of their money from ads. I may not like it, but gmail, Drive, YouTube are all great and I would prefer people who can't pay for such products have the free option. > "It’s a bloated script that affects your site speed" As others have said, no? Not with caching? Anyway my websites are probably bloated by all sorts of bigger things, I am no web dev and have had no time to optimize them overmuch, and the still work fine. So guilt tripping me about GA Analytics aint gonna work. > "It’s overkill for the majority of site owners" I like having the flexibility ; I seriously doubt this is a good pitch for any growing company or even project. > "It’s a liability considering GDPR, CCPA and other privacy regulations" Is it? It's not like Google is not addressing GDPR concerns (https://www.cookiebot.com/en/google-analytics-gdpr/ https://www.cookiebot.com/en/google-analytics-gdpr/) > "It uses cookies so you must obtain consent to store cookies" Okay, finally a good one -- nobody likes the cookie popup, so removing GA analytics would improve user experience. Then again, it's so common that people maybe are used to it? > "It’s blocked by many plugins and browsers so the data is not very accurate" 'There’s no definite answer on how many people block Google Analytics as that depends on the audience of your site, but for a tech audience, you shouldn’t be surprised to see 50% or more of the visitors blocking Google Analytics.' Really? I kind of doubt it.......... > "It requires an extensive privacy policy" Any analytics should have privacy disclosure, presumably. > "It’s abused by referral spam that skews the data" And other analytics aren't? > "It’s a proprietary product so you need to put your trust in Google" Fair, Open Source is preferable. > "It worsens the user experience due to the necessity for the annoying prompts" A repeat ----------- So yeah. Look, I am uncomfortable with big huge giant companies like Google ruling the earth. But I also have quite limited time and money, and already use gmail and Drive. So far Google has not done anything to seriously hurt my trust and I think their products are excellent. Most of these points seem weak to me, as someone already using GA analytics. Still, for someone building a new website, I could see this being enough to make the point. But, I think it would be far more effective if it was more concise and less easy to point out holes in the arguments.

tobiaslins 7y ago

I'm also working on an analytics & A/B testing tool (https://splitbee.io https://splitbee.io). The big difference is that it needs to pin unique users for A/B testing. It is a mix out of mixpanel & google analytics & optimizely!

vikramkr 7y ago

Why dont they just title this "why we made plausible.io?" Make it clear up front that this is content marketing. It would still be a worthwhile read but it wouldn't be nearly as sleazy feeling as disguising an ad as a blog post type thing. I think a lot of people on this forum would enjoy reading about how the founders approached the problem and what they see as the solution, either out of curiosity about new tech being developed or to evaluate the product by reading about what the founders were trying to fix with competing solutions. This just doesnt read as an honest marketing attempt.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

jamieweb 7y ago

For those interested, my own solution to this was to use AWStats with an anonymization script [1]. It provides high-level analytics such as unique visitors, referring sites and most viewed pages, without having to store any personal data such as IP addresses, and it's 100% server-side. IP addresses are compared against a Bloom filter in order to count unique visitors, without actually permanently storing them. [1] https://gitlab.com/jamieweb/web-server-log-anonymizer-bloom-filter/ https://gitlab.com/jamieweb/web-server-log-anonymizer-bloom-...

computator 7y ago

Can you be penalized for not running Google Analytics? If you have a website with no analytics or non-Google analytics, will your Google ranking be worse?

KerryJones 7y ago

These posts are the trash of the internet. Why? This post... 1 - Fails to explain until the end that they are a competitor writing a "bash" piece 2 - Gives conclusions based on incomplete data and comparisons (website speed is barely affected by 45kb these days, many websites have much bigger reductions on multi-mb loads) 3 - States giant scary click-baitish claim in bold and then in smaller print gives the real story. "It's a liability..." to "it is a potential liability" 4 - Gives a false sense of "many reasons" ("It's a liability" and "It uses cookies" are the same complaint) 5 - States opinions as facts ("It worsens the UX...") -- it might, but the vast majority of websites use cookies, and so this doesn't add anything that you wouldn't have to deal with anyway.

brandon272 7y ago

Some pricing feedback: The limitation of *K views per month only serves to introduce confusion into the buying process for me: - I don't know how many thousand views per month my website gets, to begin with. This is not something I have ever had to be concerned about but with this product, suddenly I need to keep an eye on this? - The first question that comes to mind is that what happens when I go over? I see you have a FAQ answer dedicated to this. (A lot of people won't bother to read the FAQ) - According to the FAQ, a one time "spike" is OK, but if it happens two months in a row someone will contact me? This seems murky and introduces uncertainty. And not sure I want to sign up for a $6/mo. product where a vendor is going to be contacting me to "discuss upgrade options". - That said, I don't know what "discuss upgrade options" means. Does this mean you'll contact me to force me to upgrade? Or is it just a suggestion? Is there a time frame in which I'd have to do it or will you cut off the service if a decision isn't made in a timely fashion? - Your highest plan allows 1M pageviews per month. What happens if I go over that? Is there a higher, unlisted plan that I would be asked to upgrade to? A lot of the above may seem silly but I'm trying to illustrate the kind of murkiness that might cause a user to think, "I don't know exactly what I'm signing up for" and move on to other solutions.

dyeje 7y ago

How does this compare to SimpleAnalytics?

andrethegiant 7y ago

Segment integration?

secfirstmd 7y ago

Or Matamo. Its free and I've found it to be excellent.

hkai 7y ago

I stopped reading after the words "surveillance capitalism".

lukaszkups 7y ago

Does using cloudflare counts in as well? I've been using cloudflare for some time now, because I've wanted to save some of my static website bandwidth & it offered https setup pretty easily. I've setup google analytics just to compare visitor statistics and this is what I've found over 1 month: GA unique visitors: ~350 Cloudflare unique visitors: ~2900 So the difference is pretty overwhelming - I assume that cloudflare count some bot traffic as well or something? Is it even a reliable source of stats (cloudflare)? If not, why?

G0ther 7y ago

Thanks but no thanks And stop using this type of advertisement to your products. I would rather stick to GA. And, you never pay for analytics on personal website.

shubidubi 7y ago

I liked it when you announce it's open source till I checked your Github page: > At the moment we don't provide support for easily self-hosting the code. Currently, the purpose of keeping the code open-source is to be transparent with the community about how we collect and process data. So basically you ask people to work for free on something only you can use? No thank you.