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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 co
by 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 agoI 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 agoIf 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 agoI think "analytics" and "traffic stats" are different things.
- LunaSea 7y agoThey are not.
- snowwrestler 7y agoTraffic 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.