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We ditched Google Analytics
- softwaredoug 6y agoOn my personal blog, I just decided to go without any analytics. I feel like I'm writing for myself and to engage a close group of friends. Maybe make some new friends along the way. I don't want to blog for page views or retweets, it just feels like it creates a bad set of incentives. Ultimately the feeder bar of vanity metrics feels so draining. The important post that 5 people deeply appreciate is just as valuable as a shallow clickbait listicle post that 1000s of people scan through.
- nicbou 6y agoI haven't looked at personal website analytics for years. I left them out of my current blog redesign. Like you, I don't maintain this blog for the fame and glory. However, I depend on analytics for my monetised website. I depend on that website to make rent. I'd still like to find a less invasive solution.
- mikro2nd 6y agoThis! Exactly this! The moment you start worrying about which posts/pages people looked at is the very moment you start getting sucked into the vortex that's called "pandering to the crowd". The extreme end of that is "clickbait content". Down that road I wish not to go!
- amelius 6y agoYes, there are much better ways of getting user feedback, for example a comments section.
- exlurker 6y agoDisqus? Just joking. Any good alternatives?
- mikro2nd 6y ago/r/exlurker? (Only half joking!)
- kdheepak 6y agoI've seen a bunch of people just link to HN and reddit discussions of their posts. On my blog I am using utteranc.es, which let's people make comments using github issues. It does require making a github account though. Here's an example of some comments on a post: https://blog.kdheepak.com/writing-papers-with-markdown.html https://blog.kdheepak.com/writing-papers-with-markdown.html
- BrandoElFollito 6y agoOr simply an email or a contact form. The reality is that one usually does not have large discussion, only one to one exchanges (if any). Email is fine for that, you can always update the post if there aee interesting outcomes.
- dpcan 6y agoIs anyone using an open source statistics system that's as simple as simple analytics? Maybe even something that can be setup to run stats for multiple clients from our own VPS?
- tecleandor 6y agoA relatively simple log analyzer, the kind we used to use in before que Analytics craze is GoAccess: https://goaccess.io/ https://goaccess.io/ If you want something more complex, Analytics style, you could try Matomo (Used to be called Piwik): https://matomo.org/ https://matomo.org/
- bojanz 6y agoGoatCounter[1] was featured on HN at some point. Open source, written in Go. It has a "subsite" feature which I haven't played with. [1] https://www.goatcounter.com/ https://www.goatcounter.com/
- timgl 6y agoShameless plug, but PostHog is MIT licensed, open source product analytics [0]. You can use it for super simple pageview analytics and even give all of your clients their own team on one instance. If you want something more advanced, we're comparable in features to Amplitude or Mixpanel too, but more engineering focussed. [0] https://github.com/posthog/posthog https://github.com/posthog/posthog
- Hitton 6y agoThere is also https://plausible.io/ https://plausible.io/ I personally currently don't use any analytics, but they claim to be simple and lightweight so I keep an eye on them in case of future use.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- rkwz 6y agoFreshlytics - https://github.com/sheshbabu/freshlytics https://github.com/sheshbabu/freshlytics * Cookies are not used * Personally identifiable information (PII) is not collected * See the pageview in different dimensions like page urls, referrers, browsers etc * Supports multiple projects * Supports RBAC Screenshots - https://github.com/sheshbabu/freshlytics/blob/master/docs/screenshots.md https://github.com/sheshbabu/freshlytics/blob/master/docs/sc...
- kmfrk 6y agoHow private is using localStorage for ID persistence instead of cookies for Google Analytics - and in general? It's what I'm using, but obviously it takes an expert to figure out just how much of an improvement it is. Apparently Service Workers can also be used. https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection/analyticsjs/cookies-user-id https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection...
- nerdponx 6y agoSeems to me like LocalStorage in this case is just a way to get around people deleting/blocking cookies. What would be the legitimate use?
- dgb23 6y ago> What would be the legitimate use? Caching/storing GUI state and user configuration. You (the server) doesn't need to know about LocalStorage contents. You can read and write from it via JS without ever sending that data somewhere. It actually improves privacy if done this way, because then the user owns the data and you just act upon it. Unfortunately Apple thinks otherwise, they clear LocalStorage in Safari after a while by default.
- itsthisjustin 6y agoYeah we use this on our Chrome Extension Next Up to avoid sending data to our server. Keeps everything cached locally and lot less data in transit
- XCSme 6y agoSee my comment above, localStorage can not be shared between domains as cookies can. So it's a lot better for privacy. With localStorage you can only track multiple visits of a user on the same site, not across sites.
- rafBM 6y agolocalStorage is no different than cookies from the perspective of privacy laws. https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/290566/is-localstorage-under-the-cookie-law https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/2905...
- hayksaakian 6y agoif all you need is counting a number of users, then you can use cloudflare analytics
- cj 6y agoDoes Cloudflare have decent user permissions yet? Last I checked, it wasn't possible to grant permissions to (for example) a marketing employee who you don't also want permission to edit DNS records. Edit: I see "Role based account access" is a feature of their "Enterprise" / "request pricing" tier...
- steve76 6y agoYes. Analytics, Adsense, and DoubleClick for Publishers integrate for maximum ad revenue. Before replacing Google Analytics, it's better to create hundreds of apps and sites and start keeping your own stats on user context and intent.
- masonhensley 6y agoNice, idea for someone (I wish I had time)... "Good Housekeeping Seal" for Analytics - Self host analytics - Don't use google analytics - Don't use tracking pixels (FB, Reddit, etc) - etc "Good Housekeeping Seal" for Billing Practices (in same vein, a little off topic though) - Can cancel your subscription online - Sends reminders prior to charging card (dark pattern on some sites) - Open receipt API to scrape out historical spend data - started some thoughts here- https://github.com/HipSpec/invoice-data-api-specification https://github.com/HipSpec/invoice-data-api-specification - No sneaky trial => subscription without warning - etc ==== I think most of us here acknowledge that privacy or "how the sausage is made" generally doesn't sell to businesses & consumers. But I think there's some fertile ground between a self attestation (PCI style) and a $40-50k SOC Audit. There are a ton of incumbents that at this point could not strip out spyware from their application/data stacks even with 100 human years of engineering effort... could be a competitive advantage for smaller/newer organizations to leverage. Good Housekeeping reference: https://www.goodhousekeeping.com/institute/about-the-institute/a31680/good-housekeeping-seal-faqs/ https://www.goodhousekeeping.com/institute/about-the-institu... Thanks for sharing the article, SimpleAnalytics, Posthog & Fathom are steps in the right direction. Also shout out to Matomo/Piwik, one of the OG's in self hosted/ Google analytics alternatives.
- AdriaanvRossum 6y agoTogether with jivings I'm working on a ethical code of conduct [1]. Please add more if you want. Happy to make this a standard for websites. Maybe add a seal as well. [1] https://hackmd.io/EmPIHGhTRh6pDSJ1VEgkkA https://hackmd.io/EmPIHGhTRh6pDSJ1VEgkkA
- edraferi 6y agoLooks good, but needs additional specificity / testability. > No hidden costs What is a "hidden cost"? Sometimes pricing is complicated. For example, shipping and sales taxes vary based on the customer's location. > No making it difficult to cancel/unsubscribe from a plan Maybe: "An authenticated user must be able to review their past and upcoming charges within 2 clicks from the default view. This page must provide immediate options for cancelling/unsubscribing (2 additional clicks to allow for confirmation)." Or weaker: "Users must be able to cancel/unsubscribe by any mechanism that they can use to sign up / subscribe. For example, if users can purchase a subscription on the website, a they cannot be required to make a phone call to cancel that subscription" > Automated emails to not self generated mailing lists/social platforms I don't understand what this means. Are you trying to prevent the companies from using third-party advertising targeting? That seems like an unreasonable ask. It would prevent using Google/Facebook/Twitter for basic marketing tasks. > No spammy follow up emails This is not testable. It would be more valuable to identify quantitative best practices and publish those. e.g. "When a user cancels a subscription, do not sent them more than 1 marketing email per month asking them to re-subscribe" > Allow recipients to easily unsubscribe from mailing-list emails This should be covered by the "no making it difficult to cancel" clause.
- luxurytent 6y agoI was just in this place two days ago, wanting some basic analytics from nginx, but not wanting to add GA tracking to my site. I found: https://goaccess.io/ https://goaccess.io/ Had not heard about Simple Analytics before but I will check it out!
- raverbashing 6y agoSounds great! Though I think GA has a "more-private" mode (though it still requires cookies). Their product looks interesting, something like a collective inbox + Google Wave builtin > How to run analytics without a consent banner? It is simple; don't use cookies nor collect personal information. Again, please. Louder for the people in the back. Thanks
- beardbound 6y agoI have been in the process of moving all of my stuff off of Google services (while I have an excessive amount of free time during Shelter In Place. So I recently moved from Google Analytics to https://usefathom.com https://usefathom.com . I quite like it. I would like to see how many people read my stuff, but I value my privacy and would like to do the same for others. It's pretty good, and
- KingOfCoders 6y agoMy problem with usefathom is that their analytics hasn't been prooved in court or by a European GDPR data watchdog to be in the clear of not storing personal information. If you only want to ditch GA because you don't trust Google, then I'd also use usefathom. I think what they do is very clever, but we settled with SimpleAnalytics instead (not as sophisticated and less analytics, but determine unique visitors by referral is cleaner and enough for us).
- nicbou 6y agoI'd still prefer Fathom because the data isn't fed into Google's fine-tuned tracking machine. Even if it's not a perfect solution, it's likely better than Analytics in that regard
- JackWritesCode 6y agoFathom has been investing a lot of $ in legal / privacy consultants recently. Excited for the next steps :)
- honksillet 6y agoQuestion: If you don't use google analytics are you penalized in google SEO?
- markosaric 6y agoNo. Google employees have denied that on multiple occasions[1] [1]: https://plausible.io/blog/google-analytics-seo https://plausible.io/blog/google-analytics-seo
- rplnt 6y agoThe answer to "will using other analytics penalize you?" is "probably". Now let's rephrase the original question, "Will using other analytics penalize you more than using ones from Google?".
- JackWritesCode 6y agoAbsolutely not. Deep dive here: https://usefathom.com/blog/google-analytics-seo https://usefathom.com/blog/google-analytics-seo
- ken 6y agoCall me old-fashioned, but if developers really want to minimize their impact on visitors, I wonder why they shifted away from using plain old log files. In the screenshot of the dashboard, "screen size" is the only attribute I see which can't be derived from a web server request log entry. I was using Analog to analyze Apache logs back in the 1990's -- it's older than JS.
- nicbou 6y agoLogs are missing some information I occasionally need to make decisions: - Browser and screen resolution - Time on page - Tracking of on-page events
- dewey 6y agoBecause a lot of times things are hosted on services where you don't have access to raw log files (Netlify for example).
- bdefore 6y agoAnd in the Netlify example, they'll sell you analytics based on the logs (adblocker proof) for $9/month. For one case on a site I operate, the numbers are ~2x higher than GA.
- z3rgl1ng 6y agoYour GA is almost certainly misconfigured.
- wastedhours 6y agoThis was always the way back before GA really gained traction - a lot of the old school log monitoring analytics basically equated requests as hits (with only some slight filtering) and so the numbers were always inflated (I never normally got to 2x, normally to about 1.5x - but guess it depends on the implementation's filtering of bots, spam IPs etc... Edit: remember we were using AWStats). Was great being able to spin the traffic figures on our game review site for PRs who didn't understand web analytics at that time.
- pst 6y agoI ran for quite a while without any analytics after removing GA. I've now settled on Fathom for Kubestack. It was important to me to be mindful about the privacy of my visitors but at the same time I need some data to see if I'm on the right track. Fathom seemed like a good compromise.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- wgx 6y agoI put this line: This site collects no analytics and calls no third-party scripts On the footer of https://remotivo.com https://remotivo.com and I've already had a couple of people comment that they thought it was a nice touch. I just built this site/bot for a fun side-project, I don't care how many views it gets.
- hosanex 6y agoWhy don't you use mixpanel or something. You'll write the code so you won't have to use JavaScript snippets that do shady things with cookies etc.
- tarun_anand 6y agoLet me first of all congratulate you. And secondly throw my hat in the ring. We offer a commercial alternative to Google Analytics and have seen massive interest in this space. Please let us know if you are looking for alternatives.
- XCSme 6y agoI also made the switch two weeks ago and I don't miss anything. I even removed google-fonts from my site and host the .woff files myself, so I don't force my users to send requests to Google. I replaced GA with my own self-hosted analytics platform[0] and I plan to add a lot more privacy features to it. [0]: https://www.userTrack.net https://www.userTrack.net
- nwellnhof 6y agoYou can talk to the Google Analytics API directly and control exactly what is sent to Google's servers. This also allows to create custom identifiers for users or sessions, or to track no personally identifiable information at all. A good starting point is Minimal Analytics which also removes lots of unnecessary bloat: https://minimalanalytics.com/ https://minimalanalytics.com/
- XCSme 6y agoThat's cool! Isn't the client-side request to `www.google-analytics.com` enough for Google to track users between sessions and domains?
- Nextgrid 6y agoYes definitely. They collect the IP address and a browser fingerprint at the very least. I'm not sure if this is doable by proxying through the server, so only custom events (with an unrelated IP - the server's one) are sent.
- nwellnhof 6y agoGoogle Analytics never uses browser fingerprints. The default tracking scripts only use first-party cookies. If you call the GA API directly, you don't even need cookies or local storage. This will make some of the reports meaningless, of course. The user's IP address is obviously sent, but it can be truncated by setting an option.
- Nextgrid 6y ago> The user's IP address is obviously sent, but it can be truncated by setting an option. The IP address is inherently sent due to how the internet operates (unless you proxy GA calls through your server, which I'm not sure is even possible). The option to "truncate" the IP address just tells Google you don't want to store it for your analytics. It has no effect on whether Google still keeps it on their side for their own benefit.
- unnouinceput 6y agoBoth google analytics and google tag manager are blocked in NoScript for me. If your site is using them they're useless for me and my actions on your site. Also every single one of my clients are blocking them too. Part of talk with my clients is to also make them install NoScript + uBlock Origins.
- je42 6y agoTo remove google analytics, I will be implementing snow-plow. First PoC was quite good. Dashboards via BigQuery + Google Datastudio + Custom stuff.
- rado 6y agoMy personal blog also ditched GA and uses an alternative tool without cookies. Admittedly, it's harder for businesses whose management is steadily being replaced by analytics.