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If you decide to migrate off GA, there's very little reason to not use self-hosted analytics. The only case when you'd get better analytics from a _service_ is

If you decide to migrate off GA, there's very little reason to not use self-hosted analytics. The only case when you'd get better analytics from a _service_ is exactly a GA-like setup that can track people as they go from one website to another. That is, the real value of an analytics service is derived directly from its ability to invade people privacy, at scale. Granted, migrating to another service is usually simpler, but it offers NO insights into the traffic that you can't get from parsing server logs and in-page pingbacks. You do however get a 3rd party dependency and a subscription fee.

bryanrasmussen 6y ago
>The only case when you'd get better analytics from a _service_ is exactly a GA-like setup that can track people as they go from one website to another. I was once making a service that provided cross site widgets for companies to embed. Obviously it was beneficial to track people as they go from one website to another, but at that point it was beneficial to do it with our own service.
bttrfl 6y ago
Server logs only tell you about things that happen on your server. If you are using JavaScript it's likely there are plenty of events that might be valuable to you that never leave a trace in your logs. For example, if you validate forms with JS you might want to track form submissions and validation errors.
- huhtenberg 6y ago
  ... and in-page pingbacks
jedimastert 6y ago
> If you decide to migrate off GA, there's very little reason to not use self-hosted analytics. My personal domain[0] was taken by domain squatters (forgotten bill in debit card shuffle, bought up within seconds of expire) so for now I have to host on github.io. Thoughts on an analytics service? [0]: http://www.aarontag.com/ http://www.aarontag.com/
elondaits 6y ago
My reason is the server not being able to handle the traffic. We used Piwik but I couldn't trust it'd be able to handle big eventual spikes of traffic (which the site itself could, being static and on a CDN) or that it wouldn't slow the site down (if I remember correctly I had the option to call piwik asynchronously and not slow down the site, but at risk that it'd be less accurate if people closed the window / navigated to another page quickly.). Of course you can run your own analytics on AWS or similar and have no issues with handling traffic, but that means higher costs / difficulty in setting up and maintaining it.
lmkg 6y ago
> that can track people as they go from one website to another Note that even in Google Analytics, this requires extra set-up, has limitations, and tends to be pretty fragile in practice. GA identifies users by a first-party cookie and tracking cross-site visits requires decorating links with cookie values. If you're interested just in aggregate traffic from one of your sites to another, rather than something that requires full-path analysis (like marketing attribute), then you can get that from looking at referrers. This should be more-or-less equally available in GA and server logs.

bryanrasmussen 6y ago

>The only case when you'd get better analytics from a _service_ is exactly a GA-like setup that can track people as they go from one website to another. I was once making a service that provided cross site widgets for companies to embed. Obviously it was beneficial to track people as they go from one website to another, but at that point it was beneficial to do it with our own service.

bttrfl 6y ago

Server logs only tell you about things that happen on your server. If you are using JavaScript it's likely there are plenty of events that might be valuable to you that never leave a trace in your logs. For example, if you validate forms with JS you might want to track form submissions and validation errors.

huhtenberg 6y ago
... and in-page pingbacks

jedimastert 6y ago

> If you decide to migrate off GA, there's very little reason to not use self-hosted analytics. My personal domain[0] was taken by domain squatters (forgotten bill in debit card shuffle, bought up within seconds of expire) so for now I have to host on github.io. Thoughts on an analytics service? [0]: http://www.aarontag.com/ http://www.aarontag.com/

elondaits 6y ago

My reason is the server not being able to handle the traffic. We used Piwik but I couldn't trust it'd be able to handle big eventual spikes of traffic (which the site itself could, being static and on a CDN) or that it wouldn't slow the site down (if I remember correctly I had the option to call piwik asynchronously and not slow down the site, but at risk that it'd be less accurate if people closed the window / navigated to another page quickly.). Of course you can run your own analytics on AWS or similar and have no issues with handling traffic, but that means higher costs / difficulty in setting up and maintaining it.

lmkg 6y ago

> that can track people as they go from one website to another Note that even in Google Analytics, this requires extra set-up, has limitations, and tends to be pretty fragile in practice. GA identifies users by a first-party cookie and tracking cross-site visits requires decorating links with cookie values. If you're interested just in aggregate traffic from one of your sites to another, rather than something that requires full-path analysis (like marketing attribute), then you can get that from looking at referrers. This should be more-or-less equally available in GA and server logs.