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GA and AWStats are both awful products for a lot of people. For us, we check out Fathom dashboard daily to see referrers and popular content. And vitality (righ

GA and AWStats are both awful products for a lot of people. For us, we check out Fathom dashboard daily to see referrers and popular content. And vitality (right now we can see a ton of traffic coming from HN). When I used GA, I never checked it.

geerlingguy 6y ago
Fathom being so quick to load and simple to use, I glance at it here and there. I had given up on trying to find a good 'light' way to navigate Analytics.
sjwright 6y ago
I've looked at many reporting tools, most of them are probably great for corporate/enterprise stuff. I'm self-employed, so I have no boss or shareholders that need pretty reports with bar charts. In my case my site is deeply database driven and I can build engagement statistics directly from real data using complex SQL queries. And while there's only a few such 'reports' that I check regularly, most of them are temporally incongruous—I think that's how you'd describe it—in that they look at what happened in the past contextualised by what's known in the present. (E.g. tracking engagements from new/irregular users, while they were new/irregular users, but which subsequently became regular users.)
- JackWritesCode 6y ago
  Well that’s a different story then. It sounds like you measure things your own way, so I agree that analytics are pointless in your edge case. For us, we have generated a lot of revenue by measuring what works and what doesn’t. That’s why analytics are worth it for a lot of people.
zoomablemind 6y ago
> GA and AWStats are both awful products for a lot of people. Just wonder, what's awful about AWStats? Sure it's dated, and "analog" in a way that it's log-based, not JS. But it does not send the tracking to the third party, can be used offline.
- JackWritesCode 6y ago
  I don’t believe it’s compliant with various regulations. I haven’t looked in-depth

geerlingguy 6y ago

Fathom being so quick to load and simple to use, I glance at it here and there. I had given up on trying to find a good 'light' way to navigate Analytics.

sjwright 6y ago

I've looked at many reporting tools, most of them are probably great for corporate/enterprise stuff. I'm self-employed, so I have no boss or shareholders that need pretty reports with bar charts. In my case my site is deeply database driven and I can build engagement statistics directly from real data using complex SQL queries. And while there's only a few such 'reports' that I check regularly, most of them are temporally incongruous—I think that's how you'd describe it—in that they look at what happened in the past contextualised by what's known in the present. (E.g. tracking engagements from new/irregular users, while they were new/irregular users, but which subsequently became regular users.)

JackWritesCode 6y ago
Well that’s a different story then. It sounds like you measure things your own way, so I agree that analytics are pointless in your edge case. For us, we have generated a lot of revenue by measuring what works and what doesn’t. That’s why analytics are worth it for a lot of people.

zoomablemind 6y ago

> GA and AWStats are both awful products for a lot of people. Just wonder, what's awful about AWStats? Sure it's dated, and "analog" in a way that it's log-based, not JS. But it does not send the tracking to the third party, can be used offline.

JackWritesCode 6y ago
I don’t believe it’s compliant with various regulations. I haven’t looked in-depth