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Firefox+NoScript+PiHole user here. Once the pages on your browser start rendering at twice the speed they normally render on other people's devices because you

Firefox+NoScript+PiHole user here. Once the pages on your browser start rendering at twice the speed they normally render on other people's devices because you block all the analytics and ads crap, you never look back. And even though I don't use any analytics on my websites (heck, some of them don't even run a line of JS), I still get plenty of valuable (and privacy-aware) insights about user experience. Web server logs are a source of user activity that has been almost forgotten. You can infer a lot of information (from what page a user came, to which page they navigated next etc.) from the logs alone. All you have is the IP address of a browser, which might as well be spoofed/proxied, but do you really need anything else than an ephemeral and loose user identifier if your goal is just to make sure that users spend time on your website? Why would we delegate such a simple task to a company that pollutes and slows down our web pages with their bloated analytics and isn't transparent with us about what they do with that data?

shenberg 6y ago
Bots. Spam ruins it for everyone. Cloudflare, for example, provide an analytics platform based off of logs, but it overreports visits by a huge amount for most cases because javascript is a good filter for most bots. Here's Cloudflare's page on why there is a discrepancy between their numbers and GA-type services: https://support.cloudflare.com/hc/en-us/articles/360037684111-Why-do-my-Cloudflare-traffic-numbers-look-different-than-other-services-Google-Compete-as-well-as-my-own-log-files- https://support.cloudflare.com/hc/en-us/articles/36003768411... And here's a blog post by a self-hosted-analytics provider who shows exact numbers from his personal blog: https://markosaric.com/cloudflare-analytics-review/ https://markosaric.com/cloudflare-analytics-review/ He has a stake in the matter, but it's also such a huge discrepancy that I'm guessing is hard to fake. Anecdotally, friends I have with small blogs mirror this experience.
- blacklight 6y ago
  Bot activities in web server logs isn't that hard to spot. They often don't use "regular" user agents, they usually only download a page's HTML without getting all the images and media, they often do a GET on /robots.txt before proceeding, they manifest unrealisticly short times between browsing a page and going to the next one, and they often come from known IP subnets. My simple log parsing heuristic can already remove 90% of the bot traffic from the statistics.
- account42 6y ago
  GA also underreports because people block it. Might not be relevant for most sites but if your audience is tech-related don't expect it to be irrelevant.

shenberg 6y ago

Bots. Spam ruins it for everyone. Cloudflare, for example, provide an analytics platform based off of logs, but it overreports visits by a huge amount for most cases because javascript is a good filter for most bots. Here's Cloudflare's page on why there is a discrepancy between their numbers and GA-type services: https://support.cloudflare.com/hc/en-us/articles/360037684111-Why-do-my-Cloudflare-traffic-numbers-look-different-than-other-services-Google-Compete-as-well-as-my-own-log-files- https://support.cloudflare.com/hc/en-us/articles/36003768411... And here's a blog post by a self-hosted-analytics provider who shows exact numbers from his personal blog: https://markosaric.com/cloudflare-analytics-review/ https://markosaric.com/cloudflare-analytics-review/ He has a stake in the matter, but it's also such a huge discrepancy that I'm guessing is hard to fake. Anecdotally, friends I have with small blogs mirror this experience.

blacklight 6y ago
Bot activities in web server logs isn't that hard to spot. They often don't use "regular" user agents, they usually only download a page's HTML without getting all the images and media, they often do a GET on /robots.txt before proceeding, they manifest unrealisticly short times between browsing a page and going to the next one, and they often come from known IP subnets. My simple log parsing heuristic can already remove 90% of the bot traffic from the statistics.
account42 6y ago
GA also underreports because people block it. Might not be relevant for most sites but if your audience is tech-related don't expect it to be irrelevant.