On 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.<p>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.
Nice, idea for someone (I wish I had time)...<p>"Good Housekeeping Seal" for Analytics<p>- Self host analytics<p>- Don't use google analytics<p>- Don't use tracking pixels (FB, Reddit, etc)<p>- etc<p>"Good Housekeeping Seal" for Billing Practices (in same vein, a little off topic though)<p>- Can cancel your subscription online<p>- Sends reminders prior to charging card (dark pattern on
some sites)<p>- Open receipt API to scrape out historical spend data - started some thoughts here- <a href="https://github.com/HipSpec/invoice-data-api-specification" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/HipSpec/invoice-data-api-specification</a><p>- No sneaky trial => subscription without warning<p>- etc<p>====<p>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.<p>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.<p>Good Housekeeping reference:
<a href="https://www.goodhousekeeping.com/institute/about-the-institute/a31680/good-housekeeping-seal-faqs/" rel="nofollow">https://www.goodhousekeeping.com/institute/about-the-institu...</a><p>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.
Call 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.<p>I was using Analog to analyze Apache logs back in the 1990's -- it's older than JS.
I 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.<p>[0]: <a href="https://www.userTrack.net" rel="nofollow">https://www.userTrack.net</a>
I put this line:<p><i>This site collects no analytics and calls no third-party scripts</i><p>On the footer of <a href="https://remotivo.com" rel="nofollow">https://remotivo.com</a> 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.
I 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 <a href="https://usefathom.com" rel="nofollow">https://usefathom.com</a> . 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
You 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:<p><a href="https://minimalanalytics.com/" rel="nofollow">https://minimalanalytics.com/</a>
Is 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?
I ran for quite a while without any analytics after removing GA. I've now settled on Fathom for Kubestack.<p>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.
How 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.<p>Apparently Service Workers can also be used.<p><a href="https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection/analyticsjs/cookies-user-id" rel="nofollow">https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection...</a>
Both 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.
I was just in this place two days ago, wanting some basic analytics from nginx, but not wanting to add GA tracking to my site.<p>I found: <a href="https://goaccess.io/" rel="nofollow">https://goaccess.io/</a><p>Had not heard about Simple Analytics before but I will check it out!
Let 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.<p>Please let us know if you are looking for alternatives.
My 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.
Sounds great! Though I think GA has a "more-private" mode (though it still requires cookies).<p>Their product looks interesting, something like a collective inbox + Google Wave builtin<p>> How to run analytics without a consent banner? It is simple; don't use cookies nor collect personal information.<p>Again, please. Louder for the people in the back. Thanks
Why 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.