"Google Analytics is free to use (for up to 10 million hits per month), but it’s only because the company recoups the cost of running the service by using the aggregated data to track users for the purpose of showing personalised ads."<p>The above quote is a bit misleading. Google Analytics by default uses first party cookies, the data associated with which isn't used for targeting.<p>For users of Google Analytics who are using Google Advertising products they can also enable the use of the third party double click cookie for remarketing and other advertising targeting use cases. This can also be done without Analytics just using Adword tagging.<p>I strongly disagree with the premise of the quote that Google makes money off of Analytics by gathering data for targeting. Instead, the value proposition for Google is better described here, <a href="https://www.quora.com/How-does-Google-make-money-from-Analytics" rel="nofollow">https://www.quora.com/How-does-Google-make-money-from-Analyt...</a> .<p>In a nutshell, Google hopes to show advertisers the value of their advertising buys on Google by attributing conversions on their sites to the correct marketing channel.
Props to the author for moving to an analytics tool that's more respectful to users.<p>For anyone who is interested in doing the same, I maintain an open source (and self-hostable) analytics tool called Shynet [0] that works without cookies or requiring any JS.<p>And to be clear, it isn't a SaaS -- the only way to run Shynet is to self-host it.<p>[0] <a href="https://github.com/milesmcc/shynet" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/milesmcc/shynet</a>
The opposite of not using Google Analytics is NOT use these new minimalist analytics tools. I'm so sick of seeing this narrative! There are plenty of mature analytics tools that do a thorough job for a small amount of money. For the curious, I've been using Clicky.com. I don't see how using tools that give you only an iota of information makes any sense.
I've opened the following issue to get input about how woke hosts files should treat Plausible and Fathom. I'm interested to hear good takes, if you have any, on the subject of ethical tracking.<p>What to do about Plausible and Fathom? <a href="https://github.com/StevenBlack/hosts/issues/1346" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/StevenBlack/hosts/issues/1346</a>
I have been considering giving up Google Analytics for my websites too, but the thing that stops me is that GA integrates really well with Google search engine, providing detailed info about which keywords were used to find your site.<p>Do other analytics services also provide this feature? If so, I'm curious of how the manage to do it without being integrated with Google.
So glad to see any alternative to a Google product. It looks like we’re slowly moving to a world where it will be basically just Big Corps using Google products and then eventually even they will succumb under sheer weight of “why are you supporting Evil Corp?” It’s becoming uncool to use Google, and they deserve it.
I reccomend GoAccess <a href="https://goaccess.io/" rel="nofollow">https://goaccess.io/</a> as Google Analytics alternative<p>Not a service but a self-hosted server log analyzer and viewer, no javascript or any other page code necessary, plus it's fast and free.
This article has its heart in the right place at least.<p>Author mentions privacy as a factor but does not state why they think their new system is better.<p>> Unsurprisingly, Plausible’s reporting for page views was consistently about 30-40% higher presumably because ga is blocked by some clients. ga is gone for good now though.<p>What? Why is the higher number de-facto the accurate one? Maybe ga excludes and/or bots recognizes return visits better. More != more accurate, as the YouTube ad money scandals showed<p>I like simpleanalytics a lot but it can’t differentiate between one visitor viewing 3 pages and 3 visitors. Still, I appreciate their offering for visitor privacy
Just two weeks ago I moved to Matomo from Google Analytics- it works great, and it feels like a tiny little contribution to make the world a better place.
Curiously, matomo analytics, a more privacy friendly competitor, keeps getting blacklisted by Edge for distributing malware. It happens so often that matomo has a faq about it. I suspect this means our sites will not show up in search engines and you have to fill out annoying forms to get re listed. It’s very annoying to get punished for spending a day trying to track people less
"I also realised that I wasn’t even using up to 10% of the features provided by the service."<p>Most of these people could get everything they want from just analysing the webserver logs.
But I guess that isn't the modern way, a true web pro has just gotta load 12 frameworks to display a page of text.
For a paid product dashboard is a bit basic: long lists have no pagination and opens in modals; Linux is split into distros, while Windows and Mac are just single entry for each; no browser versions and no way to check what browsers are used on what operating system.