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Madza
Madza Subscriber

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What web analytics tools do you use?

Web analytics is the measurement, collection, analysis, and reporting of web data to understand and optimize web usage.

Aside from Google Analytics, what tools are you using?

Top comments (24)

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gregorywitek profile image
Gregory Witek

I use Plausible plausible.io and there are a few reasons why I moved away from Google Analytics:

  • I try not to use too many services from one provider - I use DuckDuckGo for search, ProtonMail for email etc. I still rely on Google services, but just a couple
  • I avoid sending data to advertising companies - I'm not a fan of adtech industry and whether we want it or not, large portion of Google's revenue comes from publishing ads. And while sending my data there is one thing, I don't want to send my visitors' data there
  • it is a paid product built by a small, bootstrapped company - I want to support small companies that build good products and respect users' privacy, I believe internet needs more small players that specialize in some area instead of corporations building monopolies, and I often choose paid solution by small company over free product by big tech
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_garybell profile image
Gary Bell

I'm only using Google Analytics at the moment. The reason is fairly simple - it's free (to me). Others I've seen cost money, and I simply don't have the traffic volumes to justify the cost on top of my blog hosting.

This is something I want to look at in more depth next year. If I can lower my hosting costs then I can justify spending money on a platform for analytics to replace Google.

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bias profile image
Tobias Nickel

I recently removed google analytics from my blog. I did not want to add a cockie banner to my website. so I not use some local storrage. and do a separate http call, to post time, hourOfDay(local to the user), referrer, last page view time, and some more fields into a csv file. I will see, maybe I analyse some information via excel or so.

I also like to look at the google search console.

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cchana profile image
Charanjit Chana

I’ve done something similar and will phase Google Analytics over the Christmas break. I’m not interested in much of what they collect and the things I am interested in I can work out for myself... with a bit of effort.

Without thinking about it I’m actually writing a csv file too, just that it has a .txt extension! 😆

I found with PHP it was really easy and fast to parse and I recently implemented a very basic chart so I can visualise views over time. And I leave the PHP script to log the date and time.

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juancvasdisenho profile image
Juan Carlos Vásquez

Hi, is very interesting, do you have a tutorial or link to do it? I know some coding but nothing too advanced. Thanks

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bias profile image
Tobias Nickel

I was already working on an article, here it is: dev.to/bias/how-i-removed-google-a...

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mikenikles profile image
Mike

I developed my own and made it available for others to use too.

your-analytics.org

It's open source and I am going to focus on its development again starting in January.

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madza profile image
Madza

Is the service still around?
Used it for my portfolio and had couple of other projects in mind.. Loved it due to it's simplicity and clean UI...

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mikenikles profile image
Mike

Hey Madza, my apologies for the interruption with that! It is back up and running now 👍.

The domain expired and I considered to shut it down. However, you were not the only person who contacted me asking me to bring it back, so I decided to bring the project back to life.

I also made a decision to invest into it going forward - I did not expect there to be numerous people who rely on it.

If you have any feature requests or feedback in general, I'd love to hear it as it would help me prioritize tasks.

Thank you and again, I'm sorry for the interruption!

Mike

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madza profile image
Madza

Thanks for this! 👍😉

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madza profile image
Madza

Awesome job 👌💯

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moopet profile image
Ben Sinclair

I've used Piwik before (when it was called Piwik). It was alright.

For my job, I generally have to load things like Google Analytics, but that's not because it's my choice - it's what the client wants.

Depending on project, we get fed back information from everything from focus groups
to heatmaps, but I don't have any interaction with it myself.

The only analytics I've ever done on my own stuff is monitoring the server access logs. To be honest, I find most Google (Facebook, Twitter, etc.) cloud interfaces confusing, because they keep changing where all the options are or using the word "project" to mean 20 different things depending which page you're on.

For my own projects, I don't care beyond bandwidth limits. I don't have any interest in exploiting my users' data and don't tend to have anything exposed that gets more than a few users at a time anyway!

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patarapolw profile image
Pacharapol Withayasakpunt

Plausible Analytics, which is albeit privacy-focused, it is not self-hosted.

It comes with weekly email summary.

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cchana profile image
Charanjit Chana

Not sure if you were aware but you can self-host Plausible if you wanted to. Not for everyone but they’ve documented the process here: plausible.io/docs/self-hosting

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patarapolw profile image
Pacharapol Withayasakpunt

With a exception of MaxMind GeoLite2, it seems.

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jatinrao profile image
Jatin Rao

I am currently using Google Analytics, but thinking to get rid of Analytics by the end of the year and don't measure the value of blog posts based on vanity metrics.

I barely receive any traffic and looking at Analytics doesn't provide any value. Just need a little push to stop tracking my visitors.

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dailydevtips1 profile image
Chris Bongers

Currently, still Analytics, because a lot of ad companies require Google analytics to get the numbers from.

Considering switching to Plausible or Fathom, but at this point, I can't really justify the costs yet.

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yo profile image
Yoginth

I use Splitbee for taskord.com

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tobiaslins profile image
Tobias Lins

Thank you for recommending us! :)

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lucasalt profile image
LucasAlt

I've used Piwik in the past. Now it's called Matomo but I didn't try the new version 😅