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What web analytics tools do you use?

Madza on December 23, 2020

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?

Gregory Witek • Dec 23 '20

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

Gary Bell • Dec 23 '20

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.

Tobias Nickel • Dec 23 '20

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.

Charanjit Chana • Dec 23 '20

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.

Juan Carlos Vásquez • Dec 24 '20

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

Tobias Nickel • Dec 25 '20

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

Mike • Dec 24 '20

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.

Madza • Jul 7 '21

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...

Mike • Jul 13 '21

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

Madza • Jul 15 '21

Thanks for this! 👍😉

Madza • Dec 28 '20

Awesome job 👌💯

Ben Sinclair • Dec 23 '20

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!

Pacharapol Withayasakpunt • Dec 23 '20

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

It comes with weekly email summary.

Charanjit Chana • Dec 23 '20

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

Pacharapol Withayasakpunt • Dec 24 '20

With a exception of MaxMind GeoLite2, it seems.

Jatin Rao • Dec 23 '20

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.