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Google analytics, privacy, and personal blog

stereobooster on June 17, 2019

UPD: I found modern alternatives for GA. See my post here https://stereobooster.com/posts/useful-modern-tools-for-static-websites/ I want to start...
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glennmen profile image
Glenn Carremans

I haven't tried it myself but I am really interested in Matomo (used to be Piwik), they are free if you host it yourself.

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stereobooster profile image
stereobooster

I wrote about this in article - the cheapest hosting I can think of is DIgitalOcean (I guess AWS will be cheaper but much more pain as well)

I guess cheapest would be to rent DigitalOcean server for 5$ month (e.g. 60$ a year)

So free = $60 year and I will need to maintain it myself (roll security patches etc)

There is github.com/usefathom/fathom as well.

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Keith Bremner

You might be able to use Matomo on AWS free tier for a year?

Yes, it’s more work but it’s also a learning opportunity.

With free of charge saas like google analytics, it has to be worth it for the provider so you or your visitors are the product.

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stereobooster profile image
stereobooster

With free of charge saas like google analytics, it has to be worth it for the provider so you or your visitors are the product.

Yes I know. I wonder if strict privacy settings in GA would help to make it tolerable. It doesn't send cookies (so they don't know which user is that even if I logged into Gmail). I store (with permission) unique identifier in local storage (not in cookies). You can't really identify user outside of the website and no private information is stored. And you can erase it at any point. I can send anonymous IP flag.

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Mike Rispoli

So I’ve been running keen.io alongside google for a site I manage and I much prefer keen for drilling into the data. It has an auto collector script that works much like ga would except you own all the data and it has ways to disable it in the case that users want to opt out. It has a generous free tier and is very inexpensive after that. For a site with about 1k monthly uniques it ran about $1.50 a month on average.

As another plus it’s highly customizable so you can capture interesting stats and behaviors and embed cool dataviz graphs where you want.

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stereobooster profile image
stereobooster • Edited

Interesting. Price is nice. I wonder if they are GDPR compliant (They are in the US as far as I can see).

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Jace • Edited

So here's my question. How do any analytics help you?
I mean, it can tell you how popular a page is and where your traffic is from sometimes, but outside of those two reasons, what is the purpose of using analytics?

If the thing you are looking for is just how popular your page is but it isn't driving any action, maybe consider removing them entirely.

About 2 years ago I had Google Analytics and I decided I'm done with Google and Facebook. So I moved to clicky. Then once I had that data, I realized, it was neat to see... but, it wasn't actionable.

There was literally nothing I gained from this information. It wasn't going to drive the content I write. So a few months ago I removed them entirely. Now the only "analytics" i have is from my algolia search, and those things are actionable. Searched terms and searched terms with no results. Now I have a list of pages to make/update.

I'd love to hear your feedback @stereobooster on this.

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stereobooster profile image
stereobooster

1.

I mean, it can tell you how popular a page is and where your traffic is from sometimes, but outside of those two reasons, what is the purpose of using analytics?

This is what I basically need (from my post):

I simply want to know a number of views of my posts, top source of traffic (search, social, referral), maybe region - nothing fancy.

2.

If the thing you are looking for is just how popular your page is but it isn't driving any action, maybe consider removing them entirely.

Knowing that my posts are viewed keeps me motivated as an author. This is the main reason.

Others would be:

  • using referral information I can find places where my posts being discussed
  • the popularity of content doesn't drive what I write but it may drive how I write it. I do experiments: I write in different styles, using different types of titles and see if people like one over another
  • pure curiosity: where are my visitors from
  • I can use analytics to report JS errors, so I know my readers have troubles
  • I wonder on which devices (screen sizes) my content is most viewed, so I can check how my website looks like for different people
  • I can check which kind of search queries brings me the most traffic. And compare it to my expectations (are those random queries or queries related to my content)
  • I can use analytics to report 404 errors
  • github.com/guess-js/guess or github.com/browserslist/browsersli...
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stereobooster profile image
stereobooster

This maybe an option netlify.com/products/analytics/

  • Pageviews & unique visitors
  • Bandwidth used
  • Top sources & pages
  • Top resources not found
  • GDPR compliant
  • No performance loss
  • Only $9/month per site
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nataliedeweerd profile image
𝐍𝐚𝐭𝐚𝐥𝐢𝐞 𝐝𝐞 𝐖𝐞𝐞𝐫𝐝

Apologies if I missed this in your article, but why not just use Google Analytics directly? Why are you using Ganalytics?

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stereobooster

Ganalytics is 312B

 
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stereobooster

Nice. I'm not really an expert in hosting providers. I wonder if any of those have servers in EU

 
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stereobooster

Thanks. You are very helpful. This remind me about blog.simpleanalytics.io/why-we-mov...