
Migrating Away from Google Analytics - ayoisaiah
https://freshman.tech/google-analytics-to-plausible/
======
longtimegoogler
"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."

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.

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.

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, [https://www.quora.com/How-does-Google-
make-money-from-Analyt...](https://www.quora.com/How-does-Google-make-money-
from-Analytics) .

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.

~~~
throwaway2048
If it data isn't used for targeting, how exactly do they deliver you
demographic information about your visitors?

it seems pretty obvious visitors are absolutely associated with profiles of
people.

~~~
longtimegoogler
Looks like the answer is here and in agreement with what I said above.

[https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/2799357?hl=en](https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/2799357?hl=en)

In short, demographics are from the third party doubleclick cookie and are
only available if you enable advertiser features.

Whether this enables Google to click a significant amount more of data on
these third party cookies is unclear to me. So my original claim could be
wrong. I would guess that a significant amount of the information would still
be collected via AdWords tagging for conversions or display Ads.

There are also Apple and Android device IDs for mobile. I don't know if those
are app specific or device specific and if they are only logged if advertiser
features are enabled.

So the story is a bit murkier than I claimed.

------
epoch_100
Props to the author for moving to an analytics tool that's more respectful to
users.

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.

And to be clear, it isn't a SaaS -- the only way to run Shynet is to self-host
it.

[0] [https://github.com/milesmcc/shynet](https://github.com/milesmcc/shynet)

~~~
odensc
I found your project when you commented on a similar HN post, and it's great.
I've switched all of my sites from Fathom to Shynet. Nice work :)

(Fathom was good but the self-hosted version is in disarray)

~~~
epoch_100
That’s great to hear! I’m glad it’s working well for you. And yeah, Shynet is
definitely in part a response to half-baked self-hostable tools like Fathom’s
offering.

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heliodor
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.

~~~
input_sh
The author says that he doesn't need a majority of the features Google
Analytics has:

> I also realised that I wasn’t even using up to 10% of the features provided
> by the service. For the most part, all I cared about is the number of
> visitors, page views, and where visitors are coming from (search engines,
> social media e.t.c.) so all the other metrics that Google collects are not
> important for me.

But I agree, not everyone shares that thought. I believe that Matomo is the
only real self-hosted alternative for more advanced analytics.

~~~
XCSme
I have been also building a more complex self-hosted alternative, similar to
Matomo: [https://usertrack.net](https://usertrack.net)

------
stblack
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.

What to do about Plausible and Fathom?
[https://github.com/StevenBlack/hosts/issues/1346](https://github.com/StevenBlack/hosts/issues/1346)

------
pancho111203
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.

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.

~~~
zepearl
Matomo (ex Piwik) does have an "importer" for search keywords (from GA and
Bing and maybe something else) but it's not free:
[https://plugins.matomo.org/SearchEngineKeywordsPerformance](https://plugins.matomo.org/SearchEngineKeywordsPerformance)

It uses the APIs of the search engines to download/import the search keywords.

------
laichzeit0
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.

------
escuier
I reccomend GoAccess [https://goaccess.io/](https://goaccess.io/) as Google
Analytics alternative

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.

~~~
joshyi
I agree, works really well for us. Above all, no javascript!

------
gentleman11
This article has its heart in the right place at least.

Author mentions privacy as a factor but does not state why they think their
new system is better.

> 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.

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

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

------
kerng
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.

~~~
nacs
Yep I did the same a few days ago and its working well so far. Many of the
same features and layout but without all the Google baggage.

Also with 1 or 2 line changes to the default config, you can allow it to get
around any adblock/privacy filters that may have their default JS blacklisted.

------
gentleman11
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

------
ss64
"I also realised that I wasn’t even using up to 10% of the features provided
by the service."

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.

~~~
loktarogar
My time is limited. I'd rather spend that time gluing together other bits of
functionality than reinventing each bit one by one, unless I have to

~~~
rovr138
I’ve deployed this in the past.

Analog[0], AWStat[1], W3Perl[2] are some that come to mind.

[0] -
[https://www.c-amie.co.uk/software/analog/](https://www.c-amie.co.uk/software/analog/)

[1] - [https://github.com/eldy/awstats](https://github.com/eldy/awstats)

[2] - [http://www.w3perl.com](http://www.w3perl.com)

------
butz
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.

------
bambam24
Wish there was free competitor

~~~
ghh
PostHog Analytics [1] is open source, and sofar a very nice alternative (or
complement) to Google Analytics.

It's more like Heap Analytics, in that it collects user clicks and other
events from your site (or app) and allows you to _retro-actively_ define
"actions" based on these events.

For instance, if you decide today to keep track of how many users click your
sign-up button on page X, PostHog can graph this metric for you for every
moment since you first installed it on your site.

You can combine actions into funnels, graph nearly everything, the GDPR
support is first-class, there's support for heatmaps, feature flags (rolling
out new features to just a percentage of your visitors), and user cohort
analysis.

[1] [https://posthog.com/](https://posthog.com/)

