
An alternative to using Google Analytics on your website - markosaric
https://plausible.io/blog/remove-google-analytics
======
tachion
It sounds like a nice product, but sadly it's not exactly why GA is so popular
(being a 'nice' product, that is). It is popular, because it's free,
relatively easy to implement on any website, requires no self-hosting and
powerful, once running. I've checked your website for pricing, but not only
there's no word about free tiers, but there isn't even anything on the pricing
at all. So, when it comes to majority of GA users, it's not a competitive
solution.

~~~
lucideer
> _It is popular, because it 's free, relatively easy to implement on any
> website, requires no self-hosting and powerful, once running_

Tbh, I disagree. While a lot of the above is true, it's largely popular
because it's a recognisable brand, and because the majority of frontend devs
are already familiar with it and haven't felt the need to explore an
alternative (network effect).

While an alternative does really need to be free and easy to implement, it
also needs to address the above two hurdles, which is a tough ask.

~~~
londons_explore
Photoshop is the defacto-standard in image editing, yet clones which are free
and copy the photoshop UI are rapidly catching up for a segment of the
userbase, eg. photopea.com

If someone set up a Scroogle Analoytics which had a simple code snippet, was
free, and had near-identical looking dashboard, I'd use it.

~~~
jefftk
In general, you should be very careful about what third parties you allow on
your page because you're delegating to them the ability to do anything that
can be done from JS. I trust Google to take this seriously and not open me up
to XSS, but I would be much more skeptical about Scroogle Analoytics.

(Disclosure: I work for Google, and have run Google Analytics on my site since
before I joined)

~~~
Carpetsmoker
As someone who runs one of those 3rd-party analytics: the JS you add to your
site is small, readable, and can be downloaded and included from your own CDN.
Hell, you don't even need the script, you can just write your own (not very
hard actually). I took a look at Plausible a while ago, and I think the same
applies here as well.

With GA, I can do none of that; it's just a massive unreadable blob I can only
load from the GA servers. I just have to trust Google doesn't do anything I
don't want (including XSS, but also other issues). It's not even easy to
figure out what information _exactly_ it collects last time. It's very
untransparent and un-auditable and the website equivalent of loading binary
kernel blobs.

------
ksec
Plausible, Fathom [1] and Simple Analytics [2] are very similar in features.
While self hosting is not supported, plausible is Open Source [3] running on
Elixir and Postgre. It is also the most affordable out of three, starting at
$6 only.

I am not sure why HN are so negative about this post, when two years ago
everyone were cheering for GA alternatives.

Although I do agree it needs to add "Pricing" in the Navigation section.

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

[2] [https://simpleanalytics.com](https://simpleanalytics.com)

[3] [https://github.com/plausible-
insights/plausible](https://github.com/plausible-insights/plausible)

~~~
vikramkr
I think everyone is so negative on the post because the post is a sleazy ad in
disguise. If it had opened with "these are the reasons that we are unsatisfied
with analytics which led us to launch our own alternate service, plausible" or
even just "why we made plausible.io" then we would know up front that it's an
ad but maybe still a worthwhile read. This hides the fact that they want you
to maybe try plausible to the last section and the last bullet of the table of
contents. Its nothing about the product and everything about the underhanded
advertising.

~~~
animalgonzales
Where's the sleaze? GA does shady shit, Plausible has a competitor product and
they're making the pitch on their company blog. What am I missing?

~~~
meowface
They used a clickbaity title and deeply buried the lede by disclosing that
this is an advertisement for a competing (paid, non-self-hosted, proprietary)
product only at the very bottom of a long list. I would bet 95% of readers did
not realize this was an advertisement until getting to the bottom.

------
tmikaeld
Some open source alternatives:

\- [https://ackee.electerious.com/](https://ackee.electerious.com/) (Node.js
based)

\-
[https://github.com/zgoat/goatcounter](https://github.com/zgoat/goatcounter)
(Golang) (Commercial Licensed)

\- [https://snowplowanalytics.com](https://snowplowanalytics.com) (Core-ware)

\- [https://count.ly](https://count.ly) (Core-ware)

[https://www.visitor-analytics.io](https://www.visitor-analytics.io) is also a
great GDPR compliant alternative (Not open source).

~~~
owenshen24
Shout-out to GoatCounter which was both free and easy for me to set up for my
blog.

~~~
bewuethr
Another happy GoatCounter user here!

------
brandon272
Some pricing feedback:

The limitation of *K views per month only serves to introduce confusion into
the buying process for me:

\- I don't know how many thousand views per month my website gets, to begin
with. This is not something I have ever had to be concerned about but with
this product, suddenly I need to keep an eye on this?

\- The first question that comes to mind is that what happens when I go over?
I see you have a FAQ answer dedicated to this. (A lot of people won't bother
to read the FAQ)

\- According to the FAQ, a one time "spike" is OK, but if it happens two
months in a row someone will contact me? This seems murky and introduces
uncertainty. And not sure I want to sign up for a $6/mo. product where a
vendor is going to be contacting me to "discuss upgrade options".

\- That said, I don't know what "discuss upgrade options" means. Does this
mean you'll contact me to force me to upgrade? Or is it just a suggestion? Is
there a time frame in which I'd have to do it or will you cut off the service
if a decision isn't made in a timely fashion?

\- Your highest plan allows 1M pageviews per month. What happens if I go over
that? Is there a higher, unlisted plan that I would be asked to upgrade to?

A lot of the above may seem silly but I'm trying to illustrate the kind of
murkiness that might cause a user to think, "I don't know exactly what I'm
signing up for" and move on to other solutions.

------
throwaway894345
I have a hobby blog that I'm trying to run for <$5/month. I run it on Github
Pages because it's a static site and GH takes care of just about everything.
The only thing I don't get is analytics or server logs, I'm planning to build
that myself with standard AWS components. I considered other options, but I
didn't want to use GA (for many of the reasons mentioned in the blog), other
tools like Plausible were outside of my budget, and the open source tools
looked like more hassle to self-host than reinventing the wheel myself:

Browser (~3 lines of JS) -> API Gateway -> SQS Queue -> Lambda (ETLs queue
into) -> Athena.

I was originally just going to use Postgres, but RDS/Aurora are expensive and
running Postgres in EC2 is going to be at least as much work (configuring SSH,
process management, backups, monitoring, logging, image building, networking,
etc).

My custom plan is ~$3/month all-in provided I stay below ~1M requests per
month, and even then it scales very cheaply. Also, this design is highly
scalable, although I doubt I'll ever take advantage of it; it's mostly just
icing on the cake. The main motivation is that these components are available
on the free plan ("forever", not just the first 12 months) and/or the pricing
model makes the charges negligible for my super-low-volume use case.

Note that this doesn't give me pretty dashboards; the interface is SQL.
Fortunately, there are other analysis tools that I have at my disposal which
can plug in to SQL.

Lastly, of course my $5 budget doesn't do justice to the actual value of my
time; it's more of a fun challenge. If I really just wanted web analytics, I
should shell out the $6/month for plausible or similar.

~~~
munk-a
Your choice is, of course, your choice, but I'd strongly suggest GA for this
use case. I understand and agree that Google is in fact evil and we should
avoid feeding the beast, but a hobby website using GA is too minor to care
about for any of the privacy reasons the author states and if it's fully
static pages then ideally the performance will already be light enough that
the bloat of GA isn't going to make a difference.

~~~
maple3142
I have a blog hosted on GitHub pages, and I only want to know what pages are
viewed the most. Before using GA, I have considered multiple alternative. For
self-hosted alternatives, I don't bother to use it because I don't want to
maintain a server just for my blog. As for other paid hosted alternative, I
avoid them because I want it to be as cheap as possible. So I eventually
choose GA, but in a different fashion, because I do care about its bloat. I
simply write a short JavaScript using Measurement Protocol[1] to only send
pageview to GA, which works very well for me.

[1]:
[https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection...](https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection/protocol/v1)

~~~
bewuethr
I was in the same situation and ended up using GoatCounter (see one of the top
level comments in this thread).

------
hidiegomariani
Yes! I've just removed GA from one of my pet projects (shameless plug
[https://golang.cafe](https://golang.cafe)) - And started using Cloudflare NS
[https://www.cloudflare.com/dns/](https://www.cloudflare.com/dns/). Now I get
users/analytics reports at DNS level. No bloated JS trackers, no privacy
policies and weird stuff and I can track visits even when adblockers are
enabled. This would definitely be overestimated as bots would be counted in
but it seems pretty accurate so far! It also has unique users count (although
this is overestimated)

~~~
slenk
I assume you mean you are running the whole site through the cloudflare proxy,
not just DNS. You cannot get that advanced of DNS metrics by just using them
for DNS.

~~~
hidiegomariani
I use cloudflare as nameserver that effectively takes over all DNS queries for
my domain

~~~
slenk
I get that, but you don't get more information than number of DNS queries -
nothing about users

------
vikramkr
Why dont they just title this "why we made plausible.io?" Make it clear up
front that this is content marketing. It would still be a worthwhile read but
it wouldn't be nearly as sleazy feeling as disguising an ad as a blog post
type thing. I think a lot of people on this forum would enjoy reading about
how the founders approached the problem and what they see as the solution,
either out of curiosity about new tech being developed or to evaluate the
product by reading about what the founders were trying to fix with competing
solutions. This just doesnt read as an honest marketing attempt.

------
carlisle_
If you're going to tear down a competitor's product and shill your own you
should probably be up front about it.

~~~
abhisuri97
I think that if a blog shilling a company/product is hosted on said company's
website, they're already sufficiently up-front about it.

~~~
carlisle_
I really don't think so, I've never heard of this company I didn't know what
they sell. I had to poke around the website and read the comments here to
realize. That's really the exact opposite of being up front.

~~~
SkyMarshal
I’ve never heard of Plausible either but the instant I browsed to the article
I suspected they were a competitor. I skimmed the table of contents and saw
the last item was recommending a product with the same name as the website,
and my suspicion was confirmed. They’re perfectly up front and obvious about
it, not hiding anything.

~~~
carlisle_
>They’re perfectly up front and obvious about it, not hiding anything.

Wtf, this is the opposite of "up front." You had to poke around and figure it
out yourself based on a suspicion. Up front means that they just tell you, no
figuring out required.

~~~
SkyMarshal
I didn't poke around. I knew by the time I finished reading the Table of
Contents, before I even got to the content.

Even if they had said in their very first sentence of the content "Disclaimer:
We are a competitor to Google Analytics", I would have already known before
that.

It's blatantly obvious, they didn't need to spoon feed me. This isn't some
submarine article.

[http://paulgraham.com/submarine.html](http://paulgraham.com/submarine.html)

~~~
carlisle_
Your comment reminds me of this:
[https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2018/04/28/meta/](https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2018/04/28/meta/)

>"I am THE ONE. You only need to know me. I am better than all of you."

~~~
SkyMarshal
All the examples given in that article are people belittling complex
programming tasks. But this was just a simple a reading comprehension and
logical deduction task, not even remotely in the same league.

But maybe to you this was a similarly difficult task, so I apologize if I was
being insulting by belittling it. Sorry!

~~~
carlisle_
Wow what a pretentious person you are.

------
dagenix
> These two tracking scripts combined add 45.7 KB of page weight to each and
> every page load.

Which is only true is there is no caching and I highly doubt that these files
are configured not to be cached after the first load

~~~
lmkg
The Google Analytics script itself, analytics.js, is cachable and cached.

By design, Google Tag Manager and gtag should not be cached. The behavior of
those scripts can be configured from wizard interfaces, and there is an
expectation that published changes take effect immediately.

Also, all of these scripts are deeply and thoroughly asynchronous. They are
designed not to impact site speed. Not to say that they can't or won't (I've
seen GTM do horrendous things when used improperly), but I would trust an
actual timing metric over a file size metric.

------
addcninblue
It seems like plausible is a GA competitor (and I didn't see disclaimers, but
could have missed them). It seems very clean and well thought though!

------
shripadk
The biggest drawback to not having Google Analytics on your website is if you
choose to run Google Ads for your site and you have to retarget/remarket on
Google properties. Without Google Analytics you are out of luck as you can
enable remarketing only in Google Analytics (and you would need Analytics
linked to Google Ads). If you have a personal website or a business that grows
organically without needing to use Advertising then you can go ahead with any
analytics provider of your choice. But the value add provided by using Google
Analytics far outweighs other negatives from a business point of view.

~~~
chadlavi
don't run google ads either

~~~
shripadk
That is not an option if you are a profit driven enterprise. There is no
alternative that is as good/optimized as Google Ads is. You are literally
bidding on search intent.

~~~
dhimes
I find that for information search intent is a poor pre-qualifier for sales
leads.

~~~
shripadk
Evidence says otherwise. Hard data shows that conversions happen the most
through these advertising networks. Can't deny the obvious. Unless you want us
all to go back to the pre-Internet era where we cold called clients and
vendors with a hope of getting leads. We have technology for a reason. Not all
tech is bad. Not all advertising is bad either. It is the intent that matters.

~~~
dhimes
Perhaps I wasn't clear.

 _Information_ search. The last time you looked up how to do something, for
example, you bought a product off of a Google ad?

What do you define as a "conversion?" I specifically said "sales." People in
the ad biz want to define "conversion" as something else- but those of us
paying for the ads want to make a sale. If somebody (or a bot) who has _no
intention of buying_ clicks on the ad it's a mistake for both of us. Yet with
Google anyway, any attempt I make to keep people from mis-clicking (by putting
a price in the ad, for example, to indicate up front that if you're looking
for free this is not your link) earns me a penalty by reducing something
deceptively labeled as my "quality score."

I would love to see the numbers you are referring to, though. Maybe something
would occur to me to help me see how to navigate the mess.

------
geocrasher
"Here are completely legit reasons to stop using Google Analytics." <gains
credibility> <gains more credibility> <gets me thinking about switching to
something else>

"Try our product instead!"

<closes tab in disgust>

------
mark242
Not sure who makes Plausible, but if the "live demo" is reflective of the
actual product, it's sorely lacking. The reason that GA so popular is because
of the free tier, sure, but also because GA 360, the really amazingly
expensive version, has features that let you really get insights about your
visitors.

Here's a popular question these days: "when can I stop supporting IE 11?" With
GA, the answer comes in a couple of clicks; revenue generated sliced by
browser version. I don't even see the revenue generated section of Plausible,
or really any way to associate any metadata with custom events. GA gives you
this functionality without any coding.

If you don't want to use GA, try something like Amplitude, which has a lot
more data manipulation options than Plausible.

------
seanwilson
What do people suggest if you have a website that sells something?

Knowing where your traffic is coming from, if your new redesign helped or
hindered users in finding content, and knowing which traffic sources result in
the most sales sounds business critical to me.

I've seen lots of situations where when we look into analytics, it becomes
obvious users are having trouble finding content or don't know the content is
there to be found (e.g. putting an important link behind a navigation menu was
a bad idea).

I feel people can overly focus on the more manipulative side of A/B test, but
analytics is useful for improving your UX as well. Not everyone runs a
personal blog without a care for monetisation or viewership either.

~~~
XCSme
You can look over the product I'm building (self-hosted analytics):
usertrack.net. It's not free though.

------
seapunk
We use Simple Analytics
[[https://simpleanalytics.com/](https://simpleanalytics.com/)] as alternative
to GA and it's also privacy-friendly.

I saw Plausible appeared after Simple Analytics launched their product. I'm
glad to see GA alternatives becoming popular.

------
lukaszkups
Does using cloudflare counts in as well? I've been using cloudflare for some
time now, because I've wanted to save some of my static website bandwidth & it
offered https setup pretty easily. I've setup google analytics just to compare
visitor statistics and this is what I've found over 1 month:

GA unique visitors: ~350 Cloudflare unique visitors: ~2900

So the difference is pretty overwhelming - I assume that cloudflare count some
bot traffic as well or something?

Is it even a reliable source of stats (cloudflare)? If not, why?

------
dabei
Is this an ad?

~~~
smileysteve
Yes

> Give Plausible Analytics a try Plausible Analytics is built with simplicity,
> speed and privacy in mind. We’ve used Google Analytics for years and
> understand its pitfalls

------
saagarjha
If this is your personal website, one option to consider is dropping the
analytics completely. Do you really need to know exactly (and it’s not even
that exact, since people block or can’t load your analytics) how many people
viewed your blog posts? Anecdotally, if you put your email at the bottom of
the page you’ll get a pretty good idea just from the number of people who send
you one.

~~~
rchaud
> Anecdotally, if you put your email at the bottom of the page you’ll get a
> pretty good idea just from the number of people who send you one.

You can't be serious. Who in this day and age reads an article and thinks
"Hmm, that was useful, I'll send the author a note of thanks"?

This might have been the case in 1995 when there were only a few websites
around, and Internet use was considered leisure time and not part and parcel
of everyday life.

~~~
coldpie
> Who in this day and age reads an article and thinks "Hmm, that was useful,
> I'll send the author a note of thanks"?

I do. Maybe you should, too?

~~~
jefftk
For what it's worth I find it minorly annoying when people send me emails
about my posts. I'm happy for people to comment on them, but typically an
email is an invitation to have a private discussion and I'd much rather talk
publicly ([https://www.jefftk.com/p/comment-dont-
message](https://www.jefftk.com/p/comment-dont-message))

~~~
coldpie
You may get more comments/emails than I do. I think I've gotten 3 worthwhile
comments and 2 emails in the 8 years my blog has been active. I actually
turned comments off, because I was getting thousands of spam daily, and that
seems like a waste of everyone's time.

~~~
jefftk
I host my comments externally. For example,
[https://www.jefftk.com/p/mosh](https://www.jefftk.com/p/mosh) is currently on
the HN frontpage as
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22810589](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22810589),
and I think of that like my comment section. I have my blog pull in the
comments from there:
[https://www.jefftk.com/p/mosh#hn-22811119](https://www.jefftk.com/p/mosh#hn-22811119)

I also pull comments from LessWrong and Facebook, though the FB comment
integration is pretty temperamental.

~~~
saagarjha
Is there a way to comment on your post if it's not been posted to Hacker
News/Facebook/LessWrong?

~~~
jefftk
I post everything to FB and LW. If you want to comment on HN and you think
it's a post that's relevant here you could submit it?

~~~
saagarjha
I don't submit things to Hacker News :(

------
AndrewStephens
Congratulations on getting your subtle advertising on the front page. I admire
your restraint in only mentioning your product at the conclusion of a long
article - nicely done!

That said, you state what many have been been saying for years - GA is
overkill for most sites and gives a stupid amount of information to Google.
But sites are giving up their users information to any 3rd party analytics
package, not just GA.

Hosting your own analytics is the only ethical way to go, unless you really,
really need the demographic data that GA provides (which you probably don't).

Having passive feedback that people are actually reading your posts is nice
but a simple hit-counter would probably do the job and relieve your readers of
losing another little slice of their privacy.

I'm going to take a leaf out of the poster's book and mention my own project
in passing:
[https://sheep.horse/visitor_statistics.html](https://sheep.horse/visitor_statistics.html)

------
dandare
The million-dollar question: will removing GA hurt my search raanking?

~~~
rchaud
No. Hacker News does not use GA. Yet it ranks at the top for many searches.

~~~
saagarjha
Hacker News also happens to have a monopoly on certain search terms ;)

------
eli
Google Analytics data isn’t tied to ad targeting. Google doesn’t profile you
based on data from sites you visit with GA.

~~~
zepto
According to google, it is:

 _“Google uses the information shared by sites and apps to deliver our
services, maintain and improve them, develop new services, measure the
effectiveness of advertising, protect against fraud and abuse, and personalize
content and ads you see on Google and on our partners’ sites and apps”._

~~~
lmkg
Disclosure: Google Analytics consultant. Not a Google employee, but my bread
is very clearly buttered on one side here.

The article's use of that verbiage is deceptive. I think it's not actually a
lie, but it's misleading.

When you use the Google Analytics product, Google is a _Processor_ under GDPR
and a _Service Provider_ under CCPA. They are contractually bound not to
process that data beyond providing the service to you, which is dashboards. It
is illegal for them to dip into this data for their own purposes without
additional authorization from the customer. (Note that in contrast, when you
include a Facebook share button, Facebook is a Joint Controller and not a
Processor.)

Sharing Google Analytics data with Google is _possible_ but _optional_. It's
fairly easy to do and encouraged (it enables certain features), but those
checkboxes have big legal terms next to them that tends to give people pause.

In particular, the Advertising Features setting allows Google to make a
connection between Google Analytics data and Google Ads or DoubleClick data.

~~~
ec109685
This is a really good point. It's very disingenuous of the parent article to
not mention that. Google being a _Processor_ of data removes their ability to
use this data for targeting and profiling.

~~~
megous
It may remove legal basis for using the data, but it certainly doesn't remove
their abilities.

~~~
eli
The implication here being Google might be conducting a massive illegal
conspiracy to mine data they don’t have rights to use? I do not buy it.

~~~
ec109685
Especially given the multi-billion dollar fine if they were caught.

~~~
zepto
I agree they probably aren’t doing it, but there is almost zero chance of a
multi-billion dollar fine.

They’d just explain it away as an error and be given a few million dollar slap
on the wrist.

It would be very easy for Google to make a plain language public statement
about this and clear things up, the way Apple goes about their privacy/data
handling.

It’s not a good sign that they choose not to.

------
Etheryte
The correct proposition instead would be to stop analytics on your website,
period. There's many sites that benefit greatly from the insight, but I'd
argue they're a minority. Your personal blog doesn't need analytics. Let's be
honest, for many people, analytics is just a way to feed their ego — my
ramblings reached 100 people, so you could say I'm kind of a big deal. Google
is, obviously, very well aware of this target market, and tries to feed back
into this loop as well. It's not without reason you get weekly summaries and
more into your inbox by default. The reality, of course, is that it's serving
them while hooking you, much like social media notifications driving
engagement etc.

~~~
nsgi
With any website it's important to know how many visitors it is receiving. In
the context of a blog knowing you're getting a lot of traffic can motivate you
to publish more content and knowing more about your visitors can also feed
into what sort of content you publish. You could look at your server logs, of
course, but analytics is easier to set up and gives you higher quality data
than something like AWStats. Since Google lets you opt out of sharing your
data with them I don't see much argument against using it.

~~~
fsloth
How does embedded script provide better data? You mean if the page is
delivered from network cache you still get analytics or something else?

~~~
nsgi
By filtering out bots and giving you the number of visits rather than just
pageviews, and also giving you data on things like screen resolution and time
on page that can only be retrieved in javascript.

------
Ayesh
Plausible was hovering less than 50 users on its own web site, and I wouldn't
risk sending my visitors to this relatively new web service either.

Analytics requires a lot of trust to not screw you up. It's a third party
script that you add in pretty much every page of your web site. I'm still
looking for a provider that I can tame with CSP rules, and comes with the most
minimal things I need to know. A pixel tracker would have suited majority of
us.

~~~
andrewzah
You can self host your own analytics, like matomo. [0]

[0]: [https://matomo.org/](https://matomo.org/)

------
Yizahi
"Nobody was fired for using Google Analytics" (c) Is financial burden to
change any part of your product, including GA, and 99.99% of all companies in
the world don't give a damn about users of their products, so it will never
happen unless some global power restructure happens and Google will fall out
of grace. And even then most likely it will be simply replaced with even worse
GA-2.

~~~
asdfasgasdgasdg
I would say that 99.99% of businesses _do_ give a damn about their customers.
And particularly they care about their customers' preferences as demonstrated
by their economic behavior. Very few customers care whether a business uses GA
enough to change their purchasing decisions. Businesses therefore rightly view
the decision as neutral with respect to customer preferences.

~~~
Yizahi
That customer model is a mental construct of said companies. Just because
customer does not proactively ask/request/mention something don't mean that he
doesn't care about this. People implicitly assume that their personal
information is not used for malicious purposes, despite that it is not true
anymore for most of the companies. And in the era of monopolies/doupolies
customers don't have vote with their wallet anymore, unless going full luddite
and live in a cave.

~~~
asdfasgasdgasdg
So, a few objections. Most sites that use Google Analytics are not owned by
monopolies or duopolies, so that aspect of your comment does not really apply.
I also don't know if your claim r.e. malicious purposes is true. Probably
depends on whose definition of malicious you're talking about.

> That customer model is a mental construct of said companies.

Well enough, but as I said, it's the one they care about. You seem to have a
dualist view of customers where there are some things they care about that do
affect economic behavior, and others they care about but which do not affect
their economic behavior. I don't buy that model. I prefer the monist model
where in competitive markets the customer expresses the totality of their
preferences through economic behavior. I know it's incorrect, like all models,
but I think it's least incorrect.

I doubt there's more than a tiny fraction of customers that even knows the
existence of Google Analytics. Of them, only a small fraction of those has any
idea of its capabilities. And of those customers, only an even smaller
fraction even checks whether a site is using it before deciding whether to
shop. The notion that a large fraction of customers care about the use of GA
just doesn't fit with these other observations and conjectures. Please correct
me with data if you think I'm wrong.

And anyway, whether you're right or me, the monist model encompasses
everything companies have any incentive to care about, so it's the one that
will be used to drive decisions. It's also the one that we can use to predict
company behavior.

~~~
Yizahi
I suspect that we won't agree on global and complex issues like GA or
surveillance (metadata = surveillance after all, see (1)). But I want to
discuss more specific issue - "monist model". I disagree that defining what
people buy is approximately what people want. Yes, it is in some narrow scope,
but that is not all. I can't buy what I want if it doesn't exist, right? And
is I buy picking from two set choices while I want some thing different
doesn't mean that I wanted what I bought. Example - I have Android phone, but
I don't want it specifically, I don't want a gadget filled with permanently
enabled Google surveillance. But the alternative is only one - Apple, slightly
less but still about the same. The only reason I'm buying them is because I
want convenience more than privacy and I'm only human after all. People don't
know about GA, 99.9% don't know. But they do know about their home address or
credit card number or SSN or photos. They just don't have proper information
to connect all these links.

(1):
[https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2014/03/metadata_surv...](https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2014/03/metadata_survei.html)

~~~
asdfasgasdgasdg
Just a minor clarification. When I was speaking of customers, I was speaking
in aggregate. I'm not making a claim that all individual customers are having
their expressions adequately expressed by their purchasing decisions.

------
spking
How is this different than Fathom?
([https://usefathom.com/](https://usefathom.com/))

------
fitzn
I really dislike the user experience of GA. I literally know 1% of the
functionality it offers and I only _need_ 1% of what it offers. But I do like
that it's free. Was planning to one day give
[https://simpleanalytics.com/](https://simpleanalytics.com/) a shot.

~~~
rchaud
GA is complete overkill for hobby websites that get ~100s of visits/day. If
you have a commercial website selling stuff, or conduct A/B testing, or have
marketing channels funnelling traffic to the site, then you pretty much have
to use something like GA or Adobe Analytics.

~~~
munk-a
I'm actually of the exact opposite opinion - for the majority of websites just
shoving GA on it and calling it a day is quite sufficient... It's only if your
website really lives and dies by making sure users are hitting the important
components and converting into paying customers that a more feature-full
analytics tool may be valuable.

------
duxup
I like that they gave some alternatives.

With the web there are a lot of crusade like topics that while technically
correct the maelstrom of finger waving blog posts really don't seem to change
much and few really offer workable solutions to accomplish the goals that
doing the thing they don't want you to do accomplishes.

~~~
coldpie
One alternative that should be seriously considered is not having analytics at
all. I don't doubt that they're useful for many people in many situations, but
consider whether they're useful to _you_ in _your_ situation. When was the
last time you look at analytics? What did you learn from it? What actions did
you take? Are you really gaining anything from them? I think most personal
blogs, for example, gain nothing from having analytics running. In fact I'd
argue almost all non-commercial activity has no reason to gather analytics.

~~~
snowwrestler
If you don't care if people are reading your blog, why bother posting it
online at all? Why not just blog into a local Word document, like the
character Creed on "The Office"?

If you do care whether people are reading what you write, then analytics is
the obvious way to find out.

~~~
coldpie
I think "analytics" and "traffic stats" are different things.

~~~
snowwrestler
Traffic stats are a subset of all possible analytics you can gather about a
website.

But even if all you want are traffic stats, a client-side analytics package is
still a better way to gather that information.

Google Analytics--and similar client-side analytics packages--supplanted
server-side log analysis for a reason. It's much easier to implement, and
gives you much more accurate counts of real people visiting your site, as
opposed to spiders, bots, scripts, and other automated traffic that doesn't
matter.

------
tanilama
No I won't. It is free and fine.

------
mopsi
What are good self-hosted alternatives? Something like Webalizer, but a bit
more modern.

~~~
nick_meister
[https://goaccess.io/](https://goaccess.io/) ?

------
jamieweb
For those interested, my own solution to this was to use AWStats with an
anonymization script [1].

It provides high-level analytics such as unique visitors, referring sites and
most viewed pages, without having to store any personal data such as IP
addresses, and it's 100% server-side.

IP addresses are compared against a Bloom filter in order to count unique
visitors, without actually permanently storing them.

[1] [https://gitlab.com/jamieweb/web-server-log-anonymizer-
bloom-...](https://gitlab.com/jamieweb/web-server-log-anonymizer-bloom-
filter/)

------
blauditore
>Google, the world’s largest ad-tech company, [...]

This is kind of snarky, especially in the light that the author is writing
this post solely to sell something in competition with Google.

------
hk__2
Their own analytics dashboard is public:
[https://plausible.io/plausible.io](https://plausible.io/plausible.io)

~~~
twsted
And it's really interesting: see the HN effect!

------
shubidubi
I liked it when you announce it's open source till I checked your Github page:

> At the moment we don't provide support for easily self-hosting the code.
> Currently, the purpose of keeping the code open-source is to be transparent
> with the community about how we collect and process data.

So basically you ask people to work for free on something only you can use? No
thank you.

------
mathieupassenau
I wrote a blogpost about webanalytics and authentication.
[https://www.mathieupassenaud.fr/webanalytics_enemy/](https://www.mathieupassenaud.fr/webanalytics_enemy/)
Using "authorization code grant" is not as secure as we imagine with those
kind of analytics

------
tobiaslins
I'm also working on an analytics & A/B testing tool
([https://splitbee.io](https://splitbee.io)). The big difference is that it
needs to pin unique users for A/B testing. It is a mix out of mixpanel &
google analytics & optimizely!

------
uk_programmer
The first reason is about Google being evil. They may well be. However unless
your alternative is as good, or better or has a unique selling point that GA
doesn't have you will find people won't use it.

Don't tell me about how your competitor is bad. Tell me what you offer in
comparison to your competitor.

------
lharries
Posthog.com is another solid option for privacy-focused analytics. They too
have a self-hosted version

------
tobilg
If you have access to an AWS account, you can host your own website statistics
with very little costs. That’s why I built
[https://ownstats.cloud/](https://ownstats.cloud/) Would love to get some
feedback.

------
KerryJones
These posts are the trash of the internet. Why?

This post...

1 - Fails to explain until the end that they are a competitor writing a "bash"
piece

2 - Gives conclusions based on incomplete data and comparisons (website speed
is barely affected by 45kb these days, many websites have much bigger
reductions on multi-mb loads)

3 - States giant scary click-baitish claim in bold and then in smaller print
gives the real story. "It's a liability..." to "it is a potential liability"

4 - Gives a false sense of "many reasons" ("It's a liability" and "It uses
cookies" are the same complaint)

5 - States opinions as facts ("It worsens the UX...") -- it might, but the
vast majority of websites use cookies, and so this doesn't add anything that
you wouldn't have to deal with anyway.

------
jhabdas
Those looking for more ethical alternatives to the Spyware you're using see
[https://switching.software](https://switching.software).

------
computator
Can you be penalized for not running Google Analytics? If you have a website
with no analytics or non-Google analytics, will your Google ranking be worse?

------
duiker101
Slightly off-topic, but are there any analytics for open source projects?

Even if they require the actual data to be public (which would actually be
pretty nice)

------
CrankyBear
"It's owned by Google." Who knew!?

------
G0ther
Thanks but no thanks And stop using this type of advertisement to your
products.

I would rather stick to GA.

And, you never pay for analytics on personal website.

------
tyre
What's the best server-side only, self-hosted analytics platform if I don't
want to add any JS to the front-end?

Running nginx here

~~~
lgl
In my opinion there are no longer any really viable server side analytics/log
processing that's equivalent to what you get with GA unless you want to either
install some kind of server with a ton of features and dependencies or use a
tool that will most likely also require the use of js.

The amount of crawlers, botnet spam, hacking or scanning activity and other
non-visitor related hits you get these days will require a lot of filtering,
updating spamlists, blacklisting, etc and you'll probably end up spending more
time tweaking your webserver and analytics setup than actually gathering any
relevant information from said analytics.

That said, the "old" log processing tools like AWStats, Analog, Webalizer, etc
are still available although I'm not sure if they've been kept updated. I'm
sure there is also a lot of more competition on self hosted tools that try to
replicate what GA does but I'm not that familiar with any either.

~~~
tyre
This is helpful, thank you.

You mean to say that spambots don't respect robots.txt??

Good to think about. I'll check these out and see what they've done (if much)
to mitigate that issue. I'd imagine that would need to be front and center,
unless they're focused more on internal services.

------
fourstar
I've been relying on Cloudflare lately for analytics. Gives me a rough idea,
and "good enough".

~~~
fitzn
Oh, nice. I didn't think of this. But good idea. I'll look into their
analytics.

------
MrCheese
Is that Tailwind UI that you're using? First time I've seen that in the wild
in that case!

------
paulcole
For the average modern website, how much load time does shaving off 44kb save?

------
addedlovely
Looks nice. Is the account multiuser with separation between sites? If it is,
it's a service I'd consider throwing into my maintenance packages as an added
value. Most clients don't need the complexity of Google Analytics and with
GDPR the data is increasingly out of line with reality, given we load GA based
on consent.

~~~
markosaric
Thanks! At the moment, it's one user per account. However, you can create
password-protected links to share the stats with your clients. Each
link/password combination only gives access to the stats for a single site
without having to create an account.

------
ChrisArchitect
everyone hating on this in the comments, yet it's getting upvoted. Silent
support is a bit annoying. I'd also rather not be told what to do with these
titles "Stop doing this, etc"

sigh

------
secfirstmd
Or Matamo. Its free and I've found it to be excellent.

------
werds
all of these alternatives which people are posting: simpleanalytics.com
plausible.io are not free, which is the main reason people use Google
Analytics

------
garraeth
>It’s a bloated script that affects your site speed Once I removed GA, the
speed increase was surprisingly very noticeable. That alone was enough for me
to keep it off.

------
dyeje
How does this compare to SimpleAnalytics?

------
huxflux
Stop using Google Analytics and pay for your project? Sorry. I'm not convinced
by the logic.

------
andrethegiant
Segment integration?

------
varelaz
If you're so concerned about GDPR, probably hotjar is a good choice. It's free
for personal use and it's all EU based.

------
hkai
I stopped reading after the words "surveillance capitalism".

------
donohoe
Take this post with a pinch of salt... Out of the 10 points made, I'd argue
only 2 are actually valid and another 2 are "technically correct but..."

    
    
      It’s owned by Google, the largest ad-tech company in the world
    

Yes. Google provides a free service and in return gets a view into your
traffic. Very fair point, but not terribly controversial IMHO

    
    
      It’s a bloated script that affects your site speed
    

Um, not really. I'm a big web performance advocate but 45.7KB of JS is small
for the service provided. You do not need to use Google Tag Manager either so
if you care you can reduce the JS footprint to 18KB.

    
    
      It’s overkill for the majority of site owners
    

Yes. I'd agree with this. You probably do not need it if you are not a
business.(Given the source of this point I'm guessing they do not offer most
of the features of GA)

    
    
      It’s a liability considering GDPR, CCPA and other privacy regulations
    

Hard disagree. You can limit PII in GA to large degree like not gathering full
IP address, and reduce logging.

If GA is your only reason to have a Consent option then fine, its a burden to
do. However if you have any other analytics or services that use cookies its a
minor check-list item to cover this.

    
    
      It uses cookies so you must obtain consent to store cookies
    

They are repeating their previous claim in a different form here... skipping.

    
    
      It’s blocked by many plugins and browsers so the data is not very accurate
    

Technically correct, but you don't need highly accurate data to make product
decisions. GA does sampling after a certain threshold anyway.

    
    
      It requires an extensive privacy policy
    

No. It does not. You should acknowledge it and talk about why you use GA and
you can link to GA's privacy policy. Plenty of boilerplate text you can copy
to cover this if you really care.

    
    
      It’s abused by referral spam that skews the data
    

Maybe your experience if different but this is hardly a problem worth noting.
Certainly not a GA specific issue.

    
    
      It’s a proprietary product so you need to put your trust in Google
    

Yeah. Same with any service you use, but ok.

    
    
      It worsens the user experience due to the necessity for the annoying prompts
    

Again, most 3rd-party services on your site mean you need to go this path.
There are good and bad ways to do this.

I'm sure this service is worth trying. I would also recommend looking at
Simple Analytics: [https://simpleanalytics.com/](https://simpleanalytics.com/)

~~~
zepto
If it weren’t controversial nobody would be discussing it.

~~~
donohoe
Not sure how you draw that conclusion. Its made to sound controversial (by a
would-be competitor).

My point is that it is really not when you look below the surface.

------
andreyk
As someone who still uses GA for multiple sites, can we actually discuss the
claims of the article and not the broad idea of it?

> " > These two tracking scripts combined add 45.7 KB of page weight to each
> and every page load."

Google makes fantastic products that are available for free (with limits)
because they make most of their money from ads. I may not like it, but gmail,
Drive, YouTube are all great and I would prefer people who can't pay for such
products have the free option.

> "It’s a bloated script that affects your site speed"

As others have said, no? Not with caching? Anyway my websites are probably
bloated by all sorts of bigger things, I am no web dev and have had no time to
optimize them overmuch, and the still work fine. So guilt tripping me about GA
Analytics aint gonna work.

> "It’s overkill for the majority of site owners"

I like having the flexibility ; I seriously doubt this is a good pitch for any
growing company or even project.

> "It’s a liability considering GDPR, CCPA and other privacy regulations"

Is it? It's not like Google is not addressing GDPR concerns
([https://www.cookiebot.com/en/google-analytics-
gdpr/](https://www.cookiebot.com/en/google-analytics-gdpr/))

> "It uses cookies so you must obtain consent to store cookies"

Okay, finally a good one -- nobody likes the cookie popup, so removing GA
analytics would improve user experience. Then again, it's so common that
people maybe are used to it?

> "It’s blocked by many plugins and browsers so the data is not very accurate"

'There’s no definite answer on how many people block Google Analytics as that
depends on the audience of your site, but for a tech audience, you shouldn’t
be surprised to see 50% or more of the visitors blocking Google Analytics.'
Really? I kind of doubt it..........

> "It requires an extensive privacy policy"

Any analytics should have privacy disclosure, presumably.

> "It’s abused by referral spam that skews the data"

And other analytics aren't?

> "It’s a proprietary product so you need to put your trust in Google"

Fair, Open Source is preferable.

> "It worsens the user experience due to the necessity for the annoying
> prompts"

A repeat

\-----------

So yeah. Look, I am uncomfortable with big huge giant companies like Google
ruling the earth. But I also have quite limited time and money, and already
use gmail and Drive. So far Google has not done anything to seriously hurt my
trust and I think their products are excellent. Most of these points seem weak
to me, as someone already using GA analytics.

Still, for someone building a new website, I could see this being enough to
make the point. But, I think it would be far more effective if it was more
concise and less easy to point out holes in the arguments.

------
frankzander
Great if it's not written in some sort of exotic language and just in php.
Don't get me wrong I'm not a fan of php but if it's written in php it would be
run anywhere but not only on your private special configured VPS.

------
nkkollaw
GA can't really be replaced easily.

There is an army of web consultants ready to help you set up and track your
marketing with GA, and just as many marketing consultants that can only work
with GA.

While it's nice that someone works on alternatives—although I don't really see
anything wrong with GA—it's here to stay.

Reminds me of Excel, people have been trying to replace Excel for 20 years
now.

