
From Google Analytics to Fathom - geerlingguy
https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2019/its-not-me-google-its-you-ga-fathom
======
saagarjha
> Since the mid-2000s, right after it became available, I started using Google
> Analytics for almost every website I built (whether it be mine or someone
> else). It quickly became (and remains) the de-facto standard for website
> usage analytics and user tracking.

I ask everyone to consider is whether they actually _need_ analytics at all. I
think in many cases the answer is "well, no, but it's nice to have…". Sure, it
would be nice to know how many people visit my personal website, but I don't
think it's worth sending extra JavaScript to people for, or dealing with the
risk that I may be collecting more information than I actually want.

~~~
Guest10928391
A number of the large ad networks I work with requested Google Analytics data
for review when going through my application.

If you ever want to sell your site, having a decade of Google Analytics is
valuable.

Yes, you could use a different analytics software or logs for the above.
However, since Google Analytics is the standard, it's familiar, trustworthy,
and performs equally across all sites. For example, Google Analytics shows I
have about 1,000,000 page views a day. I have Apache blocking at least 30 user
agents from common types of bots and scripts. Even so, my database logs show
about 10,000,000 page views a day getting through to my site. That's a pretty
large difference in reporting. This is why if someone is buying or analyzing a
site, they want to compare the same source, such as Google Analytics, across
all properties they're considering.

~~~
marcus_holmes
This is a problem I see - that no two analytics engines actually agree on the
numbers, and none of them agree with my server logs.

I just flat don't trust GA, on anything. I can't trust it to give me the right
numbers, so how do I know the rest of the data is actually correct, and what
is the point of slowing my site down to have it?

I'll have a look at Fathom. If its numbers agree with my server logs then I'll
think about adding it in. I can see the usefulness, but I'd prefer to just
analyse the logs I'm already keeping (and maybe expand them to include user
behaviour on the client).

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0xADEADBEE
I'm currently enjoying Goaccess [0]. It's command-line based, works on my
nginx logs and tells me exactly the things I want to know. Might not be for
everyone but I thought I'd share in case someone else found it useful.

I wholeheartedly support Fathom's endeavour and will definitely use them if I
go back to JS-based analytics.

[0] - [https://goaccess.io/](https://goaccess.io/)

~~~
bad_user
Such solutions don’t work if your server is behind a proxy like Cloudflare,
since most requests will be served from cache.

And btw, this implies that you’re keeping logs on your visitors for other
purposes than security. Under GDPR that’s not OK.

A good analytics solution will anonymize the data. Including Google Analytics
if you configure it properly.

~~~
SahAssar
The GDPR question depends on what the logs include. If you don't include IP
(or anonymize it) and don't include sensitive data (like userids/cookies or
POST data) then it should be okay under GDPR. You can for example have one log
for security (fail2ban and so on) that includes IP and one for GoAccess that
does not.

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js2
> Before that you basically had web page visit counters (some of them with
> slightly more advanced features ala W3Counter and Stat Counter), and then on
> the high end you had Urchin Web Analytics

Before that you had access log summarizers such as analog:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analog_(program)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analog_\(program\))

~~~
kvz
And AWStats! [https://www.awstats.org/](https://www.awstats.org/)

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ipsum2
> Google Analytics is free, but Google uses the gobs of data about Internet
> usage it gets from tracking half the Internet for it's own purposes

Does anyone have a source on this? I attended a talk from someone from Google
Analytics a few years back, and they claim that Google doesn't use any data
they get from analytics for ads targeting. Not sure if their policies have
changed.

~~~
ukutaht
Their Privacy Policy:
[https://policies.google.com/privacy?hl=en](https://policies.google.com/privacy?hl=en)

> And we also use data about the ads you interact with to help advertisers
> understand the performance of their ad campaigns. We use a variety of tools
> to do this, including Google Analytics. When you visit sites that use Google
> Analytics, Google and a Google Analytics customer may link information about
> your activity from that site with activity from other sites that use our ad
> services.

~~~
shazow
> Google and a Google Analytics customer may link information about your
> activity from that site with activity from other sites that use our ad
> services.

To clarify: Linking your Google Analytics account with your Google Ads account
is an explicit feature that the property owner can do to get a fuller view of
the conversion funnel.

As far as I know (having worked on that team several years ago),

> they claim that Google doesn't use any data they get from analytics for ads
> targeting.

was otherwise factual. (That is, Google didn't willynilly take GA data and use
it for its own purposes, or even cross-contaminate it in any way.)

Though don't know what might have changed in recent years.

~~~
mediumdeviation
This [1] happened in 2016. Google can change its privacy policy, but your data
is still on their servers. The problem is not just a matter of what Google
says about privacy, but a matter of trust, and Google has broken that many
times already.

[1]: [https://www.propublica.org/article/google-has-quietly-
droppe...](https://www.propublica.org/article/google-has-quietly-dropped-ban-
on-personally-identifiable-web-tracking)

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chaoxu
I now use both Fathom and Google analytics.

Most of the time, the only thing I care about is where people come from, and
which page gets accessed most often. I feel this should already be enough
information for one to understand what is a popular topic.

I'm actually still super surprised that Fathom's javascript code is 1.6kb.
Can't it be lighter?

~~~
stevenicr
"where people come from, and which page gets accessed most often" \- I get
this info from the server stats with something like awstats or analog stats
(sometimes webalizer),

no google scripts, no extra javascript at 1.6k or less - much lighter, more
privacy, faster.

Are these server side stats things not an option with your hosting? (they come
included on some of my hosts, had to be wrangled to get one a freebsd host we
run with)

~~~
chaoxu
I use github pages, so I can't gather such statistics.

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forrestthewoods
I'm still trying to find an affordable, reliable, privacy-conscious analytics
tool for a blog.

I don't want to run my own server. I'm willing to spend money. I'd like to
spend ~$5/mo. I write less than 6 posts per year. A good post gets tens of
thousands of lifetime views. A mediocre post gets five to ten thousand. My
server burden is pretty bare bones.

All I really want to know are page views and referrers. My next experiment is
to use a custom "tracking pixel" served from S3 and use log tools. But I have
no idea if webcrawlers will distort my data or not. This would at least allow
me to reliably count page views even for people who use ad-blockers.

Edit: Blog is static design, hosted on Netlify free tier.
[https://www.forrestthewoods.com/](https://www.forrestthewoods.com/)

~~~
dvko
How are you hosting your blog? If you're already self-hosting that, please
know that you can easily host a Fathom instance using SQLite (because easy) on
that same server without having to worry of it eating up your system
resources.

From experience, a Fathom instance on a $5 DigitalOcean droplet can easily
handle millions of pageviews a month. It's really quite efficient.

~~~
forrestthewoods
Static blog hosted for free on Netlify.

Does the Fathom script get picked up by ad-blockers? That's one of my concern
with any off-the-shelf solution. They all involve a one-line javascript
injection which is trivial to block.

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macawfish
Piwik isn't bad!

~~~
geerlingguy
For those who haven't been following it's development, it's been renamed
Matomo[1]. Definitely an option worth considering for deeper analytics while
still being a bit more performant and respectful of privacy!

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

~~~
samuell
Thanks for sharing this summary. I had matomo in my notes, and was just
wondering how it compares to Fathom.

If there are any more detailed comparisons, I'm all ears.

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feistypharit
Been enjoying countly on a DO droplet for $5/mo

~~~
feistypharit
Finally wrote up how I did it and what I learned about the different ways of
doing it.

[https://blog.garble.org/diy-analytics-digital-ocean-
countly/](https://blog.garble.org/diy-analytics-digital-ocean-countly/)

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simplecomplex
I track conversion rate on all my sites without JS, for free, and without
hitting a DB on each request. I just download my access logs and parse them
with a 5 line script.

I don’t see the point in tracking anything but conversion. I don’t need to
know screen size or browser breakdown, because my websites are responsive, and
work in all browsers since IE8.

For those using Google Analytics and the like: what are you actually tracking
and taking action on?

~~~
detritus
Browser Breakdown is the one feature that I'd like from a contemporary
analytics package that appears to be missing from Fathom. Simply because I'd
like some slightly smarter way of checking which feature set I can get away
with using as I've been keen to roll out a fully CSS Gridded layout on a
couple of my own sites. It appears from my archaic analytics (I gutted GA from
everything around GDPR time last year because - you're quite right - WHAT DO I
gain from it, fundamentally and actionably?) I'm not able to quite yet, sadly.

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mosselman
Does anyone have any experience with Open Web Analytics? It looks very feature
rich and it doesn’t have matomo’s annoying business model

[http://www.openwebanalytics.com](http://www.openwebanalytics.com)

~~~
amanzi
I recently looked at all the open-source and self-hosted analytics systems I
could find. OWA felt very cumbersome, no native docker support, and I wasn't
even sure if it was actively maintained. I ended up going with Matomo and
haven't encountered any issues with their business model yet.

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technotarek
Unless I missed it here or elsewhere, GA is the only option that integrates
event tracking. That's really important, especially in js-powered UIs. I so
want to ditch GA, but I so need (integrated) event tracking.

~~~
pauljarvis
We're working on this for Fathom (I'm the cofounder of Fathom).

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dansanuf
Just curious, did you notice any change in your Google SERP rankings after the
move?

~~~
geerlingguy
So far, no. And hopefully it doesn’t affect SERPs or that seems like some sort
of antitrust violation, no?

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bad_user
For those not in the know, you can configure Google Analytics to:

1\. not share data with Google for their own purposes

2\. anonymize IPs

3\. reduce the max age of their tracking cookie or disable it completely

GA is also compliant with GDPR if configured properly. At least one DPA thinks
so.

Self-hosting of an open source solution is great, but I trust Google more than
I can trust the hosting provided by startups. That's because Google is under
constant scrutiny, whereas the startups working on these alternatives are not.
Of course, you can make your visitors feel good about not using Google
Analytics and get some free publicity, but that's another issue.

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mikebonnell
3 posts on the same topic within 24 hours :(

