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Is It Time To Ditch Google Analytics? (fastcompany.com)
"In the last year, a swell of privacy-focused website analytics platforms have started to provide an alternative to Google's tracking behemoth," reports Fast Company.
An anonymous reader shares their article about startups providing "privacy-centric analytics, claiming not to collect any personal data and only display simple metrics like page views, referral websites, and screen sizes in clean, pared-down interfaces."
While Simple Analytics and Fathom are both recent additions to the world of privacy-focused data analytics, 1.5% of the internet already uses an open-source, decentralized platform called Matomo, according to the company... "When [Google] released Google Analytics, [it] was obvious to me that a certain percent of the world would want the same technology, but decentralized, where it's not provided by a centralized corporation and you're not dependent on them," says Matthieu Aubry, Matomo's founder. "If you use it on your own server, it's impossible for us to get any data from it."
Aubry says that 99% of Matomo users use the analytics code, which is open for anyone to use, and host their analytics on their own servers -- which means that the company has no access to it whatsoever. For Aubry, that's his way of ensuring privacy by design. United Nations, Amnesty International, NASA, and the European Commission and about 1.5 million other websites use Matomo. But Matomo also offers significantly more robust tracking than Fathom or Simple Analytics -- Aubry says it can do about 95% of what Google Analytics does. Still, there are a few key differences. Like Simple Analytics, Matomo honors Do Not Track....
The rise of these analytics startups speaks to a growing desire for alternatives to the corporate ecosystems controlled by giants like Google, Amazon, and Apple, a swell that has helped privacy-focused search engine Duck Duck Go reach 36 million searches in a day. There's even an entire website dedicated to alternates to all of Google's services. For Aubry of Matomo, this concentration of power in the hands (or servers) of billion-dollar companies is the reason to support smaller, decentralized networks like his own that share code. "We want to control our future technology -- be able to understand it, study it, see what it does beneath the hood," he says. "And when it doesn't work we can fix it ourselves."
An anonymous reader shares their article about startups providing "privacy-centric analytics, claiming not to collect any personal data and only display simple metrics like page views, referral websites, and screen sizes in clean, pared-down interfaces."
While Simple Analytics and Fathom are both recent additions to the world of privacy-focused data analytics, 1.5% of the internet already uses an open-source, decentralized platform called Matomo, according to the company... "When [Google] released Google Analytics, [it] was obvious to me that a certain percent of the world would want the same technology, but decentralized, where it's not provided by a centralized corporation and you're not dependent on them," says Matthieu Aubry, Matomo's founder. "If you use it on your own server, it's impossible for us to get any data from it."
Aubry says that 99% of Matomo users use the analytics code, which is open for anyone to use, and host their analytics on their own servers -- which means that the company has no access to it whatsoever. For Aubry, that's his way of ensuring privacy by design. United Nations, Amnesty International, NASA, and the European Commission and about 1.5 million other websites use Matomo. But Matomo also offers significantly more robust tracking than Fathom or Simple Analytics -- Aubry says it can do about 95% of what Google Analytics does. Still, there are a few key differences. Like Simple Analytics, Matomo honors Do Not Track....
The rise of these analytics startups speaks to a growing desire for alternatives to the corporate ecosystems controlled by giants like Google, Amazon, and Apple, a swell that has helped privacy-focused search engine Duck Duck Go reach 36 million searches in a day. There's even an entire website dedicated to alternates to all of Google's services. For Aubry of Matomo, this concentration of power in the hands (or servers) of billion-dollar companies is the reason to support smaller, decentralized networks like his own that share code. "We want to control our future technology -- be able to understand it, study it, see what it does beneath the hood," he says. "And when it doesn't work we can fix it ourselves."
I have google-analytics.com set to Untrusted in NoScript. Privacy Badger blocks the whole domain by default. I suspect Firefox's tracking protection also blocks it.
This post gets extra irony points given Slashdot uses Google Analytics.
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
for a company that offers crippled open source version, and then expects you to pay a monthly subscription to get feature parity with Google.
nomoregoogle.com, which is mentioned in the article, has options for many Google services. I've been very happy with ProtonMail, though there are some inconveniences, like no full-content search with the web client (since that runs into decryption issues). Supposedly that's being worked on, though. Main thing I'm still looking for is a Calendar replacement, which doesn't appear on the nomoregoogle list.
I blocked Google Analytics on the router level years ago (so that it works on phones and tablets at home too) and I thought everybody did it.
Just what's wrong with Webalizer?
That gives in principle all you really need to know about the traffic to your web site. Outsourcing the statistics to someone that runs cookies is more or less just a waste of time considering all the cookie filters and other filters from people that don't want to be tracked.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
FYI web browsers already include code that parses the HTML before showing it to the user and doesn't use magic to extract URLs & download scripts.
Anyone? Give me a solid reason to do so.
Do you want to play super-nice with Google? Or do you need GAs features? Then a corporate account and tie everything concerning your website including analytics to it.
Other than that, use Piwik or whatever it's successor is called these days.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Around 2013 I came the same conclusion and removed GA from all of my websites. It's my opinion that there is no excuse for using cookies for any reason other than a single https-only one for the purpose of keeping people logged in. Server side IP address alone is accurate enough to gauge rough visitor behaviour patterns and the acquisition point (HTTP referrer) is the single only useful metric I personally pay attention to. Ergo, my "analytics" consists of a few lines of C# code which runs against a folder of daily nginx logs, filters out bots/referrer spam and produces a simple table of what's been going on. It's not rocket science.
One nagging question I've always wondered is whether or not google internally demotes websites containing no tracker scripts, on a presumption that "its owner is not working to track visitors/revenue, therefor it is not a serious candidate for these search terms." Even though a product landing page is clean, simple, succinct, and the end product is well received by real users in actually. I'm curious whether or not it's why earlier projects of mine seemed to gather regular organic search traffic and associated business without me even lifting a finger, other than braindead obvious correct usage of search index friendly html markup throughout, contrast to post 2013, when I build a new software product, launch a site for people to find and download it, making sure it looks clean and presentable, mobile friendly, loads quickly, ticks all the best practice boxes - it might as well not even exist. Pretty much the only search term it's considered for is the product name itself through word of mouth.
GA is effectively dead. Millions of users are already blocking this and every other external service similar to it in existence. The result is data provided by these services is at very least incomplete.
If you want accurate figures install a stats package and parse your own web logs. It's not rocket science.
considering all the cookie filters and other filters from people that don't want to be tracked.
I think most people are just annoyed about having to click "confirm" on every single website.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Ergo, my "analytics" consists of a few lines of C# code which runs against a folder of daily nginx logs, filters out bots/referrer spam and produces a simple table of what's been going on. It's not rocket science.
That's really good but it doesn't tell you things like age, gender, geo-location, and interests of your visitors. You might not care, of course.
One nagging question I've always wondered is whether or not google internally demotes websites containing no tracker scripts, on a presumption that "its owner is not working to track visitors/revenue, therefor it is not a serious candidate for these search terms."
Doesn't seem to. I only have one website to test this with, so the error bars are wide, but my answer is no.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Only complaint I've had about webalizer is when looking for "what were people searching for when they found my site?". Google uses obfuscated URLs now for search results, so I've no idea if visitors came from a search page for "glass hamburgers" or "basketball hedgehogs." If I used Google Analytics, I would have access to that information. I'm certain that change was intentional.
Google analytics was the first permanent entry on my noscript. The entire concept is antithetical to consumer privacy.
The sampling part is why I switched to Piwik (now named Matomo) about three years ago. It really sucks trying to find rare events with GA when all of the reports have such a small sample. We had problems that were happing thousands of times a day that wouldn't show-up on Google Analytics.
Posteo is good. It is also the only service I have used that refused to send if the connection was not encrypted the whole way through (although, you have to turn that on).
I reserve the write to mangle english.
Google analytics is a matured product which has been used by millions. I don't think any other product can replace it, because it is more trusted and and time tested. As a strong organization like Google is behind it.
Developer at www.waterfiltersuae.com
I'm blocking that
Nice troll. Around 30% of websites use Wordpress which is php. That doesn't count other sites developed in php that don't use Wordpress. The only realsitic alternatives are some of the hipster JS backends or C# which are not as popular or flexible as php.
Webalizer while good for some folks is ancient technology.
The value is analytics has to do with who is funding the website and its development to begin with. Speaking as a professional, I'm surprised no one has mentioned the ELK Stack yet in this thread, so here I am. Look at all the pretty graphic dashboards Kibana can be configured to display. It's free, and open-source, with paid support. And it works based purely off of log data, no javascript or magic-bits required, unlike everything else i can think of.
IMHO, I am happy as a developer, when/if I can tweak such wonderful reports, nee(!), dashboards worthy of large monitors in the hallways and lobby of whoever is funding the website.
And for bonus points: everything 'normal' can be removed from the search results, leaving you with every single hacker attempt made; filtered to your heart's content and then you can work to block the MoFo's at the server-level.
You can't be ahead of the curve, if you're stuck in a loop.
p.s. Many government agencies are required to justify their own funding, and rely on websites heavily for their mission; hence the value of knowing what is working and what is not working (i.e. analytics). Just for example: SAMHSA
You can't be ahead of the curve, if you're stuck in a loop.
In fairness, Webalizer is pretty basic. When I last used it in anger, it still couldn't properly geo IP addresses and instead just used their reverse DNS to say all ".com" IPs were from the USA. That sort of thing is never going to get past any sort of 'SEO' or marketing function people.
However, GA can accept stats that you submit. I'm sure someone must have made a webalizer-style package that scrapes log files and send GA events. That way your marketing droids can still get whizzy graphs, but only from your server logs instead of cookies.
If that's still too 'big brother' for you, then you can run your own OpenWebAnalytics (http://www.openwebanalytics.com/) server and similarly send log information to it. You could start allowing cookies again, and then use your own endpoints to collect metrics rather than 3rd parties too. Which ever way you do it, you do get a slightly more modern looking solution this way.
I believe Splunk can do analytics quite respectably, as could an ELK stack, but I'd argue that they're a bit more of a big deal to operate and run, and don't really hit the mark for the marketing folks. YMMV.
Ultimately, GA is for the lazy. It's blocked by a measurable percentage of visitors these days, and (probably) gets some spam too, so it's accuracy isn't what it once was. When GA first came out, it was a more convenient and far superior version of Webalizer, but these days alternatives exist.
p.p.s. Let's say you're a major service like the NY Times and you have 20 web servers just to load balance demand. And then one got hacked, or whatever. Fortunately you were transmitting log data in real-time to a consolidating, indexing Logstash/ElasticSearch appliance so you can easily search for, and see what exactly went wrong and when. ELK Stack FTW!
You can't be ahead of the curve, if you're stuck in a loop.