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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.
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.
Anyone? Give me a solid reason to do so.
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.