Migrate off of Google Analytics
amanahuja opened this issue · comments
I'd like to move away from Google Analytics for web privacy and tracking reasons.
While I'm aware of alternatives like Matomo, I haven't yet investigated these options. If you are knowledgeable about these things, your input would be welcome.
My criteria at the moment:
- no cookies (required)
- privacy forward (required)
- GDPR /CCPA, PERCe... compliant (required)
- open source (required)
- data portability (required)
- ability to manage at least 3 domains (required)
- features required: basic counter of visits, bounce rate
- features nice-to-have: info about browser, screen size, links followed
Expected traffic for my purposes is probably like... 100 visits per month. I should be able to find an option that is free or close to free, although I'm happy to pay/donate to support. I don't mind technical work to set things up, I guess, but a hosted solution would be nice so I don't have to worry about maintenance, updates, etc.
Here are two useful lists
- https://creativerly.com/google-analytics-alternatives/
- https://til.marcuse.info/webmaster/alt-analytics.html
Looking through that list for hosted solutions that have free tiers, then:
- splitbee
- beampipe
- micro-analytics
- counter.dev
- Swetrix
It's apparent that some of my naive "nice to have" features are not privacy-respecting. For example, many of the privacy-forward analytics software track only the landing page and not all the pages loaded. This is better for the user. Thus "top pages" are not available, but "top landing pages" are.
Cookie-less analytics has limitations, and I'm fine with that.
counter.dev's documentation states:
Counting unique users is achieved with a combination of relying on sessionStorage facilities, the browser's cache mechanism and inspecting the referrer. Using this technique considerably reduces the complexity and load on the server while improving data privacy at the cost of knowing less about users. We can't and don't want to be able to connect single page views to an user identity.
I use self-hosted Matomo on a digital ocean droplet for louispotok.com -- I believe it meets all your criteria except cookies.
This blog post with a setup for basic server-side analytics may also be useful.
I've setup Matomo as a new resource on my utility server (pafnuty.com), and I'm testing out the integration. Should be good to go soon.
I had some problems with the js tracker, but now resolved. For posterity: https://forum.yunohost.org/t/matomo-tracker-redirects-fail/20576/4
Marking this as done.
Confirmed tracking is working after some months.
FWIW I have been using plausible.io for work stuff and I quite like it -- paid and hosted, but very privacy conscious and the design is a lot simpler/nicer than matomo, which has a bunch of stuff I never use