Alternative analytics

Contrary to the current consensual hallucination, there are alternatives to Google Analytics.

I haven’t tried Open Web Analytics. It looks a bit geeky, but the nice thing about it is that you can set it up to work with JavaScript or PHP (sort of like Mint, which I miss).

Also on the geeky end, there’s GoAccess which provides an interface onto your server logs. You can view the data in a browser or on the command line. I gave this a go on adactio.com and it all worked just fine.

Matomo was previously called Piwik, and it’s the closest to Google Analytics. Chris Ruppel wrote about using it as a drop-in replacement. I gave it a go on adactio.com and it did indeed collect analytics very nicely …but then I deleted it, because it still felt creepy to have any kind of analytics script at all (neither Huffduffer or The Session have any analytics tracking either).

Fathom isn’t out yet, but it looks interesting:

It will track users on a website, the key actions they are taking, and give you a non-nerdy breakdown of their journey. It’ll do so with user-centric rights and privacy, and without selling, sharing or giving away the data you collect.

I don’t think any of these alternatives offer quite the same ease-of-use that you’d get from Google Analytics. But I also don’t think that should be your highest priority. There’s a fundamental difference between doing your own analytics (self-hosted), and outsourcing the job to Google who can then track your site’s visitors across domains.

I was hoping that GDPR would put the squeeze on third-party tracking, but it looks like Google have found a way out. By declaring themselves a data controller (but not a data processor), they pass can pass the buck to the data processors to obtain consent.

If you have Google Analytics on your site, that’s you, that is.

This was originally posted on my own site.