Alternative to Google Analytics
Hey,
I am working on alternative to Google Analytics (I know, quite popular topic) and I am bit stuck on few decisions. Hope you guys will be able to help me.
The most important for me is the data location. When choosing your analytics provider, are you worried where the data is hosted? Would it be a problem if your data would sit in Amazon datacenter? Small ones are more concentrated on privacy, when big ones can often provide more enterprise solutions for lower cost.
Would be super grateful for your help.
M
Maybe you should check this is https://simpleanalytics.com/ guys . There are also building something very similar to this. and also available in indiehackers.
I am aware of SimpleAnalytics. Great product, but I am planing to build it in a bit different way. Actually his blog post got me into thinking about data location. I think it's not as important as data is anonymised, but wanted to ask the community, as I might be missing something.
Good luck :) Keep me posted once you are up and running.
I use 2 things with Google Analytics.
I care about how much organic traffic I'm getting, and which pages are performing best. I rely 100% on organic traffic. As an alternative tool and your competitor, I've used Fathom because it was easy to spin up with digital ocean.
That doesn't answer your question, but I hope it helps you understand a potential customer. I couldn't care less about data location. Data isn't like farm to table restaurant where I care where my meat came from. I just want to see growth and what specifically grew.
Many thanks for your reply. In that case can I ask you why would you use alternative to Google Analytics? What would be the selling point? GDPR compliant? No cookies?
Can I also ask, how much would you be willing to pay for that service?
Yes, GDPR compliance and no cookies would be a selling point for me.
However, as we are self-hosting, we are using GoAccess: https://turtle.community/discovery/508 (which is coming without cookies).
I use alternative tools so it doesn't have to be hooked up to a google account. All the businesses I work with are in the continental united states so I don't give a hoot about GDPR compliance. Not sure about pricing. Fathom is free is you self host it.
As the owner of Simple Analytics I learned a few things and would love to share it. First, great you are building a privacy friendly product. I wonder, what is your main reason to choose the privacy angle? I hope it is not just a business decision.
Now back to your question. I think data location is not the number one priority why people will choose your product. I choose to host our data in Iceland because they have great privacy laws. unfortunately I was wrong and those laws where only accepted my parlement but didn’t make it into actual law.
A year after I started Simple Analytics I needed better servers and my provider didn’t offer those. I needed to move. I started digging in other Icelandic providers but they where smaller and seemed less professional. So I needed to move my data out of Iceland.
After that realization I sent an email to all my paying customers asking to vote on a poll which the question if they were okay with me moving their data to Amsterdam. 100% of the voters (around 100 voters) where okay with that. So that answers my question of moving to Amsterdam.
I did rent a bare metal server in Amsterdam and I’m moving their data before the end of the year.
Back to your question, again. As I have a lot of EU customers, it’s part of some legal policies to not do business with cloud services like Amazon but I don’t think they are a big chunk of the pie.
I do think that you are sending a message to people that you do business with a company that is not creating a great name in privacy land. With their thighs with the government, building surveillance software, having smart devices like doorbell cameras and Echos, I would not trust them with my customer data.
I do wish you the best with your product though! Let me know when it’s live so I can put it on privacyfirstproducts.com.
Thank you very very much for your reply. I appreciate it a lot, especially that I am building product that will be a competition to your product.
I spoke to few potential clients and after getting responses here, I am sure that I have some freedom about server location, technology etc. This is great.
Will definitely let you know when it's ready. I am thinking/working on this project for over 2 years now. This time I do know what and how I want to build it and that I will finally release the product (the most hard part).
PS - the privacyfriendlyproducts.com is not working for me.
I know it can be very challenging launching a product. Don't be a perfectionist, launch it after max 3 months. I hope you will finish it!
Oops, that link should have been privacyfirstproducts.com.
This is always a problem, to draw a line and decide to ship it. Now I checked your website and you stated that you cannot rely on user IP as fingerprinting - reading the ICO specs, if this is correct (looks like you are right), I am stuck. Don't want to build a clone of your SimpleAnalytics... eh indie problems :D
Honestly, no I really don’t care where my data for analytics is hosted at all. The location of the data has nothing to do with what value it provides me. You could host the thing in your basement and I really wouldn’t care.
I’m guessing this question is stemming from trust. Do I trust that you’re not going to loose all my data? But this is 2019, I think we all just assume that you as a SaaS owner are not going to loose my data. However, even if you did loose all my data, it wouldn’t be the end of the world. For me analytics are nice to have and are not mission critical.
If you’re looking to make some sort of Google Analytics competitor, I’d look at creating something that is easy to use. I know I’m not alone on this, it’s so complicated to get Google Analytics setup that I sometimes don’t even see value from it. I’d happily pay for a tool that has a bit more handholding.
Thanks for your reply. I appreciate it a lot.
Data location to me doesn’t matter. If you give it a nice API to use so I can integrate into my own dashboards I would use it.
Many thanks. I am planing build this as API first, with GraphQL API and standard REST. Is this a most important part for you? Also, let me ask, how much you would be willing to pay for that type of service?
It is for me. I’m also a developer who builds sites for clients, so having this ability would awesome. We manage 100+ sites, so I’d be willing to pay $25-$50 a month. I don’t know how much it costs on your end, so that’s just kind of a shot in the dark. I’m testing out Stat Counter now, and it’s pretty nice, but somewhat weird API docs and not super clear pricing.
Thanks. 100+ sites is not a problem, question is, how many pageviews do they generate?
Not much. Maybe 2-4 thousand each month if I averaged them out.
Amplitude perhaps? Been meaning to check it out at some stage...
If by "where" you mean "with whom," such as a cloud provider like Amazon, I think using a cloud provider is an obvious solution regardless of your size in the market, due to economies of scale and availability of backup. Google uses themselves, obviously, and Adobe increasingly uses Azure. Plenty of startups in the space use cloud services not only for storage, but also transit of data.
Yes, sorry - that's exactly what I meant. I found some voices saying that they do not trust big hosting companies like Google, MS or Amazon. And as indy project you should use small, independent providers. Looking from responses in this topic, it is not that important.
Thanks for your reply.
Maybe I missed the "WHY" part when I was asking the question.
As far as I understand, some users are looking for Google Analytics purely from privacy point of view. If something is free, you and your data are the price.
Alternative is that you pay for service, but we do not track your users.
However this leads to the point, what if I would host my privacy focused app on Google servers (I am not planing to, this is just example)? From my perspective this is ok, as the data is minified and Google can make no use of it. Also, this is my server just on their infrastructure.
Once again - many thanks for your time and replies. This is showing me that my thinking is correct. If you do not agree - please, please let me know why.
Thanks.