Do you use Google Analytics?
Trying to be privacy conscious with a new service I've put together, I want to avoid setting up Google Analytics or trackers in general. But then, it would be just nice to know whether anyone has visited the website at all.
Is there a quick and easy alternative? Server logs? Daily email with the new signup count?
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IMO getting rid of GA can make you feel better for a short while if your business gains initial momentum on its own and you're not too much bothered about user behavior. At this stage you're just happy to just record the number of visitors and number of pageviews, % visitors who are subscribing and buying and that's about it.
But if the business continues to grow, in a year or so, a point will inevitably come when you are battling attrition and looking for more avenues to grow as you've exhausted the organic channels or some competitor is breathing on your neck. This point may come even sooner if you want to increase conversions from free trials by measuring correlation of feature usage and purchase intention.
You will then be longing for more data about users but can't get around the limitations of the light tools. Light tools won't tell you about your user's funnels, conversion by segments, pages with maximum drop-off, even tracking, user experience, scroll behavior, organic keywords that are leading to conversions, true referral information (like which facebook groups, post or emails are resulting in conversion) and by this time you'd have already lost (by not recording) months of behavioral data that you could have recorded using GA.
To top it all, light tools will even confuse you by counting the same user multiple times, giving you the impression that you have 3-4 times more users than you actually have. Same user coming from different browsers, devices will be counted multiple times.
It's true that GA reports are complex and they look old fashioned. It's true that GA can have multiple problems if it's not set up properly. But whether you want to trade future usability of data for present simplicity is a choice you have to make.
On the other hand, GA is likely to significantly undercount your users, since it’s a high profile target for ad and tracker blockers.
Why do you think “light tools” are more likely to over-count uniques than GA?
Light tools are over-counting because by definition they are not identifying users by IP/cookies- hence not identifying same user visiting after certain intervals as a unique user. They most often don't have much filtering options to eliminate certain user groups/bots which can inflate my traffic count.
The best way to properly count and track users from campaigns is by using UTMs which is not allowed by most light tools.
If I have a choice between under-counting and over-counting I'll go for the former because that way I'll not be over-optimistic about my product by counting bot users/duplicate users.
You’re misunderstanding how these tools work. They still use information like a user’s IP address to identify users — the difference is that they hash it, so that their data can’t be used to retrieve that information later. GoatCounter has a good summary of how various services calculate unique visitors.
I agree that some tools are using IP hashing but some are not (like Plausible doesn't mention about IP hashing in its privacy statement, so I assume it's not). So there is a chance that Plausible is over-counting traffic.
Also, what about bot traffic? How the light tools can exclude traffic from specified IPs or bots- because that will still result in over-counting.
According to their data policy, Plausible is hashing visitors' IPs.
The deal with hashing is that nothing that goes into the hash function can later be used to segment that data. In Plausible's case, they put the current date in the hash, so it's likely that their daily uniques are accurate (since the IP and date are the same) but they overcount on other intervals (since the hash would be different for the same IP on two different dates). They can get around this by recording multiple hashes for each pageview (for example, "daily" and "monthly"), and using the appropriate hash when segmenting that data.
I'm not sure how or if they're excluding bots; they'd essentially have to do any filtering before the hashing happens, or preserve some of that information (for example, recording a "bot likelihood score" for each visit based on IP address or other heuristics). You may be interested in how Fathom dealt with a DDoS attack on their customers dashboards.
I use Fathom which I love. Dead simple, not creepy and you can track conversions. This market is huge though and there are a ton of other services, many of which are made by other indies:
Thanks, I did actually end up with CloudFlare — I didn’t realize they had this out of the box.
For https://saasmanual.com I am using https://plausible.io - can totally recommend.
NO we prefer Cloudflare and Matomo.
But then, it would be very contradictory to our brand at rownd.io to use massive surveillance tech like GA.
I've heard good things about "Simple Analytics" as a viable alternative, but I haven't gotten to trying it out myself yet.
Due to Google becoming increasingly shady and outright evil, I've completely dumped those scumbags from both my personal tech-stack as well as any and all side-projects.
All my SaaS projects run on Cloudflare Pro which comes with its own completely server-side analytics solution. Sure, Cloudflare Analytics doesn't hold a candle compared to GA, but it includes the basics I need, while not spying on my users.
I used to but switched over to plausible a few months back. Easy to setup and understand without all the unnecessary nitty gritty details that GA provides.
I'd be curious to know what was your primary motivation to switch to Plausible? Is it just the simplicity?
It was partly to do with simplicity as GA had so much stuff that I barley looked at, but the main reason was to not require cookie banner permissions as it's fully GDPR compliant without me needing to do anything special
Cookie banner permission can be avoided by using a slightly customized GA set up.
Didn't know that although don't think if I did I would have done anything differently. The fact that there needs to be separate setup to avoid Google tracking/collecting data. Plausible is a simple one line copy and paste, no special setup required
If your use cases are limited, Plausible is perfectly fine for you. But it doesn't allow for event tracking (how many users scrolled to the bottom of my landing page-> should I fix my copy?) and true user counts (like how many users visited my app for more than 10 times in last one month). So there's a trade-off.
True, I never really looked at that stuff too much. Prob why I don't gain much views in my site lol 🤣
Despite being a Google enthusiast I don't use Google Analytics. I personally don't mind the kind of tracking it does. But making sure an Analytics-powered website or online resource complies with GDPR is a hassle (e.g. it's difficult to suspend tracking until the user gives consent), so I don't even bother.
Have you tried IP anonymization? That may help you get rid of GDPR hassle.
For the time being I get enough data from my websites (e.g. on Squarespace), so I have no immediate need for Google Analytics. But it's good to know, thanks.