I spent $9 to test drive Netlify Analytics
You might remember my previous article on finding alternative to Google Analytics. I was researching one, because I migrated my blog from self-hosted WordPress and lost my own server-side analytics.
When I started to use Fathom Analytics I noticed that my reported visits dropped. It was a little bit anticipated, because client-side analytics won't catch every single hit, but the difference was big enough for me to investigate. I needed to know if the migration hurt me.
Last month I decided to spend $9 to see what Netlify has to say about my traffic. It looks like it's much closer to the numbers I have been seeing before, so the drop is either entirely about client-side vs server-side or perhaps something with Fathom as well.
Intrigued? Read the whole post Testing Netlify server-side analytics. I am also interested if you personally use server-side analytics or Netlify ones?
Did you ever compared analytics side-by-side to see the differences? Results might surprise you!
I started using Netlify Analytics for my blog and later added Plausible Analytics (client-side). The difference is quite big and I managed to track a big part of it down. You get much more hits on the server side, but it is mostly bots. Client-side seems to be much more reliable for real users. I wrote some more details in this Twitter thread. I still have both running, so I can give you more details if you are interested.
Overall, Netlify’s $9 are not worth it IMO. It is too expensive for what it offers. The Analytics UI is very limited, like for example you can see only the top 15 pages and cannot set arbitrary time intervals. There is an undocumented API, though, which is quite powerful... 😈
A good general post about server vs client side analytics is this one: https://plausible.io/blog/server-log-analysis
Great, will have a look.
As I wrote in my articles Plausible would be my front-runner now, but I am thinking if the long term strategy should not be server side. I agree that $9 per site is not a great offering (but you can pay it as a thank you for the free hosting I guess).
:)
I agree that server side has the big advantage, that you don't have to inject scripts. However, because of the bad bot detection it is currently unusable for me...
Have you tried using your own custom domain with Fathom? I expect that would make up the difference, as some visits might be lost due to ad blockers.
I did not. Just the simple setup.
Does Netlify filter out search bots?
I don't know, but given I got so many hits I would say, no?
I saw a huge difference when I moved from GA to Netlify.
I really like how simple Netlify.
Both of my projects are there...
thanks for sharing!
This comment was deleted 5 years ago.
Yes, I was thinking this to myself. Maybe you need to combine both in some clever way.
This comment was deleted 6 years ago.
Thank you!