Looking for simple app / site analytics product
I'm looking for a very simple site / app analytics product for my marketing site. I basically just want to track page views, clicks -- things of that nature. I want to do this on the server side, NOT through a client side script (my site is a React SPA and I will capture the event data there and transmit it to a Node.js server).
I also don't need any advanced reporting, segmenting, campaigns, user journeys, or things like that. Just want to see how many people visited certain pages and what they did. Basically I just want an api (preferably with a Node.js client) I can send custom events to and then view them in a simple dashboard.
There are a lot of analytics products out there, but I haven't found anything in line with what I've described above. Have any of you come across a product like this?
Better yet, have any IndieHackers here created one?
I guess we don't have anything like that.. those analytics apps have A LOT of stuff that usually we don't use at all.
I'll follow this post, i would appreciate if someone share with us something simple as that: API to receive events and view those analytics events in a clear way without a lot information that we don't need it.
Exactly. They all seem spammy, privacy invading, and bloated with a bunch of stuff I don't want. They are also not really set up to work well with SPAs.
Segment is probably the closest thing to what you want. You can fire server or client side events and then hook that up to any one of a number of analytics services.
This morning I was looking at Fathom. It's open source and more privacy-conscious than other tools in this space. It uses a client side cookie to aggregate events and then sends rolled up events to your own fathom server that are anonymized - no potentially PII data is collected. You just get raw daily stats of new and returning sessions, page views, bounce rate, and time on page. It's a very simple solution that should be GDPR compliant since there is no PII touching your server and it respects things like Do Not Track browser APIs.
Yeah I like Segment, but it's just a connector, and I'm not too fond of the services to which Segment connects.
That Fathom product looks pretty close to what I'm after, barring the cookie part. Thanks for highlighting it.
Google Analytics + Hotjar?
I want to stay away from Google Analytics.
May I ask why? I'm actually using it, are there any drawbacks which I'm not aware of? :D
GA relies on a client side script, which I want to avoid, I don't like the interface, and I'm not sure where Google is on the whole privacy / tracking issues. As far as the software itself, I think it's fine so you shouldn't have anything to worry about on that end.
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