The problem is, there are very few free, privacy-focused analytics services. Why free? Because I'm not going to pay for analytics while I have zero income. Why privacy-focused? I care more about my users' privacy than about crap like funneling etc.
It's very difficult to provide a free service in case you're not making money somehow from the data you collect. It takes a lot of money/resources to run and store analytics data and keep it up at all times under any traffic load. Even Cloudflare cannot do it for free as they limit you to 7 days of data retention and remove anything that happened more than a week ago.
Hey Marko, I love Plausible Analytics and use it for all my sites. With all the features you've added this is becoming a real alternative to Google Analytics.
Have you thought about making for example accounts with < 100 visits per month free? That might reduce the burden for people trying it out (which they should do!)
thanks Peter! would be great if we could do that! the reason we're priced as fair and affordable as possible is to give more site owners a chance to de-google. if we can have a free tier, it would make that even more possible.
we're growing (recently became sustainable) and building our infrastructure so it's something that we may look at in the future. any free plan would need to be limited though (pageviews, data retention, perhaps even by features). and additional load on customer support is also something i would be concerned about so definitely something we would need to figure out how to deal with.
for now we have a completely free and unlimited 30 day trial and there's also a free as in beer self-hosted version for those who want to manage their own server infrastructure.
Oh yeah, totally aware of that. That's why, for most providers, free means either you, your users, or both lose some privacy.
I'm just looking for a service with a free starter tier that I can use until I can drive sufficient traffic to many enough money so I can pay for a higher tier. So for that I think Cloudflare might do the trick.
As the article rightly says....Google is really a beast....
I don't remember any search which shows search result....What it shows is ads. First page is full of it.
Also, it is polarising the society by feeding the results that you would like to see instead of showing the facts and neutral results.....AND this is largely because of the Google Analytics.
I really think that this privacy is one of the most stupid trend nowadays. RGPD law is more logic
At least, you don't use google search, google chrome, microsoft, facebook, twitter smartphone, laptop,... you have absolutely ZERO chance to have a real privacy.
You are alse tracked by your phone carrier, so no need to use a phone.
Also, you are using GPS with waze/google, so you are tracked.
Ok, there is maybe 0.00001% of people that are using nothing, so yes, it make sens for them.
But for 99.9999%, you are already tracked.
Easier said than done, unfortunately. GA is kind of the gold standard at this point, and I'm not certain that if people en masse stopped using it (which is unlikely anyway), that it would really hurt Google's bottom line as a company.
You can say the same about Google search, Gmail, Facebook, climate change etc. And if we all said that (it doesn't matter if i take a personal action if everyone else doesn't follow me), we will definitely end up in an even worse situation than we are now where two companies pretty much dominate the web and can do what they please.
The problem is (to my knowledge), is that most alternatives like Fathom or Plausible don't offer as in-depth analysis for stuff like funnels and customer journeys. GA is really to set up too.
I am Emir, a co-founder of HockeyStack. We offer easy-to-understand yet powerful analytics with funnels, goals, customer journey, marketing campaign tracking, etc. all with completely no-code. Let me know what you think!
It is hosted in our servers located in Frankfurt. However, we have the cookieless tracking option ready to get rid of GDPR banners and will launch it in the second week of March :)
Depends really on what your needs are. In Plausible we support UTM tags and we also support very flexible custom events. So you can track aggregate data from paid click in social media or search to a conversion on your site.
It's impossible to track anything personal without getting user consent. Even with GA you need to ask for it, and most people say no if you give them an easy opt out as you're required under GDPR.
Yeah I did this. Used Piwik/Matomo for a few years on a few sites, then switched to GoAccess. Neither of which were without their hours of setup time, so they aren't exactly what I'd call free either. Morally yes, but in terms of workload, no.
I'm somewhere in between now. I've whacked the new analytics on a site I'm going to need verifiable/trustworthy stats on. I still use GoAccess on my personal projects because it's just enough information to be useful. But I also dip into the Google Search Console very often because they are offering some valuable data nowadays, without me needing to slow my site down or track individual users.
It's a good discussion to have though, and one that will shape the future of the web, no doubt.
I'd like to highly recommend that people use Amplitude instead.
It forces you to pick and choose the events you want to track. That approach is, in my view, so much better than sticking in GA and having an absolute mountain of data to wade through. Consciously building analytics up from scratch means you focus on one problem at a time that you really care about.
More generally, stop using external analytics tools.
Set up a private Matomo anywhere, and use some available scripts as a proxy, so you can be absolutely 100% sure that ads blockers and such prevent you to see the REAL statistics.
I'm sure some people benefit from all the things GA has to offer, but for me it's just overwhelming.
I'm quite happy with Simple Analytics so far, as it shows exactly what I'm interested about: number of visitors and number of page views, paths breakdown, device and location. It's also filterable, so you can go a bit deeper into analysing things.
I agree about the hypocrite bit in part, but I think there's a slight difference.
If I choose to use Gmail then I'm making the decision to give my data Google.
If I use GA on my site then I'm making a decision to give my users' data to Google (they can opt-out of course, but I could respect their privacy in the first place and not force them to do so).
I'm not saying we shouldn't track anything, I think we do need some metrics from users in order to run a service. Just that we should try and capture the smallest amount of data we can.
I use ConvertKit for emails for example. I'm not over the moon that they track individual email opens, but I do need some data about open rates to be able to improve my content.
true! at least there are now good alternatives to pretty much all google products so for those that do want to de-google their lives, it is possible and can be done
The problem is, there are very few free, privacy-focused analytics services. Why free? Because I'm not going to pay for analytics while I have zero income. Why privacy-focused? I care more about my users' privacy than about crap like funneling etc.
I want to replace GA on my sites with https://www.cloudflare.com/web-analytics/
It's very difficult to provide a free service in case you're not making money somehow from the data you collect. It takes a lot of money/resources to run and store analytics data and keep it up at all times under any traffic load. Even Cloudflare cannot do it for free as they limit you to 7 days of data retention and remove anything that happened more than a week ago.
Hey Marko, I love Plausible Analytics and use it for all my sites. With all the features you've added this is becoming a real alternative to Google Analytics.
Have you thought about making for example accounts with < 100 visits per month free? That might reduce the burden for people trying it out (which they should do!)
thanks Peter! would be great if we could do that! the reason we're priced as fair and affordable as possible is to give more site owners a chance to de-google. if we can have a free tier, it would make that even more possible.
we're growing (recently became sustainable) and building our infrastructure so it's something that we may look at in the future. any free plan would need to be limited though (pageviews, data retention, perhaps even by features). and additional load on customer support is also something i would be concerned about so definitely something we would need to figure out how to deal with.
for now we have a completely free and unlimited 30 day trial and there's also a free as in beer self-hosted version for those who want to manage their own server infrastructure.
Makes sense, thanks for sharing your thoughts around that. Wishing you all the best!
Oh yeah, totally aware of that. That's why, for most providers, free means either you, your users, or both lose some privacy.
I'm just looking for a service with a free starter tier that I can use until I can drive sufficient traffic to many enough money so I can pay for a higher tier. So for that I think Cloudflare might do the trick.
As the article rightly says....Google is really a beast....
I don't remember any search which shows search result....What it shows is ads. First page is full of it.
Also, it is polarising the society by feeding the results that you would like to see instead of showing the facts and neutral results.....AND this is largely because of the Google Analytics.
I have personally used Plausible.io. It's good.
thanks Priya!
I really think that this privacy is one of the most stupid trend nowadays. RGPD law is more logic
At least, you don't use google search, google chrome, microsoft, facebook, twitter smartphone, laptop,... you have absolutely ZERO chance to have a real privacy.
You are alse tracked by your phone carrier, so no need to use a phone.
Also, you are using GPS with waze/google, so you are tracked.
Ok, there is maybe 0.00001% of people that are using nothing, so yes, it make sens for them.
But for 99.9999%, you are already tracked.
I %100 agree with this. Privacy became a marketing buzzword rather than a standard for all products in the market.
Easier said than done, unfortunately. GA is kind of the gold standard at this point, and I'm not certain that if people en masse stopped using it (which is unlikely anyway), that it would really hurt Google's bottom line as a company.
You can say the same about Google search, Gmail, Facebook, climate change etc. And if we all said that (it doesn't matter if i take a personal action if everyone else doesn't follow me), we will definitely end up in an even worse situation than we are now where two companies pretty much dominate the web and can do what they please.
I have to agree with csallen.
The problem is (to my knowledge), is that most alternatives like Fathom or Plausible don't offer as in-depth analysis for stuff like funnels and customer journeys. GA is really to set up too.
Hey fellow indie hacker!
I am Emir, a co-founder of HockeyStack. We offer easy-to-understand yet powerful analytics with funnels, goals, customer journey, marketing campaign tracking, etc. all with completely no-code. Let me know what you think!
hockeystack.com
Nice! Is the data hosted on your servers or mine? (as in: do I need a GDPR banner?)
It is hosted in our servers located in Frankfurt. However, we have the cookieless tracking option ready to get rid of GDPR banners and will launch it in the second week of March :)
Depends really on what your needs are. In Plausible we support UTM tags and we also support very flexible custom events. So you can track aggregate data from paid click in social media or search to a conversion on your site.
It's impossible to track anything personal without getting user consent. Even with GA you need to ask for it, and most people say no if you give them an easy opt out as you're required under GDPR.
Yeah I did this. Used Piwik/Matomo for a few years on a few sites, then switched to GoAccess. Neither of which were without their hours of setup time, so they aren't exactly what I'd call free either. Morally yes, but in terms of workload, no.
I'm somewhere in between now. I've whacked the new analytics on a site I'm going to need verifiable/trustworthy stats on. I still use GoAccess on my personal projects because it's just enough information to be useful. But I also dip into the Google Search Console very often because they are offering some valuable data nowadays, without me needing to slow my site down or track individual users.
It's a good discussion to have though, and one that will shape the future of the web, no doubt.
I'd like to highly recommend that people use Amplitude instead.
It forces you to pick and choose the events you want to track. That approach is, in my view, so much better than sticking in GA and having an absolute mountain of data to wade through. Consciously building analytics up from scratch means you focus on one problem at a time that you really care about.
Is goal tracking no-code on Amplitude?
More generally, stop using external analytics tools.
Set up a private Matomo anywhere, and use some available scripts as a proxy, so you can be absolutely 100% sure that ads blockers and such prevent you to see the REAL statistics.
Haters gonna hate
I'm sure some people benefit from all the things GA has to offer, but for me it's just overwhelming.
I'm quite happy with Simple Analytics so far, as it shows exactly what I'm interested about: number of visitors and number of page views, paths breakdown, device and location. It's also filterable, so you can go a bit deeper into analysing things.
This comment was deleted a year ago.
I agree about the hypocrite bit in part, but I think there's a slight difference.
If I choose to use Gmail then I'm making the decision to give my data Google.
If I use GA on my site then I'm making a decision to give my users' data to Google (they can opt-out of course, but I could respect their privacy in the first place and not force them to do so).
I'm not saying we shouldn't track anything, I think we do need some metrics from users in order to run a service. Just that we should try and capture the smallest amount of data we can.
I use ConvertKit for emails for example. I'm not over the moon that they track individual email opens, but I do need some data about open rates to be able to improve my content.
true! at least there are now good alternatives to pretty much all google products so for those that do want to de-google their lives, it is possible and can be done
This comment was deleted a year ago.