Fathom – Simple, trustworthy website analytics
usefathom.com
usefathom.com
Matomo looks like a GA clone that'd take some getting acclimated to.
Really looking forward to trying Fathom.
[1] https://github.com/matomo-org/matomo/issues/6223
(i would use matomo if they fixed this issue)
Probably not a conspiracy... given that you could fork it, implement this feature, and then PR it back to the main repo...
Matomo is very complex. Trackingcode is simple, comparable to Fathom.
I experimented with using GoAccess (https://goaccess.io) on CloudFront logs instead of using Google Analytics. It gave me a lot of what I needed, without the overhead or intrusiveness of client-side code—and it provided a more complete view of my traffic because it isn't stymied by browser plugins that block tracking.
The downside was having to save the logs, periodically run it to generate reports, etc. It's not a lot of work, but it's more work than GA. I think CDN providers should just include managed analytics tools of this caliber as either part of the package or for a modest extra fee.
Is this kind of snark really necessary in top marketing copy? I get what you are saying in terms of freemiums ins and outs, but I don't know if it should be my first impression to your company's message.
To each their own, just feels a bit cheap IMHO.
Rules are made up by a consensus of the players. You've just been told by 3 people, 4 including me, that you broke the Rules. This means you broke them.
A landing page for a company is like a job interview. Certain things are expected. First impressions matter and you're on your best behaviour. Sure, you can wear bunny slippers to the interview and then complain that you don't want to work for that company anyway if you can't have some fun. But who's out of a job?
A little bit quirky might be OK - snarky is definitely not. I recommend changing your copy immediately, and reflecting on how better to gracefully accept constructive criticism from what should be your ideal target market in future.
I'm not a copywriter, but I think something like "We’ve become complacent in trading information for free access to web services, and then complain when they robotically testify before congress." would be an improvement.
Well if you use the stock price of $FB as a proxy, Congress was no problem. In fact Facebook stock is at all time record highs. At the height of the media hysteria it traded down to $152, in the last 4 months it has rocketed up 33%.
This snark comes off amateur. Fathom is very very basic and minimal. No geo/location metrics. No browser metrics. No goals. No custom events.
Whoa, I did not expect to see Fathom show up on Hacker News. It's very early but our plan is indeed to go down a similar road as Matomo, albeit more opinionated. Hopefully resulting in a simpler product in the long run.
I feel it's important to point out out that with Fathom, no personal information is tracked (or stored), at all. Only daily and hourly aggregates are stored on the server.
And yes, the demo should not require you to enter credentials. The simple reason is that I haven't gotten to polishing that experience just yet. Sorry.
But are you concerned that GA will come out with an "overview panel" for dummies, that cuts into your appeal? Or do you have a plan to stay ahead if GA comes out with a view like this?
Given the current state of Google Analytics, staying ahead in terms of simplicity shouldn't be an issue for a long, long time.
So long as credentials are required, it may be wise to change demo@demo.com to demo@example.com:
Would like to know how to deploy for production.
I was pleasantly surprised that when I looked into gauges that the interface looks modern (unlike the screenshots on the start page) so it seems that it changed hands and is actively being developed again. I used it a while ago when it was bought up by Github.
If you sell software, you have a customer that can do whatever they like.
If you provide SAAS you can tie in the user more and more.
Please check out https://matomo.org (former name Piwik) for open-source self-hosted website analytics (with server logs support)
It's very basic compared to Piwik, but it runs on PostgreSQL, my DB of choice, and it's written in Go, not PHP, which means it has higher performance and is more secure.
Just wanted to add that you can also use Fathom with MySQL or SQLite if that's more your cup of tea. It supports those 3 database engines right now.
[1] https://count.ly
I think that for your average "offline" business, just throwing Google Analytics at it is major overkill. It may even cause the website owner to simply not look at their stats just because they don't know what to look for exactly.
I'm pretty sure this is misleading/false. I don't think Google uses Analytics data from your site to target AdWords on other sites.
Maybe it's true in a general sense that GA gives them lots of aggregate data which they can use to make smarter business decisions about other products including ads. But it is a myth that Google Analytics data feeds directly into any Google ad-targeting platform.
I think the main thing Google gets out of free-tier Analytics is it encourages small webmasters to pay attention to their traffic and makes it easy to demonstrate the value of buying ads from Google.
https://www.google.com/analytics/terms/us.html
https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/6004245
https://policies.google.com/technologies/partner-sites
Interesting aside: Google Analytics customers are required to prominently state that their site uses Google Analytics. I suspect many, if not most, customers don't do this.
> What is the data used for?
> Google uses Google Analytics data to provide the Google Analytics measurement service to customers. Identifiers such as cookies and app instance IDs are used to measure user interactions with a customer’s sites and/or apps, while IP addresses are used to provide and protect the security of the service, and to give the customer a sense of where in the world their users come from.
I'm pretty sure GA data doesn't intermingle with AdWords targeting profiles in a default configuration.
If that was true, then Google wouldn't consider it a violation of its ToS for HIPAA-covered entities to use its analytics product.
"If you are (or become) a Covered Entity or Business Associate under HIPAA, you may not use Google Analytics for any purpose or in any manner involving Protected Health Information unless you have received prior written consent to such use from Google."
Source: https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/6366371?hl=en
As for the quotes terms, the same are there for any personal information (in my EU-based account at least) and you grossly misread it: it says you cannot send Google protected classes of information, not that you cannot use GA at all.
The reason is obvious: Google does not want to have any legal obligations from running GA. Same with forbidding storage of personal information.
Disclaimer - it's neither self hosted nor free (nor very expensive), and I was previously a part of the team that built it. I can honestly say no data is being sold to 3rd parties, as should be expected from a paid service.
But at the same time, stats packages have been available for year simply by parsing your server logs (awstats, etc). Old solutions still work, even if the problem space is evolving in new directions.
Why is it that not one SEO organisation/company/snake-oil salesperson ever thinks to look at the server logs? One problem that Progressive Web App/server worker solves is catching those messages that don't get sent to Google Analytics and making sure they are sent. You would think that server stats offer a level of truthiness that SEO types would be interested in.
In theory you could do backend tracking, e.g. default server logs and not run cookies on the frontend until the site visitor does something requiring state, e.g. adding to cart. Then you could throw up the 'cookie notice' and aggregate their previous page visits to get the data needed to see where the sales funnel is working, even de-anonymising it so you know more about a given customer and their browsing habits.
When you're hosted on S3, etc, you don't get access to the logs.
For larger sites which are hosted across a number of webservers, behind a load-balancer, getting a unified access-log is also a little fiddly.
But I guess the honest answer is that it's not trendy enough these days. With Javascript submission of "stuff" you get much more data about your visitors than you can glean from the server-side logs.
This is UX feedback from a lazy user. Why make me type in a login and password? Especially one that I have to remember from the previous screen?
It's trivial effort to just setup an auto login based on some query string parameter right? As in, url?demo=true results in either populating the login/password fields so all I have to do is hit the button, but then it's also trivial effort to just add in some JS that triggers the button for me, thus auto login.
It's not.
You don't need to explain how to do it, you don't need to make an argument on time to implement - unless the time to implement is insanely high.
Use the language of business: You are losing prospects by creating work for them. Resolving this will help your sales funnel. Over time this could be worth substantial revenue, and contribute to the ultimate survival of your product. That is worth a lot more than how long it takes to implement or how to do it.
That said, I see your point but I will try to defend mine. Your language of business sentence is basically implied by the pure existence of my complaint right? Should I have to type every implication out in order to provide any feedback? And this being a tech place for tech people I wanted to emphasize how simple it would be to correct (I don't really even know if the creator/app owner is reading, so it's more of a general feedback for other people who build products.) Highly subjective either way. Hell, the app owner could argue they don't care about people that don't manually type in the info because they're not really potential customers. I don't know if I'd fully agree, but it could be a form of lead qualification in which your business language feedback would not hold weight. It's at least somewhat true, because I was just curiously kicking the tires. I have no use for this product.
--- I always struggle with this type of response on feedback. They seem to think that how feedback is given is important, and that the phrasing also is important.
They don't need to explain the business impact, you don't need to use the perfect words, unless it's insanely subtle.
Use the language that takes the least amount of time and effort. We don't want you to forego on giving feedback, since that may push you to not give feedback at all, resolving in substantial lost in quality, and contribute to the ultimate destruction of your product. The fact that you share insightful feedback is a lot more important than the exact words.
-- It's the job of the business people to listen and analyze the business impact of things.
After all, I want login screens to look nice and come up fast, too.
we are working on ironing out the UX of our site (it's a single column of text, that we whipped together in an hour, so we could focus on building the software). so it's completely a work in progress at this particular moment.
It would be awesome to have a more cohesive example. Is this reading log files? Or using client-side JS? If the latter, do I have to have the Fathom server internet-facing so that the JS can report in?
[0] https://redistats.com/ [1] https://redistats.com/privacy-policy
[STRs] In top right, select 7/8 as start date and 7/10 as end date.
[Expected] Displays data for 7/8, 7/9, and 7/10.
[Actual] Displays data for 7/8 and 7/9 only.
Yay lurkers!
Boo lurkers!
Can you elaborate a little bit on the use-cases where this would apply? I can get into the idea that tracking would ideally not rely on JavaScript, but the dashboard? Surely the administrator can enable JavaScript for their Fathom dashboard, right?
Also, as a side effect, it's considerably faster browsing the internet without JavaScript enabled.
Is there a roadmap or planned features page for fathom?
That said, I am now wondering what the numbers would have been like if we did not honor DNT...
This quote keeps living on endlessly. It's based on a naive and terribly over-simplified view of the internet, 'free' products, and capitalism in general. TLDR: Consumers aren't the product if the product would not exist without customers, and customers wouldn't be on the product unless it provides them value.
Not to mention publisher web analytics, such as this, are rarely being used to target ads. That is a completely different .js file (still) being embedded alongside the analytics.
I'm all for privacy but it's important to be accurate about this stuff. No major newspaper or free site is going to stop 'making their visitors the product' by switching to a privacy-first web analytics product. FB has accomplished equally as much as Google Analytics without providing any analytics service.
I think the core of this statement really is that if the users and funders of a product are the same, their interests are much better aligned.
If your data is used for profit, you and your data is what the company sells to other people. By definition you are the product.
Whether that's a bad thing depends on your view, but to me it means the product I use is skewed towards the needs of the people who pay, which often have demands that aren' in my best interest.
The reason this is naive and oversimplified is that, say, Google, does not sell your data. Your data is their competitive advantage and they have every reason to not sell it. There is no service Google provides where someone can go in and request your data or access it.
Advertisers are generally not buying you, or your data, they are buying access to your attention based on the data a third party has about you, but not the data itself.
Selling your information is a different business model (think insurance, credit reports, LexisNexis and so on) and is usually not what's under discussion when this thought-terminating cliché gets used.
Depends on how you define sell.
Advertisers pay to use the Google's collected data about people in order to better target their ads. This happens through Google's advertising channels (Doubleclick, AdWords, etc...)
Money changes hands. Personal data is involved. Sounds like selling to me.
Perhaps you should say "Google does not directly sell copies of your data," instead. But there is indeed a transaction involving personal data.
Your data never leaves Google, nor can third parties acces it. Google is not selling your data. QED.