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Comment by pilif | Hacker News Reader

While I do like GoAccess and I like owning my own data, there's still a huge difference between what tools like GoAccess offer and what the elephant in the room, Google Analytics, offers.

It's not just the data available by default, it's also the very advanced user interface allowing even somewhat non-technical people to produce their own reports and dashboards.

Yes, you only co-own the data together with Google, but at least you have the data compared to using a home-grown solution which will either not provide your product managers with what they need or which will consume all of your life as you slowly re-implement your own Google Analytics which will never be as good and/or featureful as the original.

Of course, if it's just about your personal blog and if you're willing to spend some time on the tooling itself, then yes, tools like these don't have the privacy issues otherwise accompanying third-party analytics.

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For me, the problem with GA (or Matomo or any JS analytics) is that it’s not accurate with the people visiting your website.

You lose all the ones with a blocker, all the ones with JS turned of.

Of course it’s not the biggest percentage, but still.

So you’re right, it depends of what the website is. It’s easier to follow individuals with a JS solution.

This is the sort of thing that the W3C committee and open-source web-companies should be researching/solving instead of "HTTPS" and "SSL pinning", "new HTML5 tags", "web notification", "location apis", and "DNS over HTTPS" type of stuff (although they are important on some level). We shouldn't have to rely on JS in order to do these sorts of website analytics. It could arguably be part of the browser stack and within the users' realm of control.

Instead we now have disable GA or all JS in order to not be tracked. GA is a huge privacy issue, and I have no idea why no one is looking at this more closely than some of the other things I see as trivial.

Google controls most of the web's search. It controls a huge chunk of the browser market. And a huge chunk of the websites out there use GA if not google-ads. Between Google and Facebook, we are constantly being tracked and monitored for maximum benefit/profit.

Case in point: Even without GA, I recently browsed a blog that had a Disqus comments section embedded on it. The embedded Disqus script did a post to "https://accounts.google.com/o/oauth2/iframe" that had a referral header telling google exactly the page I was at, and it included a few other potentially-tracking tokens. Bad? You decide. But this is not what we should be allowing the players on the web to do, and we shouldn't feel like conspiracy-theorists for being bothered by it.

GA does support using Google Tag Manager and a NOSCRIPT iframe for recording visits from people with JavaScript disabled.

You can also either proxy GA through your own domain, or use server side APIs to track those with blockers. Both support passing the browser IP as a parameter.

Also, fwiw, just noting both are technically possible. I'm not speaking to whether either is okay ethically.

FYI: Paranoid adblockers / privacy protectors will block iframe to remote domains. For example: uMatrix by gorhill (same author as uBlock Origin) does this.

I think a big problem with Google Analytics is accuracy, especially with the now so popular adblockers. Log analysis such as GoAccess should be able to track these down fine since it works at the server level.

I believe tracking visitors at the client level deflates the actual number of visitors. On the other hand, server-side tracking gives you a more accurate number at the cost of not knowing for sure if the client is a human behind a browser.

You can programmatically send hits to GA from your server, and get the benefit of the nice UI.

That's correct but there is also an alternative approach. You can track your user event data into your database using an open-source solution such as Rakam API (https://github.com/rakam-io/rakam) or Snowplow (https://github.com/snowplow/snowplow) and use a product analytics tool such as Rakam (https://rakam.io/product) that provides a set of prebuilt reports & ad-hoc reporting interface for the data on top of your database.

That way, you won't be sharing your data with a third-party company, have full control over your data, be able to access an interface similar to Google Analytics with prebuilt reports and also have the ability to model your data for your custom needs and do custom reporting.

Shameless plug: I'm the maintainer of the Rakam API and working for the company behind that open-source product.

Google Analytics keeps track of visitors using cookies, so if a browser has cookies or JavaScript disabled, then it won't keep track of it. This includes the now so popular adblockers and bots as well. Log analysis such as GoAccess should be able to track these down fine since it works at the server level.

I believe tracking visitors at the client level deflates the actual number of visitors as pointed above. On the other hand, server-side tracking gives you a more accurate number at the cost of not knowing for sure if the client is a human behind a browser.

Have you tried Matomo?

> produce their own reports and dashboards.

A good open source project would likely be to dump that all in a DB abd expose it as OData. Although PowerBI is non-free, it would cover what GA can do and then, not some, but a huge amount.

When did you last use Google Analytics? It became useless about two years ago when they refused to block referral spam.

goaccess does not deal with this either.

Also, Google Analytics (and other analytical solutions) give much more information about the visitors than can be inferred from access logs.

Not that I recommend using GA - I've dropped all analytical tools from my sites long time ago.

I did the same for a few years. Recently I installed a central matomo instance for all my sites to hit. It's pretty good!

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