Building my own web analytics tool | Hacker News Reader

Building my own web analytics tool

johnmathews.eu

60 pointsmthwsjc_20 comments

So with his own analytics, Cloudflare's server-side analytics, Cloudflare's Analytics script and Google Analytics he's got 4 different measurements now. And according to his follow-up article they all return different results.

welcome to web analytics.

yes. server-side must be the most accurate, but I'd still want a good way to filter out bots. for a site with a technical audience any general client side solution is too prone to blocking.

Have you tried Microsoft Clarity?

https://clarity.microsoft.com/

I haven't. The main motivation was to see if I could build an analytics tool, it wasn't really about getting better analytics. Though it was interesting to compare the different tools.

It's not loading... I can only assume your server is hardly keeping up with the influx of traffic :D

Still not loading 4 hours later, the request to /get_analytics is not getting a response.

I assume it would time out eventually but I left the page after 30+ seconds without it returning anything.

It should be loading just fine, though it is slow at the moment. The good news is that the HN wave didn't cause any errors or break anything, the bad news is that the response time quadrupled and I'm not sure why yet.

If you are looking for something that is a bit more privacy friendly and not a feature overkill, check out Plausible.io (not affiliated, just a happy customer). There is also a self-hosted option.

How does this compare to Momato

More of a marketing comparison than a technical one, but here you go: https://plausible.io/vs-matomo

My main takeaways and why I personally use Plausible are their script is lightweight, it uses no cookies and therefore is by default GDPR compliant and it respects my visitor’s privacy by default. Also a big point, Matomo is way more complex than Plausible and personally overkill for all of my use cases.

Matomo has a cookie-less mode.

I assume you are referring to Matomo the open source alternative to google analytics

https://matomo.org/

I've self hosted their analytics and the setup could not be simple enough! Their docs are amazing, the community is active and helpful and the docker upgrade commands are just below their version releases which is super helpful. Really happy with their product.

My site only has less than 100 views most months, so I use goatcounter the hosted version of which has a free tier (but can also self host)

I literally just built my own analytics server too! It's got a different feature set, but still it was crazy to see this here today

cool! how did you do it? what was your approach?

Yeah same here, literally started to run it localy this morning. What's that psychological effect called when you suddenly see a thing everywhere?

Check out Darwin if you want something free, simple, yet super useful to work with. https://darwin.so

Free? It's says $79 per month

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