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Comment by tommiegannert | Hacker News Reader

> Use analytics, set-up funnel tracking

Any thoughts on which analytics services, regarding privacy and "acceptable to users" kind of metrics?

(Former Google employee, who don't quite get the hatred Google receives online, but feeling that Google Analytics has a really complex UI for my needs.)

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Mixpanel, their UI is amazing and they make it really easy to setup graphs that are actually useful.

I'd recommend only sending server side events so you get really accurate stats and no privacy invasion.

I tried to limit the number of events tracked as well, and made sure I knew why I was tracking something, and not just "because I can", I found that it made it easier to focus on what matters.

How far does webserver access log analysis take you? If you log IP address or some other kind of user fingerprinting and referer headers I think you'd get pretty far already in doing rudimentary funnel analytics without needing permission or installing 3rd party tooling on the website. Mind you, my understanding of analytics is minimal at best; I don't know what use cases are usually applied to this data.

Plausible for marketing site, Mixpanel for the app, has been a great combo for me.

I use Plausible analytics for site analytics - you can do quite a bit just by firing events when users land on a page (don't need to know who they are, just need a count of people that see page A, B, and C).

If you like self-hosting: https://www.uxwizz.com/

I built https://graphjson.com for builders like yourself! Feel free to email me (in bio) if you have any questions. I wrote about how and why I built it here https://www.graphjson.com/guides/about

I’ve found Azure’s Application Insights to be quite privacy focused. You can host the instance in whatever region you prefer. The UI isn’t all that great, but it seems pretty decent.

Are any Azure regions currently operated by independent companies that license Azure code from Microsoft?

(if not, what difference does the region make privacy-wise, if the parent US company can ultimately still access the data?)

Does it matter if you’ve turned off all PII collection? If that’s your threat model to your own app though (ie, doing stuff that’s illegal in the US but not where you serve traffic), self hosting is probably the way to go.

No, if they process no PII then it does not matter.

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