Show HN: Why Google Analytics May Not Be the Best Option for Your Website (2023) | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Why Google Analytics May Not Be the Best Option for Your Website (2023)

metricswave.com

19 pointsfalcon_16 comments

In 2023, website owners, bloggers, and web developers need to re-evaluate their use of Google Analytics. While it has been a go-to tool for tracking website stats, its privacy concerns and limitations are becoming increasingly apparent.

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Whenever anyone asks me about ways to improve the performance of their web frontend my first question is always "What do you actually use the data you get from Google Analytics for?" 9 times in 10 the answer is "To see how many people visit my website." My next remark is usually something about vanity metrics and how conversions are what actually count, but that's because I'm a mean person. The point is that adding in Google Tag Manager for the use case of 'counting' is absolutely killing your website's perf. You can, and should, collect that information from the server logs with no frontend JS at all.

If you need more than just a counter then MetricsWave or Plausible or something is better than Google Analytics. The only reason to use Google Analytics is if you need to integrate it with other Google services like ad tracking.

I think another potential, valid reason is if you don't have access to the server logs - e.g. you host on GitHub Pages. Now, I still choose not to use analytics in that scenario, but I can understand why some would.

What is the current state of the art in server-side analytics?

I run goaccess on a cron job and have paired it with a MaxMind GeoIP database so that you can see where people are coming from etc.

https://goaccess.io/

This is pretty great. Thanks.

I tried using GA the other day. I was surprised how terrible the UI/UX was. I would literally rather have no idea how many visitors I have instead of using this tool. Google never fails to disappoint.

It has always been terrible, but the new version 4 is an abomination. I have no clue how a company of their size and resources is releasing such garbage. It seems like they have too many teams working on each product and poor oversight/communication between teams.

I love using clicky.com, homepage looks old school but the app is modern.

Has that simple, show-people-what-they-actually-care-about dashboard vibe, but has lots of hidden functionality around.

It also let's you see the lifetime of a single visitor in an easy fashion -> https://i.imgur.com/xeOnn2V.png

I still install GA on my sites but I never look at it.

I think metricwave.com and counter.dev style analytics are a bit too simplistic, would be nice to see just a few more features on top such as reports, alerts and integrations

I'm going to give criticism because I think this deserves it. By the looks of it, this is being created by someone who doesn't inherently understand how Google tracks users for advertising purposes, but also doesn't understand how GDPR works. There is not a single outgoing link that backs up any of the claims in this article, and it's written entirely tone-deaf.

I'd also add that there is fierce competition in this space now, but the article is written in a tone that assumes there isn't. It's very hard to trust projects like this that use 90% professional language peddling the product itself and nothing else.

All in all, in its current state I would not choose this over alternatives like Plausible or any of the other projects that do the same exact things but actually have a track record.

This account solely exists to promote products

Good luck, the product looks slick.

I see you have traffic coming from indiepa.ge, so I wonder which indie hacker are you and are you on twitter. I always wont to know who's behind something, particularly if im going to install their tracking tool. ;)

You can find me at @victoor (spanish) or @falcon_maker (english)

FYI your dashboard mispells “referrers” as “refferers”

Clearly it should be "referers"

Yes haha!

Do you support displaying comprehensive stats for wildcard subdomains? Do you have an API?

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