I have various low traffic websites, and just because I hated having to go through the burden of creating accounts for all of them in Google Analytics, I wrote a very simple web analytics engine called Microanalytics[1].

It is a Couchapp (which means it only takes a CouchDB database to work, no other server or backend) and it allows for emitting of custom events with a simple `ma(event, [optional_value])`.

Every event is tied to a session, so later you can analyse and filter events based on session, see exactly who did what on your site, see if the same user came back at some other day, things like this.

So, in my small websites I can clearly see when a person enters the site and all that. Also, 1 visitor makes a difference, and when I tested having Google Analytics alongside Microanalytics what I saw was that Google Analytics statistics showed a lot more visitors than Microanalytics. I know Microanalytics can't be wrong, because it literally counts me in real time when I enter the site, so I don't know what to think. The only thing it doesn't count is visitors without Javascript, but are there so much of them? Does Google Analytics count them? I think not.

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Also good to say: the way Microanalytics does data visualization is through a command line tool that prints to STDIN, so you can do all sorts of things with Unix pipes. For example, for doing an A/B Test experiment once, I just called `ma('version', versionName)` in each tested page, `ma('conversion', 'converted')` when appropriate, and later ran the following:

    for name in versionA versionB
        echo $name
        set v (microanalytics identifier inspect sessions --limit 300 | grep $name | wc -l)
        set c (microanalytics identifier inspect sessions --limit 300 | grep $name | grep converted | wc -l)
        echo $v $c (echo "$c / $v" | bc -l)
        echo
    end

(This example is in the fish shell, but you can do the same in bash, obviously.)

[1]: https://github.com/fiatjaf/microanalytics