Ask HN: Simple alternative to Google Analytics | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Simple alternative to Google Analytics

18 pointscsomar16 comments

I'm looking for an alternative to Google Analytics. The reasons:

- Referral SPAM has become huge, and I'm playing catch up trying to filter them out.

- It's way too complicated now, and I'm looking for simple measurements.

What I'm looking for:

- Accurate, no ref SPAM analytics SaaS

- Visits, Visitors, Geo, Page Views, Duration, Bounce Rate and Traffic Sources.

- Simple and easy to use interface.

Any suggestions?

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I recently launched Pleasant.io (http://pleasant.io/) for this exact problem. I wanted a simple, easy to use alternative to Google Analytics (and one that respected the privacy of me and my users). Please feel free to give it a try - any money you spend over the first 3 months is given to Watsi :-)

Great looking service.

I think your pricing is off though. I was about to sign up right before i saw the variable pricing. I'm not sure why but I'd much rather know exactly how much I'd be spending every month. Even if that means I'll be logically paying more over the long term.

Thanks, appreciate it. That's a very good point, I hadn't considered that. I'm going to have a think about changing it - thanks for bringing that up.

If it's not too complex I would recommend an AWS,EC2 model - let customers pay as you go or opt in to pre buy for predictable and possiblely reduced pricing.

That's the current model I'm using, thinking it'd be cheaper for most users. I'm not doing any pre-buying yet but was planning to, however now I'm considering a subscription model.

No problem man!

Let me know if you ever do, I'll definitely sign up to test it out. Email is in bio if you ever want more feedback - I really like what you're doing. :)

Host your own analytics using Piwik - http://piwik.org/

Piwik is the obvious choice, and it blocks referrer spam by default and hosting can be subcontracted out of you don't want to deal with setting it up.

http://piwik.org/blog/2015/05/stopping-referrer-spam/

http://piwik.org/hosting/

+1 for Piwik.

It's better to have the raw data on your own server. I also like Piwik better than GA.

http://get.gaug.es/ was built to do exactly this with unlimited sites.

There is also Snowplow. http://snowplowanalytics.com/ It's more of a toolbox, so it fails on the simple-to-use part. But it does lots of high-end/sophisticated things that other tools can't.

For anyone else (at a very high level):

- written in Scala

- $1250 or $5k("real-time") per month

- https://github.com/snowplow/snowplow

I've been using https://clicky.com/ for several years and on some high traffic sites, thoroughly recommend.

I think you might block some identified spam sources URLs! But it's not all the time very efficient! Will also be happy to have some recommendations on that point!

check out http://kilometer.io/ - simple way to track key events

clicky.com is pretty good

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