you could actually get more from plain old log parsing in some cases. First of all with GA you can't access the raw data. With logs you can create new type of stats/metrics/charts and apply them on past data. Also, IIRC GA uses random sampling - only a % of connections are recorded and the data being shown is extrapolated from those samples. While I'm not arguing that given the vast amount of data at disposal, huge capacity and great engineers they can make those extrapolations very accurate, I'm not entirely convinced it is precise for (very) small traffic websites. And since a small traffic logging requires both small storage space and small processing capacity the resources needed for keeping and processing your own logs are insignificant while the results might be useful.
Sure you can setup and run your own site and CMS easily enough, but running even hourly bulk log ingestion is usually not as straight forward and the information you can derive is very limited comparative to js based tracking.
Matamo ( formerly Piwik) is decent but still takes some time to setup and get right.
The main thing that the analytics tells you if you are promoting anything, is which of those promotions is actually working and driving visitors to your site.
I don't think it's unreasonable to require them to provide you some sort in insight into your traffic data in that case.
You can to promotion tracking with just log parsing, depending on how your system is built. There's a large number of sites that handle that by simply having unique URL for each promotional partner.
Have you actually used Google Analytics? Doesn't sound like it.
First, being able to get stats on real traffic and not bots/crawlers is very important and GA does an excellent job of this.
Google Analytics also allows you to see how people actually use your site. Stats like how long, what their visit path looks like, and when they leave your site. It also lets you see demographic info, like age group and gender.
I've only touched the surface of what GA does. Yes, it is equally frightening and amazing how it tracks users.
Good luck doing these with your server logs.
Yep, and lots of us still do. I wouldn't feel right throwing my users under the bus by subjecting them to GA.
Sure, you can't get the exact same information, but you can get enough to do capacity planning and some basic stats.
I've started to wonder why people care about Google Analytics, what does it tell you that you actually need to know. Again capacity planning is useful, but other than that, isn't sort of pointless?