Do you have any thoughts on the financial impact of self-hosting vs using something like Google Ads? I'd assume you mostly made that choice for ethical reasons, right?

I noticed that my ad blocker doesn't block your ads, and like you mentioned, they don't interrupt the browsing experience. They're almost like those in a high-quality paper magazine!

We initially used Google Ads, but phased them out 6-7 years ago because the ads were lower quality than we wanted and missing a big chunk of the ad sale due to Google's fees.

If I remember correctly, we used Google and self-hosted for a while, but eventually it made financial sense to replace the Google Ad slots with self-hosted so we were able to capture the full ad sale.

Several years on, I am really happy with the decision and it is great to not be subject to the whims of an ad marketplace we have no control over.

When you say 'on my site' would it be correct to say that you are talking about the one in your 'about' section? If so I was motivated to take a look as a way of expressing support for your design choices.

However, you are using a Google-Analytics script????

Nothing wrong with that Buuuuttt.... uhm, yeah.

Yeah, I would like to not use GA too in the ideal world too :/

That said, we do use the Anonymize IP setting and have all of the demographic / interest settings turned off for Google Analytics.

We basically whittled 3rd party stuff down to GA and a Google font, so while not 100% perfect, I am pretty happy with the strides we have made.

Have you thought about moving to posthog or plausible?

https://plausible.io/

https://posthog.com/

I have looked into alternatives before, but not either of those actually.

Plausible looks more promising of the two and I will check it out (PostHog could also be, but I didn't really understand the features as it related to a normal WordPress website).

It would be interesting to know how other Plausible users have found their traffic numbers compare vs Google Analytics. Likely that some users would be counted that weren't before, while perhaps bot filtering works differently.

Due to the privacy focused nature Plausible doesn't track returning users.

I almost managed to remove all 3rd parties too (apart from the tawk.to chat widget, until I implement a custom contact form).

If you are looking to replace Google Analytics with a self-hosted solution (to fully eliminate 3rd parties) you can check out the analytics platform I'm building: https://www.usertrack.net

I actually did try UserTrack a couple of months ago using the self-hosting option and it was easy to get going, though was missing a few metrics we use in addition to event tracking.

Wow, that's cool that you already tried it!

Could you tell me what was the most important metric missing from userTrack for you? I keep adding new features (eg. just recently added the ability to filter all sessions from a specific user), so knowing which ones are the most common requested is really helpful!

Thanks for replying.

I commented on it because I spotted the Google Ajax calls which sort of lead me to believe that you might have also been using Google for the Geo-Location stuff. When combined with the GA stuff it made me do a 'hang on a minute, something doesn't match up'. Thanks for taking the time to clarify.