I ditched analytics entirely when I realized they didn't tell me anything I didn't already know. Stat dashboards are skinner boxes that get in the way of doing the work of trying new things, getting feedback, and using it for the next thing.

The entire purpose of analytics is to tell you what you don't know. But go off.

While it might be a bit hyperbolic to suggest that analytics don't tell you anything new, I've seen vanity metrics toted around on more than one occasion as if it meant anything actionable or otherwise unknowable. I think this is more common than the other way around. It's like the ol' conundrum where an A/B test is performed on a design change, and the B version results in more "engagement" with the site; what they fail to openly mention is that so-called engagement may just be the frustration of the user trying to bypass your crummy design update.

IMO, the best analytics for many businesses is customer acquisition and revenue as well as customer feedback. If you aren't adequately responding to those inherent analytics then you shouldn't yet be using The Google's form of black magic.

You've seen vanity metrics? That's throwing the baby out with the bath water. You just haven't seen the value it brings. Analytics isn't black magic and it won't run your business for you.

Some people think the existence of vanity metrics or stupid tests means that the entire concept is bullshit. That is their problem, and reveals more about their limited perspective than it does about whether or not analytics is important.

I joke around that my “best” traffic days are when my website is broken and users keep reloading the page to see if it is fixed.

I started back in the '00s with server-side stat tools like AWStats and never learned anything new from checking them. Why would I keep wasting time? My subjective experience tells me they're useless for me, and this is a common enough experience.

That doesn't mean everyone will have the same experience, but it does mean most people probably don't need to feed into Google's ability to track everyone just to look at their stats and say "yep, that's where I'd expect a person to come from."

If knowing where your traffic comes from and what it does on your site has no value to you then I'm not going to try and convince you otherwise. You can try and ask your users who either won't respond to you or potentially give you incorrect or misleading responses, if you want analytics, you know, in order to make business decisions.

Your website has GA4 installed on it, you might want to remove that.

That's put there by the platform. I don't have access or interest.

> Great, plenty of time to replace GA with another analytics solution.

Any suggestions or recommendations? I'd be keen on trying something new.

Plausible Analytics is a good choice: https://plausible.io/

They also have a nice Fediverse presence and quite open about what they do even down to their user stats.

Use their free self-hosted one, though. They have bugs in their paid service that they won't fix and their support sucked.

On the other hand the paid version is no fuss, affordable and works great. Its much cheaper than fiddling with how to selfhost it. Not sure what bugs would be in paid that are not in the self hosted one. It´s same thing.

Bugs aren't in their code. It's the way they've configured their server that hosts the .js. Their headers are fucked up so some browsers will never load the .js correctly, and you'll never know about it. So your stats will never be remotely true.

What bugs did they refuse to fix?

+1 to Plausible's self-hosted version. It was easy to get started and works well (at least for my basic use cases).

May I suggest a cookieless and codeless solution with data stored in the EU: https://www.hockeystack.com

We're building the most comprehensive, but still easy-to-use analytics tool out there. Specifically useful for SaaS businesses that want to collect and unify marketing, product engagement, sales, and subscription revenue data.

Why is "data stored in the EU" a selling point?

I've seen tons of similar analytics products pop up in the last year and have avoided them all for having out-of-country data storage (and usually less functionality, etc). With how volatile data-related laws have been in the EU the past few years, IMO it feels risky to try to store anything there, let alone view it as a feature!

I think you're putting your finger on why it is a selling point. You're avoiding them because they're out of country, and that makes sense. For Europeans, the default has been "US hosted data" for a long while, and having options that store data in our jurisdiction is thus a selling point.

Fewer jurisdictions is almost certainly going to be easier, and these options offer that for the European market.

Thanks for the explanation. HN is so notoriously US-centric at times that it didn't occur to me that these services offer the same perks from the other side of the pond.

I'm not sure how you get to that conclusion. Data privacy laws are among the strongest in the world here. It is a selling point because of that, but also because there are laws against sending user data to non-EU countries.

>Data privacy laws are among the strongest in the world here

The fear is that you would now have to adhere to those "strongest laws" by hosting your data there.

How is that a bad thing?

Less risk is good for businesses

You have way more risk storing your data in a potentially un-private way in the US.

It feels risky to have my data stored anywhere else other than the EU. Feels like my data is just up for grabs anywhere else with no clear privacy protection. Imo EU is the best place to have your data.

Your pricing is an order of magnitude too high, given there are better free solutions out there. Would be like me selling a search engine service for $99 a month when Google and Bing exist.

We just switched to Matomo - lots to learn, but the data better is by far. AND it supports Do Not Track & is GDPR compliant :) https://matomo.org/

It's compliant if you show a cookie banner on your website. It not really privacy-friendly as you are still setting cookies on your users devices.

There is one point from the Google announcement that I fully agree with and that is that the future of analytics is cookieless by design (only google won't be a part of this)

Is this [1] relevant here?

Edit: I am asking because I know that there are better alternatives than matomo. But there still needs to be some alternative for 'oldschool' hostings with LAMP stack.

[1]: https://matomo.org/faq/new-to-piwik/how-do-i-use-matomo-anal...

if the primary issue here is data loss...isn't part of the solution to also find a way to take more ownership over the data, regardless of what you're using for analytics?

i.e. instrument a standard spec with something like www.Rudderstack.com and write it to your warehouse/datalake + whatever analytics tool you want.

That way if you ever want to move off your analytics tool (or a solution providing the data spec), you still own the data for whatever you replace it with.

By sending the data to the WH, also lets you own any proprietary data you create - like the custom PPC model referenced in this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30707913

full disclosure - Rudderstack employee

Look, not to rag on your employer's product too much - I'm sure it works for some people. But the first thing I checked was the pricing: $750/month just to get some graphs in grafana (and support, if you're a business and care about that kind of thing), and SSO is in the "contact us" enterprise tier.

Throwing in another choice: nocookieanalytics.com great interface and very simple. Just what I needed to see which one of my blog posts were famous, (none of them are)