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by SaulOfTheJungle 2665 days ago
> I used to put Google Analytics on my blog

Have you found a viable alternative or removed analytics from your blog altogether?

6 comments

Not OP, but personally I removed it and don't miss it. But then I'm not trying to monetise everything, so analytics seem more about the ego boost in retrospect. A bit shameful I was willing to compromise my readers' privacy for that.

Depending on your needs, it's pretty easy and interesting to hack something together yourself though.

I think I will resort to looking at the Apache access logs.

I just want to know the number of daily unique visitors and where they are located (geographically).

Not the parent, but I switched to Matomo (https://matomo.org/ - previously known as Piwik) and have been quite happy with it.
In my particular case, I realized I really didn't care about traffic stats with any kind of intimate detail, so I just wrote a thing that tagged the user with a cookie and sent a POST to my site with JS, but even then I eventually just gave up and decided that I really have no interest in the analytics since I really don't have any plans of trying to monetize my blog.
Server-side, goaccess is pretty rudimentary, but it works really well for me.
Personally, I just analyze my web server logs to get this data.
I use Heap Analytics. I get all of the analytics I want, but they aren’t selling the analytics data to advertisers.