We've been using goaccess [1], we've been very happy with it and most important, we keep things private. Installing Google Analytics is def a NO for us.
I've been planning to switch to goaccess (from piwik/matomo) for my personal sites. Do you have any tips? Generally I just want to know trends in unique pageviews/visitors; whether any page in particular is seeing a lot of referred traffic and from where, and what paths people are taking through the site once they arrive. I like the purity of going solely with log analysis, but I'm a bit concerned I won't get quite as much visibility.
I'd say start with the basic command of goaccess and then you can add extra options to the command line as needed. We have ours on a big display at our office running real time with only the most relevant panels that fit our needs.
Overall the stats are pretty accurate, we did some tedious/manual analysis of our weekly access log and the counts displayed by goaccess are on a par with our data results.