I run a SaaS business and I dropped Google Analytics a long, long time ago. Primarily because of the tracking, but also because I really couldn't see the value of the data.
In the old days, you could at least use the "Referer" (sic) header to know where people came from and what they searched for. But that is long gone, and the only source of that data is Google/Bing search console.
Page visits are a vanity metric: they tell me nothing about my business. The only thing that actually matters for a SaaS are signups and MRR. Measuring your business by page views is like measuring the business performance of a Walmart by counting cars on the freeway nearby. Yes, the numbers are somewhat related, but you can't draw any conclusions.
I made it a point not to include any third-party JavaScript on my site, but even if I were to make an exception for these analytics, I can't really see the point, unless you are running an ad-driven site where pageviews are king.
Say for example, if all your users start spending 30% more time in your reset password page after you pushed out some changes. How would you know? What could be causes of that? Could something be broken with the login? Apply this to everything.
Not having analytics is literally not caring about what they do in your product, so you're either never changing the product and 100% confident it'll always work, or you're probably giving them a worse experience than you could.
How you do this tracking is another story, but there's ethical ways to do it.
The change of adding obnoxious tracking of course accounts for some user loss itself, which it cannot measure. On some of those "modern" websites, that show me a whitescreen without JS, I check my uBlockOrigin and see the domain of that website and some Google shit? Tab closed. No thank you, I will go elsewhere.
Understanding what drives traffic to your SaaS website is such an important piece of information. For instance, if you write two articles, one describing how to use your product to achieve a certain thing which customers want to do, and another article which compares your product to a competitor product and one of the two articles creates 50x more traffic than the other then you'd certainly want to know this, because then you know what articles give you the biggest return on your time writing them.
Just one of so many examples how web analytics is such an important tool to being a good sales person.
With true analytics, understanding typical session helps you optimising users workflow, making sure relevant features are easily discovered at the right place.
It really helps when you want to work on user experience. You may need metrics such as LCP, INP and CLS with details per type of page, ability to drill down data and get that in real time.
ROI of such script depends on what you do with the data. If that's vanity or not even looked at, you are emitting CO2 for nothing.
These are qualitative improvements which are extremely unlikely to stem from quantitative metrics, especially when the sample size is not significant (which it is for the vast majority of pages in existence).
One of the most disappointing client experiences I had was after building a custom shop for a company that was heavily focused on graphic art. We optimized the hell out of their site, getting performance scores of 97+ when every page was image heavy and included a product grid designed for a masonry grid look similar to Pinterest.
A few days before launch they asked us to add their Google Pixel script. The next day they had included 7 or 8 different third party scripts and blown performance scores into the mid 50s. Its their site and they can do what they want with it, but I sure could have saved a lot of dev time if performance didn't matter at all.
Page visits tell you have many people you get. If you then use how many sign ups you get then you have a conversion rate. That’s an important figure. Page visits can also tell you if your marketing efforts have worked. Imagine doing all the marketing work and not knowing if it did anything.
We're a membership driven organization, and by "membership" I mean we rely on donations to fund our content creation (Though whether you're a member or not you have the same level of access to our content). We care about raw traffic numbers, because it relates directly to our mission of informing people. It tells us how many people we inform day to day.
So yeah we care about those raw numbers, and those numbers are difficult to get w/out javaScript r/n because caching and the terrible log retention of our hosting providers.
Raw traffic numbers only tell part of the story though. We want to know the path people take from first landing on the site to becoming a donating member so that (in theory) we can do more of the things that promote that behavior in more people. That's The Funnel, and that's where orgs like Plausible are best. They're first party tracking, so the data stays with us. Also since they're first party tracking we can track a person's overall relationship with our site, from the first news story they read to the moment they first hit our donation page 3 years into the relationship or whatever.
We should be able to do that with our GA set up, but one of the reasons I want us to shift to Plausible is for its simplicity.
It's funny that they spout nonsense about better UX or how you wouldn't be able to do CRO when you'd just laid out two metrics that are actually important and don't require any website analytics to track.
Their most recent blog post:
Things I hate about GA4
It's also cookieless, the hosted version is free to use within reason, and it's extremely lightweight if you choose to self-host it. It doesn't even need a separate database, it can run self-contained with SQLite (or Postgres if you prefer). A good fit for small sites where the big industrial-grade solutions are overkill.
Sites can track sessions without tracking personal data.
> The IP address and User-Agent are never stored to the database or disk, and there is no conceivable way to trace the random UUID back to this. > > It’s only stored in memory, which is needed anyway for basic networking to work.
I can't say whether that is GPDR compliant but it's definitely not storing the hash
Could you detail how that would work?
https://www.gtlaw-dataprivacydish.com/2021/03/what-is-hashin...
So much so that I made my own that focuses on self-hostability using SQLite and DuckDB (no external dependencies, can run on a 256MB VM): https://github.com/medama-io/medama
Stuck it behind a NGINX frontend and it works just fine.
https://github.com/Glimesh/glimesh_app/blob/main/lib/track.d...
I’m vain and curious enough to want to see the Google data, but not so much as to pay $160/yr for the Matomo plugin for my personal blog.
[0] This isn’t the same as Google Analytics. You can get this information without installing a tracker on your site.
https://search.google.com/search-console/about
It's not perfect, but it is free.
I think Plausible’s self-hosting is not simple, requiring unnecessarily heavy databases like ClickHouse, which can be overkill for the average website owner. Comparatively, this project can effectively run on a 256MB VM for most small website with no external dependencies.
I think simple hash(IP) is only pseydonymiztion and can be reversed with a bit of work. And thus cannot be stored without consent.
Of course mapping each IP to random id and not storing the mapping should be completely ok.
And legitimate reasons allow storing the mapping for a short period for debugging and attack detection.
And regarding anonymisation, is it enough to remove the last two parts of an IPv4 IP, or it must be more?
So if you store and analyze everything "locally" to your server you don't need cookies and therefore no banner no matter how much you "track" since its all request made to your own server you merly use the telemetry of.
You can't share that data without consent but thats a seperate data protection thing from the cookie banners.
1) If it's strictly necessary, e.g. logging in or legal obligation, you're fine and don't need to ask
2) If the data can be associated with a specific human, and it isn't covered by #1, then ask
3) ??? legitimate interest ???
* but I know from experience that this means "don't trust my own feelings of clarity, ask a lawyer"
you have an online mail service, you have to save email accounts of emails you receive so you can respond to those.
you allow people to forward their emails received to other email addresses, you need to save those other email addresses.
This would be in dbs for that stuff if you have third party marketing analytics, just because you have legitimate interest to save email to make application work doesn't mean you can pass that email into third party marketing analytics. That is not legitimate interest.
if you have a newsletter service and someone signs up to receive newsletter then you need to save their email to send that newsletter. you don't need to ask, they have implicitly given you permission by asking you to send them the newsletter.
If you have a process for removing users from service for violation of terms then you probably need to be able to keep information about them otherwise they can just say get rid of info and then sign on again - this would come into the parts of the Digital services acts about obligations to users and appeals process for removal etc. but different thing, if you have removed someone you need to be able to identify when they try to come on again.
> Allow users to access your service even if they refuse to allow the use of certain cookies
Does it mean that sites like https://www.spiegel.de, are not GDPR compliant?
