I am more than eager to move away from using Google Analytics for my personal blog. Not only because of the impending GDPR complications this might bring, but also ideologically, to stop providing a search giant with data for free. In case you are interested, Jesse Squires has laid out his reasons to do it on his blog, and I pretty much stand by all of them.
I am trying a tool called Matomo (formerly known as Piwik), because it comes with a self-hosted version, and offers a no-cookie version, plus an opt-out popup. The one disadvantage is that it offers you way too much data right off the bat. Of course, everything is customisable, but to be honest, I don't really need much more data than some daily user count/read-time stats. Plus, the less data gets collected from my readers, the better I'd feel.
So here is my question to you? Are you using anlaytics for your personal blogs? If yes, I'd love to know what.
Top comments (3)
I use Google Analytics. I'm totally okay with them collecting whatever they collect in return for their services. Yes, that means that it's not technically "free", but it's free in the sense that I'm not spending money on it, and the effort to integrate it was minimal. My needs/wants are really simple. I just want to know how many users visit my pages.
Piwik had a good reputation so I'm sure Matomo is a pretty good product with good ideals. I'm not sure it will make dealing with GDPR stuff that much easier in the short term.
I share the ideology and I think we'll eventually move to something like Matomo.
For me Google Analytics is Ok. I use it with my personal blog and all my websites, I also work with SEO and I think it brings me all the data I need to tracking and improve my sites.