[HN Gopher] Matomo: Open-source analytics platform
___________________________________________________________________
Matomo: Open-source analytics platform
Author : AbdHicham
Score : 166 points
Date : 2021-01-05 20:47 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| viraptor wrote:
| I've tried to use it and... they could work on improving the
| installation guide. I gave up after an hour or so of failing to
| provision the database and create configuration in a way that
| gets me to the initial setup screen. I was using their docker
| setup for this.
|
| It's kind of my job to take random apps, deploy them and manage
| properly, so I'm not a clueless user here. I could press on and
| figure it out with more time, and I understand they'd be happy
| with people using the cloud offering / paid support instead. But
| I also feel like a working docker-compose (or comparable) setup
| is table stakes these days for an open-source service.
|
| See Loki+Grafana for a good example:
| https://grafana.com/docs/loki/latest/installation/docker/#in... -
| it's not a production setup, but it's a valid "play around with
| it in 2min" setup.
| typhonius wrote:
| I've found that using geerlingguy's Ansible roles for MySQL,
| Nginx, and PHP, most random PHP applications can be deployed
| with default configuration. I've had them in production with
| Matomo for the past year or so and had no problems so far.
|
| A lot of the challenges faced with a 'from scratch' install
| will revolve around which PHP version and extensions to install
| and how to get Nginx to talk to FPM. Neither of which are
| trivial for someone wanting to test/evaluate without much prior
| knowledge.
| crstin wrote:
| I've did some research a while ago and found that
| https://github.com/crazy-max/docker-matomo dockerizes it the
| best.
| cxcorp wrote:
| It was pretty easy to get up and running with Docker Compose:
| version: '3' services: mysql:
| image: mysql:8 environment:
| MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD: root MYSQL_DATABASE:
| matomo matomo: image: matomo:4
| ports: - 4000:80
|
| This lets me in at localhost:4000 and I just enter "mysql" as
| the DB host, "root" as the username & password and "matomo" as
| the database name, and it's basically done.
|
| Of course, I probably have to point it out or someone else
| will, that it's a bad idea to be using the MySQL root user,
| instead of creating a user with the rights that Matomo needs:
| https://matomo.org/faq/how-to-install/faq_23484/
| kooparse wrote:
| It's pretty easy to make your own analytics. It's not famous, but
| I open-sourced mine; it's called Bast, written mostly in Rust,
| and it's easy to deploy it. https://github.com/kooparse/bast
| marvinblum wrote:
| I did the same for my Go library [0], but I don't think it's
| "pretty easy" if you want to do it right. Especially filtering
| out bots is a constant hassle, it needs to be tested,
| maintained, just like any other software. So, paying something
| like $4 is worth it, if you don't want to think about it as
| much.
|
| You have a very good looking UI there. I really love the
| simplicity.
|
| [0] https://github.com/pirsch-analytics/pirsch
| hertzrat wrote:
| I used matomo once for a basic Wordpress blog (with cloudron) but
| for some reason it led to my site being flagged as distributing
| malware and I vanished from search engines. Apparently there is a
| Microsoft form you need to fill out to get unflagged where you
| explain what data your site is collecting but I just took the
| site offline because I was too busy to dig into it. Extremely
| annoying since the entire idea is to collect as little personal
| information as you can. It wasn't matomo fault, its somebody's
| dysfunctional web crawler bot auto generating reports
| mox1 wrote:
| Formerly known as Piwik, been around for a long time.
| AbdHicham wrote:
| Thank you :) I didn't know that, found it here as well
| https://piwik.com/
| junon wrote:
| No screenshots, no examples in the readme, builds failing.
|
| Nah.
| tadzik_ wrote:
| There's some of that on https://matomo.org/, not sure why OP
| linked to github instead.
| kerng wrote:
| I switched to it about a year ago to get rid of Google Analytics.
| Quite happy with the decision.
| XCSme wrote:
| Where are you hosting it and how much do you pay for it? Do you
| have a lot of visitors?
| input_sh wrote:
| Any cheap Hetzner dedicated (~30EUR/month) can handle
| tracking thousands of daily visits without breaking a sweat.
|
| If we're talking about 10s of thousands, you're gonna need to
| invest in some SSD (EUR50-70/month probably).
|
| If we're talking about dozens of sites, some of which have
| millions of yearly visitors (and a bunch of plugins and
| reports that need to be generated), then you're gonna
| encounter some issues and have to spend a considerable amount
| of time optimizing every part of it, and hardware cost will
| rise to a hundred or two per month.
| y42 wrote:
| To add another level: To track millions of requests per day
| for a couple of sites, it will probably cost around 1k - 5k
| per month, hosting on AWS. It's advised to use not the
| cheapeast hoster here, because any little outage directly
| affects every site that implements your tracking
| technology.
| zerkten wrote:
| > It's advised to use not the cheapest hoster here,
| because any little outage directly affects every site
| that implements your tracking technology.
|
| I guess it depends on how essential your tracking is, and
| how you've implemented it. It shouldn't be added in a way
| that can take out your site unless there is some business
| critical reason to track.
|
| Then I'd ask, just how critical is the tracking? If
| losing a few hours of data is going to throw off your
| product development, do you have enough data to be making
| decisions? My experience is that bugs and
| misconfiguration of experiments is common in most orgs,
| so even if the system is up to capture all data, product
| managers check an experiment a week later to find they
| have only 50% of the data.
| celsoazevedo wrote:
| While it makes sense for some projects to use AWS, Azure,
| Google Cloud, etc, you could track the same number of
| requests on Digital Ocean, Vultr or Linode reliably and
| for less money.
| FriedrichN wrote:
| My anecdotal experience is that people liked it better than GA.
| I also really like how easily you can extend it. In one case (a
| webshop) we added the currently logged in user so we can track
| what they look for specifically so we can improve the search
| and categories.
| samuell wrote:
| Installed it on some websites recently. Quite pleased with the UI
| and the functionality. Pretty spot on in terms of the right level
| of information about users - providing useful info without
| stalking people inappropriately. The new version (4.0) seems to
| improve on some earlier stability issues.
| XCSme wrote:
| Is the performance better than Google Analytics?
| samuell wrote:
| It is definitely clearly snappier, yes. There is some sub-
| second loading times, which should not be surprising, but not
| the sometimes multi-second lags I have seen in Google
| Analytics.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| Would recommend Countly. Not affiliated.
| nagbava wrote:
| About data protection and GDPR, a good thing with Matomo is that,
| if configured properly, it can be used without requiring to
| collect the user's consent (since Matomo doesn't use the data for
| its own purpose). Of course there are less information collected
| but at least you don't have to display a form as soon as a user
| enters your website.
|
| The French data protection authority issued a piece of code (JS)
| which must be used to avoid collecting the user's consent. I
| don't know about other data protection authorities in the EU but
| it shouldn't be much different.
| iamacyborg wrote:
| > it can be used without requiring to collect the user's
| consent (since Matomo doesn't use the data for its own purpose)
|
| This is not how the GDPR works. If you are collecting personal
| data, or if you are dropping analytics cookies on someone's
| device, you need consent. No ifs or buts.
| arp242 wrote:
| This is not how the GDPR works. It lays out several legal
| basis for the collection of personal information, of which
| consent is one. There are others as well.
|
| I'd have to re-read it to be sure about analytics cookies,
| but I don't think it says a whole lot about that off-hand.
| This the the ePrivacy directive.
| nagbava wrote:
| You should apply to the CNIL since you seem to know GDPR
| better than they do. (https://www.cnil.fr/fr/cookies-
| solutions-pour-les-outils-de-...)
|
| I never said no personal data were collected but, _if
| configure properly_ , the processing of data falls within the
| legitimate interest basis.
| iamacyborg wrote:
| I believe that page may be out of date, or they've updated
| their github repo prematurely.
|
| https://github.com/LINCnil/Guide-RGPD-du-
| developpeur/commit/...
|
| /edit Ignore me. I appear to have misunderstood the changes
| when I last read this. Sorry
| nagbava wrote:
| It is true that an opt-out system must be installed on the
| website (Matomo gives that piece of code) but - as noted on
| the github link you posted - that very is different from an
| opt-in system (which is the standard GDPR requirement).
| lmkg wrote:
| GDPR does not require consent. If you use consent, then
| it must be freely-given, but can often use a different
| legal basis when processing personal data.
|
| The ePrivacy Directive requires consent for reading or
| writing from a terminal device. This includes anything
| with cookies, even if they're not personal data. While
| the ePD refers to GDPR for its definition of consent, it
| is a separate piece of legislation and many things that
| are true about GDPR are not true about ePD (such as being
| able to invoke Legitimate Interest instead of consent).
| nagbava wrote:
| Sure, but when it comes to cookies, consent is almost
| always required on the GDPR basis (other legal basis are
| rarely working).
|
| You're right to point to e-privacy, to which consent is
| central. But the latest draft of its new version states
| that (art.8): _1.The use of processing and storage
| capabilities of terminal equipment and the collection of
| information from end-users' terminal equipment, including
| about its software and hardware, other than by the end-
| user concerned shall be prohibited, except on the
| following grounds: [...] (d)it is necessary for audience
| measuring, provided that such measurement is carried out
| by the provider of the information society service
| requested by the end-user or by a third party, or by
| third parties jointly,on behalf of theone or more
| providersof the information society service provided that
| conditions laid down in Article 28, or where applicable
| Article 26,of Regulation (EU) 2016 /679 are met_
|
| So Matomo can still do without the user consent (from
| what I understand, the relation between GDPR and
| e-privacy is no easy business).
| iamacyborg wrote:
| > So Matomo can still do without the user consent (from
| what I understand, the relation between GDPR and
| e-privacy is no easy business).
|
| It also depends on the jurisdiction. For example the ICO
| has been clear that using a cookie based analytics tool
| requires a GDPR level of consent, without exceptions.
| lmkg wrote:
| > when it comes to cookies, consent is almost always
| required
|
| We are in agreement. It seems I wasn't clear enough in my
| original post, but this is my overall point. GDPR doesn't
| require consent, but consent is required because of ePD.
|
| > latest draft of its new version
|
| > So Matomo can still do without the user consent
|
| The new draft is not law yet. It's been 6 months away
| from passing for several years now. In the meantime,
| fines are still being issued under the existing law.
| Google got fined a hundred million euro last month in
| France, and that fine was _very specifically_ ePD and
| _not_ GDPR for a variety fo reasons.
| bravura wrote:
| 29 euros a month for the managed, on-cloud version. Does anyone
| know inexpensive Google Analytics alternatives for small sites,
| that are hosted for you?
| marvinblum wrote:
| https://pirsch.io/
|
| $4/month if you pay annually or $6 to pay monthly, but free
| during beta.
|
| We are actively working on it right now, but the core is
| working well and is open-source: https://github.com/pirsch-
| analytics/pirsch
| ddevault wrote:
| Open source does not make it okay. Do not spy on people. It's
| just that simple.
| XCSme wrote:
| So, you shouldn't be allowed to know the conversion rate on
| your page?
| ddevault wrote:
| It's easy enough to run $nconversions / $nrequests without
| spying on anyone.
| XCSme wrote:
| But $nrequests is not accurate as it can be 10x or 100x
| more than the number of visitors, so your conversion rate
| will be 10x or 100x off.
| hertzrat wrote:
| What do you use to track whether your site is growing or
| shrinking in popularity? Server logs? If so, I'm curious
| whether not being able to filter out bot visits is a problem
| XCSme wrote:
| Is 1.7k open issues something to worry about or is it normal for
| a project of this size?
|
| PS: I have also been building something similar, but not
| completely open-source: https://www.usertrack.net
| zufallsheld wrote:
| I also compare open issues to closed issues. If the numbers are
| roughly the same (or the open issues bigger than closed) I'd
| say that's a problem.
| yread wrote:
| I think it's more a consequence of not tidying up. There are
| irrelevant issues open from 2008. On the other hand I prefer
| 1.7k issues to project where they aggressively auto-close
| tickets
| mgkimsal wrote:
| if projects are given the option to 'auto-close' tickets
| (which honestly, I don't mind - having loads of open stuff
| can hamper finding more recent/useful info), wouldn't it be
| helpful to have filter to view 'auto-closed' tickets vs
| 'closed' tickets?
| Findus23 wrote:
| While I agree that 1.7k issues are a lot, also keep in mind
| that there are 9.6k closed issues and they are bugs and feature
| requests over 11 years that never get closed as there might be
| someone else coming across some feature request one day who
| wants to implement it.
| monkin wrote:
| Fun fact that should be point out: Most of those issues and
| pr's comes from core team members. There is almost no
| community around it, but looking at these numbers you get the
| impression that it is otherwise.
| AbdHicham wrote:
| It's normal for a project of that size, never had any major
| issues with it, it's in active development so it's good to see
| issues are being reported
| AbdHicham wrote:
| Which parts are open source in usertrack ? you say not
| completely open-source
| XCSme wrote:
| I say it's not completely open-source mainly because it's not
| free and people usually expect open-source to equal free.
|
| Once you purchase it you get full access to the original
| server-side code (PHP, MySQL).
|
| For the client-side part you only get the bundled JS/HTML/CSS
| (the original client-side source code is TypeScript, React),
| mostly because otherwise I would have to provide all the
| build tools and document better the code, tooling, building,
| releasing, etc.
| AbdHicham wrote:
| I understand now, thank you for clarifying :)
| viraptor wrote:
| > people usually expect open-source to equal free.
|
| Open source has a specific meaning - is the Software
| released on an open source license.
| (https://opensource.org/licenses) For example if you pay
| enough, you get ms windows source as well - that doesn't
| make it "not completely open source". Your project doesn't
| seem to be open source at all.
| mgkimsal wrote:
| I think the term 'shared source' was coined to describe
| that particular business model (under certain conditions,
| the code is shared, and perhaps modifications may be
| allowed in some scenarios, but no redistribution).
| XCSme wrote:
| Sorry for the misunderstanding then, I might be using the
| wrong terminology.
|
| I have seen many other products that are marketed as
| "open source" because you get the source code after you
| purchase it, so it is literally "open source", but not
| "open-source" as in released under an open-source
| license.
|
| I am personally not marketing userTrak as open-source and
| I will stop using similar terms if other people do have a
| strong opinion about what "open-source" actually means.
| ffpip wrote:
| Did you change the license? I think I stumbled upon your
| website on HN comment a few months ago. Didn't it be free?
|
| Great product and an excellent demo!
| XCSme wrote:
| Thank you! userTrack was never free, but I did change the
| pricing model from lifetime, to yearly to now being one-
| time payment + yearly payments for updates.
|
| I would love to make userTrack free if I can find a
| sustainable way to work on it. Most other similar open-
| source software offers a "hosted" version to get revenue,
| but my goal is to promote decentralization and self-
| hosting in general, so me focusing on the hosted version
| would go against my goal and beliefs. I really want to
| see a feature where any non-technical person can choose a
| few products and have them running on their own
| VPS/server in a few clicks. This would have many
| advantages for the clients AND for the developers:
|
| * Clients pay a lot less for a products
|
| * Developers must focus more on product and performance,
| leading to higher quality products.
|
| * Hugely increased privacy for the average internet user
| and for the own data of the client using the product
|
| * Better performance (each client has their own server so
| it is more likely to have more resources)
|
| * Better latencies (each client can choose to use/host
| their product on a local datacenter)
|
| * Better data transparency, easier migrations and fewer
| vendor lock-ins (if you own the server and the data on it
| you can most likely always export it in some form)
|
| I think there are many other advantages for both
| companies and clients. The current SaaS environment makes
| it really easy for companies to ask huge amounts of money
| for services just because they want to, as the client has
| no real alternative unless he is really technical and can
| spend days installing and maintaining a self-hosted
| software that rarely gets updated.
| ffpip wrote:
| > userTrack was never free...
|
| Sorry if it seemed like I was complaining about the
| pricing change. I was just wondering whether I remembered
| it correctly from here
| (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24207129)
|
| It's a great product. People will pay for it.
| XCSme wrote:
| No worries, I was just making the history of the pricing
| structure clear.
|
| Thank you for the kind words, I do love working on this
| project and I hope to be able to continue working on it.
| Existing customers absolutely love it and keep
| recommending but I am still struggling with finding a
| pricing structure that makes sense for everyone.
|
| I do hope that one day I will find a way to make
| userTrack free for everyone, but looking at Matomo,
| making it open-source seems to drastically slow the
| development of a project as there are so many people
| involved and so much more decisions to be taken. Apart
| from that I would still have to earn a living somehow,
| but if I get a job and keep userTrack open-source I won't
| be able to spend too much energy on maintaining it and I
| hate not being able to make a product as good as it can
| be.
| Macha wrote:
| From your license agreements (this language appears in all
| 3):
|
| You are NOT allowed to:
|
| Redistribute in any way any of the userTrack files or any
| parts of the userTrack's source code (with the exception of
| the public tracker JavaScript files that have to be
| included on your site).
|
| Install userTrack on someone else's server.
|
| Continue using userTrack or offering userTrack access to
| others after this license agreement has been voided (either
| via a refund, license period expiration or legal action).
|
| This is not open source (or even "fair code" as redis etc
| advocate for). Providing the source but under a license
| like this is usually referred to as visible source or
| shared source
| XCSme wrote:
| You are correct, I did confuse the terms "visible source"
| with "open source".
|
| The way userTrack is currently distributed is as any
| other digital product (you pay for it and you are not
| allowed to sell or redistribute copies of it) with the
| mention that the server-side code is un-compiled and un-
| obfuscated so you can transparently see what it does, how
| it does it and change it if you want.
|
| I am not sure that fully open-sourcing it is the way to
| go as I've seen so many projects die or disappear because
| the maintainers didn't have a lot of incentives to keep
| improving it or simply no longer had time to work on it.
| I also think that it's fair to pay for something that
| brings value to you also knowing that by paying for it
| you support its further development.
| RocketSyntax wrote:
| maybe website analytics is more appropriate? the word analytics
| is taking on a new meaning these days
| solarkraft wrote:
| I used it a bunch back when it was Piwik (why did they change the
| name, it was great!) and have been quite satisfied.
|
| Yet, though at least it isn't cloud based, it's still quite scary
| what kinds of things it will tell you about your visitors.
| brnt wrote:
| I'll bite: what kinds of things did you learn about your
| visitors?
| cmg wrote:
| Worth noting that they also have a WordPress plugin that handles
| all of the installation and related setup:
| https://wordpress.org/plugins/matomo/
|
| I use it on a personal project site and it works very well.
| [deleted]
| pachico wrote:
| I just wished it used Clickhouse as persistence layer.
| [deleted]
| villgax wrote:
| A startup I worked with used Piwik(now Matomo) & defrauded
| investors with fake visits by tampering with the DB. Any VC
| should actively be involved & knowledgeable of analytics that is
| presented to you in order to avoid being ripped off.
| viraptor wrote:
| I'm not sure if this is specific to Matomo. You could use
| headless agents over web proxies around the world to inflate
| Google Analytics as well. It just costs less to do it in your
| own DB.
| andrewzah wrote:
| I used to use matomo but I found goatcounter to be simpler to set
| up and maintain. I also like the UX more [0].
|
| [0]: https://stats.arp242.net/
| francoisp wrote:
| a slightly different angle, also opensource: mautic
| deepstack wrote:
| Any one know a node alternative to GA? Matomo is great, but for
| something like GA, node would be best option for handling large
| amount of http requests.
| codyogden wrote:
| I started using Umami (Node/Next) to replace GA on my major
| site (70k/30days). It provides the data I care about seeing,
| and nothing more. Public preview: https://analytics.kbg.rip
|
| Project: https://umami.is
| AbdHicham wrote:
| That's also a really cool alternative.
| fbnlsr wrote:
| This looks really good. Kudos!
| pabe wrote:
| I'd also recommend this one. Relatively "basic" data but it's
| GDPR compliant and easy to install and update. Big thanks to
| the author!
| XCSme wrote:
| I use a PHP analytics platform on a shared VPS hosting and it
| can track 1M+ monthly visits without any issues.
|
| Why would node be able to handle so much more HTTP requests
| than Apache or Nginx? I think the throughput is mostly dictated
| by implementation.
| looperhacks wrote:
| Why would you need node to handle "large amounts" of http
| requests?
| capableweb wrote:
| Of course you don't have to have nodejs to handle large
| amounts of http requests, if you spend enough time you can
| get any language/framework to handle the amount you need :)
|
| But, seems that at least in the TechEmpower framework
| benchmarks, es4x (JS) ends up on position 9 while the closest
| PHP framework ends up at 13. Now it's just a small benchmark
| with specific tests, but I do think it's easier to make
| NodeJS handle large amount of requests than PHP. Although
| again, you can definitely do large amounts of requests with
| PHP too. I've spent about 5 years on each, found that getting
| good performance out of V8 is easier than out of PHP.
| Volrath89 wrote:
| I've been using plausible, and don't miss a thing about GA so
| far
| rilut wrote:
| Have anyone evaluated Matomo vs Countly vs PostHog?
| Galanwe wrote:
| As a non-web developper, I always wondered:
|
| Are these alternatives fully able to replace Google analytics?
|
| I sort of thought Google analytics would tell you more about your
| visitors since with Google cookies, they could map them to other
| visited websites, centers of interest, age group, etc.
|
| Are you loosing all that when switching to a less intrusive
| analytics platform such as this, or is Google analytics not
| leveraging their ability to disclose more about the visitors?
| dustinmoris wrote:
| Due to the amount of people blocking Google Analytics with
| browser extensions, Pi-Holes and other tools I find GA
| increasingly lacking good analytics.
| wartijn_ wrote:
| I assume most tools will block Matomo as well. I know uBlock
| origin with the default blocklist does.
| mattmcknight wrote:
| This is why you self host it, to avoid a third party
| cookie.
| y42 wrote:
| Still not help if you consider GDPR et al. rules, at
| least in the EU.
| XCSme wrote:
| I think that using a self-hosted platform where you don't
| store any PII or cookies allows you to store visitor
| statistics without explicit consent.
| mattmcknight wrote:
| I meant it helps with uBlock type rules against domains.
| vntok wrote:
| In some countries (eg France), there are exemptions for
| tracking purposes if the tracking is done only to the
| benefit of the site's editor.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| Google Analytics tells you more about your audience because it
| stalks people across the web. Matomo can never provide that
| without having a broad range of websites from which you collect
| data and writing custom code to annotate visitors with your own
| interest tags.
|
| Matomo purely tracks analytics: who visited what page, for how
| long, from what device, from what location, from what inbound
| website, and what outbound links did they click. It also
| provides a log of pages requested per session so you can
| analyze people's flows through your website.
|
| It's certainly not a replacement for Google Analytics if you
| use it to collect background information on your visitors. Even
| though Google's information is very broad (you mostly get
| ranges and the interests aren't that reliable), some marketeers
| use it to make decisions about their marketing strategies.
| Matomo won't help you there, your alternative would probably be
| Facebook or another big tech tracking solution.
|
| It does provide a replacement for the type of tracking that I
| personally find acceptable, assuming the IP addresses are
| anonymized sufficiently. Matomo recommends shortening IP
| addresses to /16 after analysis, which I consider good enough,
| but that's a setting administrators can change.
| iamacyborg wrote:
| > Google Analytics tells you more about your audience because
| it stalks people across the web.
|
| That data is mostly garbage and only getting worse.
| XCSme wrote:
| What information exactly does GA tell you from stalking
| people across the web? I don't think Google sharing with you
| accurate information about the people visiting other websites
| would be completely legal (GDPR). Where exactly do you find
| this information in the dashboard?
| marvinblum wrote:
| Even if they don't share it with you, they do it for
| themselves.
| XCSme wrote:
| Yes, that was my point, probably they get this data for
| themselves and improving their own services but as a
| webmaster you don't get all this data yourself.
| iamacyborg wrote:
| It's under Audience -> Demographics.
|
| It's off by default. Turning it on gives you basic
| demographic data but also means you consent to sharing your
| GA data with Google to use for advertising purposes.
| kbelder wrote:
| Importantly, it's always bucketed. You can get a breakdown
| for a group of visitors, but not the demographics for an
| individual.
| JW_00000 wrote:
| Demographic data like: age (in buckets of 10 years),
| gender, household income for some countries, whether you're
| a parent [1] + Interests/"Affinities" [2]. I think these
| are derived from your Google search history and the sites
| you visit.
|
| You do need to explicitly enable this in the GA dashboard,
| and ask users' consent under the GDPR.
|
| [1] https://support.google.com/google-
| ads/answer/2580383?hl=en [2]
| https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/2497941?hl=en
| marvinblum wrote:
| Hey there, we are working on Pirsch [0] (another GA
| alternative).
|
| If you can replace GA depends on your needs. GA collects more
| personal data, you get better insight of your audience. This is
| important if you do online marketing and like to see how well
| your campaigns perform. GA does track visitors across days and
| you can therefore see if someone came back after a week and
| made a purchase.
|
| In case you don't do that or are simply not interested in
| specifics, all the alternatives are good enough right now, I
| think. You can still tell how visitors navigate your page, what
| content they visit most and all that stuff. We are currently
| thinking about what we can add to gain more insight for
| businesses, without invading privacy as Google does.
|
| [0] https://pirsch.io/
| johnchristopher wrote:
| The real kick is when you link both google ads and google
| analytics https://blog.littledata.io/2019/02/25/why-link-
| google-ads-ad...
|
| Something you can't do when leaving google land.
| l1am0 wrote:
| I use Matomo for years now and it works quite reliably. (A few
| updates failed the automatic update, but nothing serious)
|
| Only thing that bothered me is that most Ad Blockers are blocking
| Matomo as well. I did build a little Script to circumvent that,
| you might find it handy as well:
| https://gumroad.com/l/matomo_circumvent_adblock
|
| I use it on my website. Check if your ad blocker is capable of
| blocking it: https://simon-frey.com
| l1am0 wrote:
| FYI: The gumroad link is to a support license.
|
| You purchase a support license to help me to continue working
| on MCAB. MCAB itself is Open Source and can be found on Github:
| https://github.com/simonfrey/matomo_circumvent_adblock
| vntok wrote:
| Unfortunately your script still calls a third party domain,
| which is trivial to block using a generic AdBlock/uBlock rule.
| Instead, you should host the matomo script (under a different
| filename of course) on your own domain. That way it won't be as
| easily blocked.
|
| I go as far as to send all the tracking parameters through a
| custom server script before they are proxied to GA and Matomo.
| That way, I can change the script and parameter names at will,
| making them much more difficult to block. For example, Matomo-
| related blocking rules are as follows:
|
| /matomo-tracking.
|
| /matomo.js$domain=~github.com
|
| /matomo.php
|
| /matomo/ _$domain=~github.com|~matomo.org|~wordpress.org
|
| /piwik-$domain=~github.com|~matomo.org|~piwik.org|~piwik.pro|pi
| wikpro.de
|
| /piwik.$image,script,domain=~matomo.org|~piwik.org|~piwik.pro|p
| iwikpro.de
|
| /piwik._/ping?
|
| /piwik.js
|
| /piwik.php
|
| /piwik/*$domain=~github.com|~matomo.org|~piwik.org|~piwik.pro
|
| /piwik1.
|
| /piwik2.js
|
| /piwik_
|
| /piwikapi.js
|
| /piwikC_
|
| /piwikTracker.
| l1am0 wrote:
| If someone decides to explicit block my Matomo tracking
| server I am fine with that.
|
| I experimented with tracking on the same site and the
| overhead is not worth it for me. Central solution for all my
| projects works quite reliable
| vntok wrote:
| Sure if someone explicitely blocks you and you alone,
| that's fine. The problem is you getting blocked
| generically, because you're using the same scripts or
| patterns as everyone else, such that there exists a very
| wide and generic block rule in uBlock Origin or some other
| filter that happens to apply to your own domain. That's
| unacceptable and worth fighting against.
| l1am0 wrote:
| But that is exactly what the script is doing. It changes
| the structure to prevent generally being blocked
| vntok wrote:
| Using a third-party domain means you're already blocked
| in most cases involving adblockers and non-standard CDNs.
| l1am0 wrote:
| Oh thanks. That is an insight I did not have so far!
| huhtenberg wrote:
| Unless I am missing something, that's trivial to block.
|
| Any tracker can be made to work around ad blockers by making
| callbacks to the site itself and having a small shim there that
| forwards these pingbacks to the actual tracking service. But
| even then they still can be blocked based on the request
| contents.
|
| PS. Here's how your website looks in Firefox -
| https://i.imgur.com/uFKEB4X.jpg. That's with uBlock off. No
| console errors.
| l1am0 wrote:
| Weird that you don't see any text. In FF on Linux it works as
| expected. What system are you on?
| huhtenberg wrote:
| Windows
| lightswitch05 wrote:
| Its pretty disgusting to track people against their consent,
| even more so to circumvent their protections against tracking.
| I added your domain to my blocklist:
| https://github.com/lightswitch05/hosts/commit/bb2cd77c9ec028...
| vntok wrote:
| It's pretty disgusting to access creators' content for free
| while blocking their attempts to monetize it.
| [deleted]
| necovek wrote:
| Why not block access to the content then? You can't watch
| Netflix streams without paying for them, that's trivial to
| implement.
|
| Ah, right, creators want their content to show up for my
| search keywords, Google won't let them have pages only
| visible to Google bots (though even that is changing with
| the rise of paywalled sites), and they want the money from
| that same Google showing ads from their ad network.
|
| Google initially promised to deliver a search for the open
| web unencumbered. It has become a sort of paywall itself
| (accept our ads or our search results will be useless
| pointing you to pages that only work if you have ads
| enabled).
|
| Sure, it would be fair if they haven't pushed out the
| competition acting entirely differently ("we have no ads",
| "our ads are clearly marked" to current "see if you can
| tell a difference between an ad and your search results").
| samjmck wrote:
| Ad blocking != block tracking. If you don't want to get
| tracked, turn on Do Not Track in your browser. Matomo and
| most other privacy focused analytics scripts respect that
| setting.
| lightswitch05 wrote:
| While I agree that is the proper solution, most analytics
| do not respect the Do Not Track header. Beyond it being
| mostly ignored, Safari (which currently has 20% global
| browser share) removed support for Do Not Track in 12.1. So
| even though Matomo might respect the header request, there
| is no way for me to send that header on many of my devices.
| Blocking is the only solution left to me to 'opt out' of
| tracking regardless of the good intentions of Matomo.
| l1am0 wrote:
| +1 I set Matomo to respect Do Not Track and you can opt out
| of the Tracking in my Privacy Settings
| dastx wrote:
| Sure, so I have tracking protection too both through uBlock
| Origin, and Firefox' tracking protection feature. Yet, here
| you are, bypassing my tracking protections.
| samjmck wrote:
| If you're using Firefox tracking protection (which I'm
| guessing using DNT as well), then Matomo by default does
| not track you though. So no, your tracking protections
| aren't being bypassed.
| arp242 wrote:
| Do-Not-Track is pointless and dead. Pretty much none of the
| trackers that _actually_ matter pay one iota of attention
| to it.
| aorth wrote:
| It's your call really, but a website owner tracking you with
| their own software on their own Matomo instance is not the
| problem. This is essentially the same as monitoring website
| logs... that's not disgusting at all.
| Mediterraneo10 wrote:
| When the GDPR was entering into force, I remember some
| speculating that monitoring Apache logs could violate it,
| since the user has not consented to having their personal
| details (i.e. the IP address) processed. What was the final
| consensus reached on this?
| lightswitch05 wrote:
| I think grouping server-side tracking with JavaScript based
| tracking is an oversimplification. JavaScript tracking is
| much more invasive and can access significantly more data.
| From something as straightforward as fingerprinting to
| potentially even more invasive data such as geo-location,
| battery status, webcam, microphone - you name it. Server
| access logs aren't going to track my eyes.
|
| I think we can all agree there are different levels of
| acceptable tracking and use of that data- but the degrees
| of acceptance are going to be different depending on the
| user and service. I don't consider bypassing my
| restrictions to run unauthorized code to be an acceptable
| tracking method and raises serious concerns about how the
| data will then be used.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| OTOH JavaScript tracking is an easy way to filter out a
| lot of the bots. I use a little bit of JS-based tracking
| for exactly this reason, but I'm not extracting anything
| that wouldn't show up in server logs (eventually I also
| want to get some "time spent on page" metric so I have
| some idea how useful my blog posts are (are people
| clicking and leaving right away or are they sticking
| around to read). You pretty need JS for this. In whatever
| case, web analytics like these aren't "tracking"; you're
| looking at user behavior on your own site; not trying to
| follow them around the Internet or otherwise identify
| them.
| arp242 wrote:
| Anyone _can_ do all sorts of things. I can punch anyone I
| see on the street in the face. Doesn 't mean they're
| actually doing it.
|
| Now, I have a vested interest in this as I work on one of
| those tracking tools, but it actually collects _less_
| data than those Apache access_logs that people have been
| keeping for 25 years. Plus, the JS is unminified and
| easily examinable if you want (as is the HTTP request),
| so you also have more insight in what is being collected
| exactly.
|
| "It's using JavaScript" and "it _can_ do [..] " are
| massive red herrings; browsers are actually fairly
| sandboxed and there are millions upon millions of lines
| of code on your computer that _can_ do much more than
| JavaScript inside a webpage.
| lightswitch05 wrote:
| > I can punch anyone I see on the street in the face.
|
| Yes, and then you would be charged with assault. It is
| great that you work on a tool that respects peoples
| privacy. I suppose I failed to put an emphasis on trust.
| With server side logs, less trust is required because
| there is less that can be done. Paired with VPN, I can
| have reasonable belief that server side logging is not
| logging anything unreasonable and it does not require
| trust that they are not fingerprinting me. As you say,
| just because someone can do something doesn't mean they
| will - but trust is required, especially if there are no
| repercussions if that trust is violated.
| matomo-report wrote:
| I have setup a load balancer with 3 instances of matomo connected
| to one mysql database to handle tracking on a website with around
| 7000 visits a day. It could all probably be handled by just one
| instance but that is sort of the standard setup we have for
| things.
|
| matomo is very comparable to google analytics in terms of
| reports. matomo has some things that seem a little easier to get
| to; like visitor flows.
|
| However, matomo seems to just give up on big data, complex
| reports. Similar reports in google analytics take a long time to
| complete, 10 to 40 seconds, but they at least complete;
| eventually.
| sneak wrote:
| Does anyone know how to get it to show the full referer URL? I
| use a self hosted Matomo and it only shows the referer domain.
| XCSme wrote:
| I don't think that's always possible as it's a browser security
| limitation. The referring domain can decide to pass on only the
| domain, not the full URL.
|
| https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Headers/Re...
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