[HN Gopher] Umami - An alternative to Google Analytics
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Umami - An alternative to Google Analytics
Author : sandebert
Score : 167 points
Date : 2021-05-17 09:44 UTC (13 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| HuwFulcher wrote:
| What is the edge of this over competitors like Plausible or
| Fathom? They look the same and seem to offer exactly the same
| features
| mrwnmonm wrote:
| Uses Chartjs?
| preya2k wrote:
| I recently switched from Matomo to Umami and I don't regret it at
| all. Of course Matomo can do a lot more, but Umami is perfect for
| my use case and a lot less work to maintain and host than Matomo.
| kstrauser wrote:
| Why do you say that? I'm using Matomo right now and it I don't
| recall having to maintain it, other than applying the
| occasional upgrade it asks for.
|
| I admit that Umami is pretty, though!
| ksec wrote:
| Previous Discussions
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24198329
|
| Edit: LOL, why is top Referrer from pornhub.com ?
| Retr0spectrum wrote:
| At time of writing, pornhub.com has 69 referrals - I suppose
| someone was just having a laugh.
| Seirdy wrote:
| It's not uncommon for people to spoof their referrer headers
| to a site they want to promote or to shock content. I ended
| up watching the Simpson's Couch Gag "You're Next" episode
| because it showed up in my access logs at least 50 times, for
| instance.
| cdubzzz wrote:
| Damnit I clicked that thinking it would drill down or
| something, not load the page. Sorry, IT.
| francislavoie wrote:
| Also: https://usefathom.com/
| listenallyall wrote:
| Under-featured and over-priced
| cbsmith wrote:
| In a similar vein: https://divolte.io/
| benjaminjosephw wrote:
| I know visitor stats has been a long-established expectation of
| the web publishers but, silly question, why? Is it primarily
| curiosity or are there genuine operational concerns which aren't
| possible with stats from the server itself?
| hansvm wrote:
| Dwell time is challenging to pull out from server logs without
| constant interaction. E.g., if a landing page has a low
| conversion rate, your solutions are going to be pretty
| different if you're trying to solve users immediately bouncing,
| reading the whole thing and bouncing, or scrolling to some
| particular piece of content and bouncing.
|
| There's also an implicit assumption in your question that every
| notable user event has an associated server-side request. If
| page changes and whatnot are being handled completely client-
| side after the first request you might need a little extra
| monitoring just to get the same level of detail you would
| otherwise have from traditional server logs.
|
| I could be wrong here, but I think the big feature in client-
| side analytics isn't that they offer some sort of special data
| or insight; the selling point is that anyone can add them to
| basically any web hosting solution (including CDNs you don't
| control or random WordPress sites) with a single copy/paste. It
| optimizes ease of adoption _at the cost of_ probably better
| analytics.
|
| Elaborating on that "better analytics" point -- the web is
| varied enough that even if you want to track your users'
| activities it's really hard to interpret client-side data
| correctly. E.g., in the landing page example above, if your
| heartbeats stop hitting the server did the user navigate away
| or did they go to another tab for a bit? In that same example,
| are your heartbeats going through because the user is reading
| and pondering your content or because they've gone to make a
| sandwich (you can disambiguate this a bit if you also keep
| track of something like the last time the user did something,
| but it's not perfect)? On top of that, you don't get metrics
| from people with JS disabled, with certain DNS blocklists,
| people with slow connections, etc.
| asciident wrote:
| It looks like Umami does some of that. But I found that
| Google Analytics does none of it, and in fact year-over-year
| seems to cut back on the amount of useful information. The
| main advantage now is they show referring search terms, which
| servers logs would show, but they broke that on purpose with
| their search result self-referring links.
| benjaminjosephw wrote:
| Is dwell time a meaningful/valuable metric to track? I
| consistently open links in tabs I keep open for a long time
| and I suspect other people might do the same. Like you said,
| it's really hard to interpret this data, so why bother
| trying?
|
| I think you're right about the ease of adoption aspect. My
| take is that we do it because we've always done it -
| primarily because the cost/benefit ratio has justified it.
| We've normalized the idea that it's not only acceptable but
| also prudent to study and analyze the detailed behavior of
| end-users. The consensus seems to be that not adding end-user
| tracking is similar to "leaving money on the table".
|
| On reflection, I'm starting to feel that it's perhaps not an
| acceptable set of norms to accept without a justified need.
| Some metrics seem almost voyeuristic and most imply an
| approach to content marketing that only snake-oil salesmen
| should consider. The use of analytics itself implies a
| certain potential for inauthentic or intentionally
| manipulative content. Optimizing content to have as much
| mass-appeal as possible is perhaps more problematic than we
| initially thought.
|
| Maybe it's time we rethink the norm in the first place.
| Perhaps it's better to not know everything.
| hansvm wrote:
| > Is dwell time a meaningful/valuable metric to track?
|
| Like most other questions of this nature, the answer is
| "maybe." Throwing out one possible scenario: We know some
| people keep tabs open for a long time. Does our dwell time
| data reflect that? If not then that's a red flag that we
| have work to do (maybe a memory leak from some framework
| lifecycle issue makes our page prone to crashes or being
| manually closed, maybe the content is such hot garbage that
| nobody thinks it's worth even keeping a background tab open
| with our site, ...).
|
| > Like you said, it's really hard to interpret this data,
| so why bother trying?
|
| Something can have a lot of value without that value being
| easy to extract. Like...I'm sure Amazon has detailed
| metrics about every mouse and keyboard event associated
| with any pixel with the gall to glance sideways at the
| shopping cart. It's probably hard to use correctly, but
| when a 1% increase can pay for hundreds or thousands of
| dedicated engineers and scientists the ease of
| interpretation starts to not matter as much.
|
| > I'm starting to feel that it's perhaps not an acceptable
| set of norms to accept without a justified need
|
| I'll need to think on it further, but on the surface that
| seems like a reasonable baseline. If you don't at a bare
| minimum know enough about your business and the data in
| question to be able to anticipate some actionable way you
| might actually need the data you want to collect then
| you'll probably do more harm than good for yourself and
| your users by collecting it.
| ahstilde wrote:
| Just use Parse.ly and make your life easier.
| Saris wrote:
| Not considering it since they don't publish pricing.
| wussboy wrote:
| Their pricing page doesn't have any pricing. It shows three
| tiers, each one without a price, and when you click to "learn
| more" it asks you to fill out your personal information. I'm
| not impressed.
| catinblack wrote:
| https://piwik.pro/ You should also check this one
| stanislavb wrote:
| Umami seems great! However, if you are interested in an
| alternative in a different programming language (non JS), you can
| check out LibHunt https://www.libhunt.com/r/umami
| doo_daa wrote:
| Your faq says that "Umami does not use any cookies" so how do you
| get the count of Visitors on your geo breakdown part of the
| report?
| yorwba wrote:
| By combining the request's IP, user agent and OS to create a
| unique session ID:
| https://github.com/mikecao/umami/blob/f8ac987bfc0df581721bd2...
|
| This will undercount some visitors and overcount others, but it
| should be good enough for most purposes.
| kevinbowman wrote:
| Interestingly, the OS is detected from the user agent, so
| really it's only hashing the IP and the user agent.
| lucasmullens wrote:
| So an entire school district would be the same user?
|
| Seems reasonable for most cases, but if you're a website
| that's used a lot by schools or businesses, they might have
| every computer using the same user agent and IP.
| esrh wrote:
| This is unfortunate in a way because it's easy to deny
| cookiee but hard to spoof all of those
| Shorel wrote:
| Another pollution of the search space.
|
| Now when I am looking for flavour profiles I will get SEO
| nonsense.
|
| Also true the other way around.
| mrwnmonm wrote:
| Why is pornhub in the Referrers list?
| johbjo wrote:
| The value google provides here is not the technology, but a
| "neutral" external partner. It means that bosses do not need to
| elevate anyone's responsibilities to some niche (but probably
| better) alternative tool.
|
| It's the same with most standard tools or outsourcing partners.
| The point is not so much "no one got fired for choosing IBM",
| it's that IBM is customer to the boss, not the subordinate.
|
| A big value in SaaS is that it allows the boss to have the
| highest privileges in all systems.
| IceWreck wrote:
| If you want something more lightweight and easier to selfhost, I
| recently discovered https://www.goatcounter.com/
| nvr219 wrote:
| Yes I've been using goatcounter and it's very simple and to the
| point. Recommende.
| codyogden wrote:
| I've been using Umami for Killed by Google for the last eight
| months. I'm very happy with it. Provides me with just enough data
| for insightful decisions.
|
| Here's the public analytics page (all time ~675k page views,
| ~575k visitors).
|
| https://analytics.bale.media/share/s1Q7twme
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(page generated 2021-05-17 23:00 UTC)