[HN Gopher] Show HN: Volument - Our take on website analytics
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Show HN: Volument - Our take on website analytics
Author : fuzzymind
Score : 30 points
Date : 2021-05-17 18:04 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (volument.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (volument.com)
| [deleted]
| RileyJames wrote:
| Very interesting. I've recently switched a bunch of sites from GA
| to plausible, and love it! I only used the few features / tools
| plausible offers, the rest of GA was privacy invading bloat.
|
| But I foresee I will need the kinds of features volument provides
| in the near future (only some of the conversion focused websites
| / pages). Might throw it up on one site today to test it out.
| krmmalik wrote:
| Ok, you have me convinced. I'm actually going to try this. I have
| two separate sites I want to try it on. Is it 10k free events per
| site or per user account. Also, is it "catch-all" event tracking
| or do I have to set the event tracking up manually? Apologies if
| that's already mentioned on your site but I did go through the
| article and didn't see any mention of it.
| andrenotgiant wrote:
| A year ago, I found Volument's mini-manifesto "Minimalism: an
| undervalued development skill"[1] on HN (discussion [2]) and it
| resonated hard with me.
|
| I worked in Marketing and community at DigitalOcean over five
| years as it scaled. I had contributed to a hodge-podge of
| overlapping analytics tools running in managed chaos at my
| company, I had watched another team get hoodwinked into a multi-
| year deal with a big analytics/testing tool that had been in
| development for months without yielding a single test, I had seen
| people throughout the company struggle to find answers to basic
| analytics questions due to the complexity of the tool stack.
|
| I got a Volument pilot going on the public part of our site, and
| while the scale really strained the Volument infrastructure, I
| absolutely loved the opinionated and simple interface.
|
| It was like what Netlify did for static-site hosting, applied to
| analytics. Volument took the 3000 views and features of a legacy
| provider like GA and just figured out what people actually need
| and boiled it down to 5.
|
| I've changed companies since, but am excited to test this new
| version at my current company. The people at Volument are super-
| great and responsive, and if the new one is anything like the
| original it's going to be very useful.
|
| [1] https://volument.com/blog/minimalism-the-most-undervalued-
| de... [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21871491
| tipiirai wrote:
| Thank you, Andy! Really appreciate this comment.
| [deleted]
| strzibny wrote:
| > Fathom, Simple Analytics, and Plausible offer bare-bones
| pageview- and session statistics. Like Volument, they all focus
| on privacy so you don't need any cookie banners outside Europe.
|
| I am not sure I follow. Why do you still need one in Europe? And
| besides I think you don't need one with your competitors [0]
|
| [0] https://nts.strzibny.name/privacy-oriented-alternatives-
| to-g...
| tipiirai wrote:
| It's the local European laws. For example in Finland, where I
| live all analytics software must display a consent because the
| data is used for non-essential purposes. Applies to Volument
| and our competitors. More details on this doc, which is co-
| authored with a GDPR official:
|
| https://volument.com/learn/data-privacy
| jakelazaroff wrote:
| GDPR differentiates between cookies and localStorage? I'm
| skeptical, but if so that's... a really surprising loophole.
| tipiirai wrote:
| Founder here (1). Here's a backstory: We launched the MVP two
| years ago with this HN post:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20037116
|
| Market demand was there but the product wasn't ready for the load
| yet.
|
| Fast forward two years and now it's all "perfect". The product is
| now useful -- even for people using goaccess or similar. The main
| reasons include:
|
| 1. Understanding of traction and how visitors behave before they
| convert. You can start optimizing the causes.
|
| 2. Faster A/B testing: Volument is an order of magnitude faster
| than the traditional A/B testing tools.
|
| 3. Privacy-friendly. Volument is on the same line with Fathom,
| Plausible, or Simple Analytics when it comes to privacy.
|
| We've built a custom stack from scratch so this is not just
| another pretty face to Google Analytics data. We have full
| control and the door is open for pretty much anything.
|
| The parent post links to a founding story and here's a direct
| link to the front page:
|
| https://volument.com
|
| ---
|
| 1: Bit of myself: I'm a long-term frontend developer: the
| original author of semi-popular projects like jQuery Tools
| (2011), Head JS (2013), and Riot JS (2014). I'm also a co-founder
| of two other successful startups: Flowplayer (flowplayer.com) and
| Muut (muut.com).
| mritchie712 wrote:
| > European visitors are secretly tracked without their
| permission.
|
| This is quite a claim to just throw in and not footnote or back
| up in any way.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| It is. I've had several discussions with Marko Saric (co-
| founder of Plausible), and I doubt he'd've let this slide
| even if his co-founder was Mark Zuckerberg. The author of
| "Only 9% of visitors give GDPR consent to be tracked"[0] is
| hardly the sort of person to secretly track users in
| violation of the GDPR.
|
| Which part of Plausible's source code[1] is doing the
| tracking, exactly?
|
| [0]: https://markosaric.com/gdpr-consent/
|
| [1]: https://github.com/plausible/analytics
| thehappypm wrote:
| Hey! Cool product! I have run many A/B tests in my career, and
| agree that it really does take ages to get statistically
| relevant results, and most results don't really pan out at
| scale. (Though in my experience, a new button color might drive
| conversion just by catching the user's eye as something new,
| but this doesn't stick around).
|
| How do you get A/B test results faster? New math? Or just more
| BS? ;)
| tipiirai wrote:
| The secret is on Volument's ability to measure a bunch of
| "leading indicators", like the ratio of first-time visitors
| who stayed on the website more than 7 seconds (which
| indicates a better first impression). For every key
| conversion event at the bottom of the funnel (such as "signed
| up"), there are thousands of leading indicators to take
| insights from. By utilizing these top-of-the-funnel metrics
| you'll know whether the new version better in a matter of
| days -- even hours on a very busy site.
|
| Another fact is that Volument is a full-blown analytics
| software it already knows all the data for the baseline
| variant "A", so you only need to collect data for the "B"
| variant after a specific timestamp. Further cutting the
| measurement time by 50%.
|
| More about the topic here:
|
| https://volument.com/learn/
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