website-analytics

 analytics  is the collection, analysis and reporting of a websites traffic. Website analytics are often used to report key statistics to website owners. These data points include, but are not limited to; peak user time, the amount of traffic received from each social media website and how much time people spend on each page.

Website analytics are provided by several open source and proprietary solutions. They can be split into two groups; active analytics and passive analytics.

IndieWeb Examples

 * Max Böck 2021-02-07 Webmention Analytics describes a set up for generating analytics of the webmentions on his site using webmention.io, Eleventy, and Netlify. He's got a demo version running on his site. The code can be found at https://github.com/maxboeck/webmention-analytics.

Active analytics
Active analytics usually work by having you include a JavaScript file which asynchronously communicates with a server, providing it with data such as


 * Referrers
 * Screen size
 * Operating system and browser
 * Page load time
 * Even mouse position; which can be used to determine the most/least popular parts of a page

Mixpanel
Mixpanel is a hosted service that "gives you the ability to measure any action a customer takes in your application while Google Analytics lets you measure the number of times specific pages in or site or app are viewed (page views)." (via Mixpanel)

You can get 175k free data points per month (which is way more than most personal sites need) by displaying their badge somewhere on your site. After setting up your account, you can grab the badge code and verify the badge at https://mixpanel.com/free/.

People using it on their own site:
 * mowens.com (Badge is visible in the expandable colophon)

New Relic
New Relic is a hosted service that provides server and application performance monitoring analytics with code-level visibility. Some of its recent additions to its service have added the ability to monitor and track user experiences in the browser as well as transaction tracking to better understand how your site or app perform in the real world setting of production.

Free users only get 24 hours of data, but this tends to be enough to allow you to monitor changes in performance based on new features or to debug specific performance bottlenecks.

People using it on their own site:
 * mowens.com

Twitter Analytics
Twitter Analytics is a companion analytics service to Twitter and Twitter Ads that provides link tracking on Twitter and conversion tracking around those links (i.e. "How many visitors arrived directly or indirectly due to engagement with a tweet containing my URL?").

People using it on their own site:
 * mowens.com

Matomo
Matomo is an open source project that you install on your own service that can collect information about visitors to your website. Note that this project was previously called Piwik until a name change was announced on 2018-01-09.

A project exists to make it easy to run Matomo on OpenShift https://github.com/openshift/piwik-openshift-quickstart. It is also available on sandstorm.io:

People using it on their own site:
 * werd.io (discontinued in early 2014?)
 * as of 2014-08-22. Installed out of curiosity, it's interesting to see the geographical diversity of visitors and get an idea of basic traffic volume.
 * - used on main personal site since 2015-06-10
 * has been using it on his site since January 21st, 2018. https://jacky.wtf/weblog/tracking-you/
 * has been using analytics since having a personal website
 * has been using it on his site since 24th July 2020
 * uses it for some of his personal websites.

Open Web Analytics (OWA)
Open Web Analytics

Fathom
Fathom is an open source, privacy focused website analytics package written in Go that is also available as a hosted service.

People using it on their own site:
 * The IndieWeb Wiki uses it with an available dashboard at https://app.usefathom.com/share/zphfryaa/indieweb.org
 * The IndieWeb Wiki uses it with an available dashboard at https://app.usefathom.com/share/zphfryaa/indieweb.org
 * The IndieWeb Wiki uses it with an available dashboard at https://app.usefathom.com/share/zphfryaa/indieweb.org
 * The IndieWeb Wiki uses it with an available dashboard at https://app.usefathom.com/share/zphfryaa/indieweb.org

Offen
Offen is an open source, self hosted, opt-in only, website analytics system. When a visitor opts in to sharing their data, the visitor is also provided with a link where they can see the exact data they have shared. From this data view, consent can also be revoked, removing all the data again.

Passive Analytics
Passive analytics are implemented on the server side, usually at the server or application level. Some of them work with server logs (e.g. AWStats) while others are more integrated to the platform they are running on (WordPress plugins).

Advantages

 * Passive analytics do not affect the load time of a web page.
 * Users do not need to download a JavaScript script every time they visit a page.
 * Passive analytics scripts are easy to write for Nginx and Apache because logs are available in plain text.

Disadvantages

 * Passive analytics require more technical knowledge
 * You must have access to a server environment to implement passive analytics
 * Depending on the software you use, you are unlikely to receive real-time updates without developing an extension.

Dobrado
dobrado includes an analytics module that can record all page requests and referers where provided. It was added to avoid the overhead of running Piwik/Matomo on the same server, which requires extra javascript on the page and an extra network request.

Log Analyzers
This type of analytics software collect their data from server logs. The data in these logs are considerably less than the ones provided by active analytics, but they are still enough to generate useful reports. There are several tools to analyze these files.


 * GoAccess command-line, realtime log analyzer written in C. Single executable, no configuration necessary.
 * User:rascul.io uses it on his personal site to see high-level visit information
 * has also had good, albeit limited experiences with it
 * awstats is another popular tool. It can generate pretty graphs and it's written in Perl.
 * used to use his own log analyzer script to view analytics for his website.
 * The log analyzer is open source on GitHub Gists.

Makes Your Site Slower
Anecdata: while browsing around the web, I often see sites (mainstream/big sites!) freezing with "Waiting for ssl.google-analytics.com ..." in the status bar in the bottom left for several seconds which is unacceptable latency. Based on such poor user experiences I can't imagine for what benefit I would make my users wait that long. - undefined


 * The way to avoid this is to load analytics scripts asynchronously which is theoretically supported by the following:
 * Google Analytics async how to. Examples of IndieWeb sites using Google analytics asynchronously:
 * https://snarfed.org/
 * https://aaronparecki.com
 * http://caseorganic.com
 * https://mowens.com
 * GoSquared async how to

Have also seen similarly: "Transferring from fonts.googleapis.com ..."

Privacy and Tracking
Analytics silos like Google's collect and aggregate data about your site's visitors. These statistics might be interesting to me but they are majorly profitable to them. For this reason I would prefer to use self-hosted analytics or avoid them altogether Kylewm.com

IndieWeb Community Analytics
The IndieWeb websites (indieweb.org, events.indieweb.org, etc) use Fathom rather than Google Analytics. The stats are available publicly:


 * indieweb.org
 * events.indieweb.org

Sessions

 * London 2020: Analytics and the IndieWeb