Why you should stop using Google Analytics on your website
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One interesting feature of Plausible Analytics is that you can open your dashboard and share your stats with the public. We've done that and as this post is now on the front page of Hacker News you can see some stats flying! Check the live stats here https://plausible.io/plausible.io
In my experience, sites using it are blocked by the Great Firewall in China. So if you want to get to the largest middle-class market in the world, don't use GA.
I wasn't aware of that, thanks for sharing!
Enjoyed the article. I have been thinking about using alternative services as well. I really like that it works with single page sites and that you can track events. I will give it a try, for sure!
Enjoyed this long read. I am particularly excited about the fact Plausible no longer uses cookies. I can now remove the vast majorty of Cookie Notices from my portfolio of client websites. The uplift is page speed is non-trivial and user experience is improved a gazillion percent! Great work Uku.
glad you enjoyed the article and the no-cookie update Richard, thanks!
This is a great read. Google Analytics has been a "habit" of mine too, and every-time I made it to the dashboard to create a new key, the whole experience had me second-guessing myself. But still, you need an easy way to measure, right?
This article pushed me over the edge to drop it! I will be trialing plausible.io and we'll see how it goes, but I might be exploring some of the other suggested solutions to.
I do really appreciate "the play" here, from an indie hacker perspective! It reads like: "This is why this is a bad product for me, these are the many ways where it was failing me so badly I built an alternative that solves my problems. These are some alternatives, but try out my solution, I believe in it." Of course I'm trivialising here, but how thought out the deconstruction is, sold me on giving plausible.io a try!
I do think "works out of the box for Single Page Apps too" is a neat feature you might want to make more obvious too... It's a small headache to take care of with Google Analytics, so it's nice it's just not an issue here!
happy to hear this Johnny and glad you enjoyed the article! we need more sites that choose to stop supporting Google and that choose to use more independent services. let me know how you get on with Plausible and if you have any feedback. thanks!
My trial is coming to an end and figure to revisit this to happily report I converted :-)
Not serious feedback, but every time I saw "10k / yearly" in the prompts and the email receipt, I had a mini heart-attack 😛 It is of course referring to the monthly pageviews plan, not how much I just paid.
Product works, pricing feels fair and transparent, all good :-)
that's great to hear Johnny, thanks for following up on this!
Hey thanks for replying!
I went into it expecting to write an article like "Tracking analytics with Next.js and Plausible", but the process is so easy since there is no further setup to track client-side routing!
It might be worth mentioning that on the "green dot / waiting for your first event" page too, as I immediately went to figure out how to do the "config update" equivalent from Google Analytics. It took me a while to find the section where you say "If your website is a single-page application with pushState routing, Plausible will track pageviews automatically with no extra work."
And maybe there could be a nice segway into tracking custom events, which does need a bit of extra setup? This is the part where I could write a little article on actually, as it has both the Next.js specific
_documentfile, as well as some typescript declarations you could define.You may see the relevant commit here, if you are curious about the typescript part: https://github.com/jmagrippis/magrippis/commit/27689ed3a23ee7db0e30d2776f9222cf5dc7d388
Thanks again for sharing this, clearly it's resulted in thoughts and learnings 😄
@ukutaht I have a question about keywords. Does your site show the keywords that the users use to come to a site?
You can link your site to Google Search console to get keywords: https://docs.plausible.io/google-search-console-integration/