Historically, we’ve used Google Analytics to measure usage of this website.
GA has some advantages: it’s free, for a start, and it’s also the default industry standard. Even gov.uk uses it.
But it also has some, in my opinion, fairly major drawbacks.
- It may be free for site owners, but there is a cost to users in terms of their privacy
- It’s a data source for Google’s big advertising empire
- It requires cookies out of the box, which means we need to ask for consent, which we (probably) mostly don’t get, which in turn means
- It’s unreliable, and you can’t even know how unreliable
- I comes with a big dose of javascript, which has a performance impact
So I’ve been thinking for some time that it would be good to be able to find an alternative that addresses at least some of the issues.
At the start of October, I uninstalled Google Analytics and replaced it with an alternative package that:
- Integrates with our CMS
- Runs entirely on our server, not in your browser
- Records no personally identifiable information
- Stores all data on our server, with no third parties involved
- Does not require cookies or any other kind of local storage in clients
- Uses no javascript
Additionaly, I set the ‘salts’ (long strings of random letters and numbers that represent a unique visitor) to be refreshed every 24 hours as an additional layer of privacy.
As there are no cookies, we do not need to ask for consent, so I was also able to disable our cookie consent banner. Another win.
The results
So far, the results seem pretty good. It’s basic and simple, but that’s fine; we don’t need anything more detailed than page views and visitors. We only want to know what content people find most interesting.
We don’t want to track people around the site or over the web, we don’t have any campaigns, we don’t need to know about your every interaction.
It’s just nice to know that the work that goes in to maintaining and writing for this blog is appreciated.
Performance benefits
As a side benefit, removing the kilobytes of javascript that come with GA has definitely improved this site’s performance.
I'm a service designer in Scottish Enterprise's unsurprisingly-named service design team. I've been a content designer, editor, UX designer and giant haystacks developer on the web for (gulp) over 25 years.
Really interesting David. I love reading your insights and learning in these blogs. Please continue!
Thanks, Siobhan! I really appreciate that.
Think I might just make a habit of posting all the data routinely each month.
You know: open honest and transparent.