analytics
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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
Google Analytics
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:
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:
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: [1]
People using it on their own site:
- werd.io (discontinued in early 2014?)
Kara Mahan 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.
AJ Jordan - used on main personal site since 2015-06-10
Jacky Alciné has been using it on his site since January 21st, 2018. https://jacky.wtf/weblog/tracking-you/. He's stopped using this in favor of Plausible since March 2022.
Jamie Tanna has been using analytics since having a personal website
Arne Govaerts has been using it on his site since 24th July 2020
tw2113 uses it for some of his personal websites.
Open Web Analytics (OWA)
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:
Jonathan LaCour
Eddie Hinkle
CJ Willcock- 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.
- Screenshots, as of 2022-02-12
