TLDR: I now use Plausible for my web analytics. I’ve made my blog’s analytics public here.
In February of 2016, I wrote about why I left Google Analytics for Piwik (to avoid referral spam). About four months later, I wrote an R package to do custom analytics with Piwik. I had five main objectives for my analytics:
- Traffic over time
- Most popular pages
- Where is traffic coming from?
- How big are the browser screens?
- Conditional on being on one page, where do users go next?
Fast forward to today and I’m back at it again! Piwik is now Matomo, and I’ve switched analytics providers a second time. Here’s why I chose Plausible Analytics over Matomo:
Plausible doesn’t use any cookies and we don’t collect any personal data so by using Plausible you don’t need to obtain a cookie consent or the GDPR consent at all.
Plausible quickly addresses the first four of my five analytics objectives. Plausible doesn’t track how users navigate from page to page on my site (objective 5), but that’s a fine price to pay to be privacy-friendly.
PS Thanks to Jeff Palmer (artist) for introducing me to Plausible.