EP481 – Lies, Damned Lies, and Analytics

Episode Transcription

[00:00:00] Jason Tucker: This is episode number 481 of WPwatercooler, Lies, Damn Lies, and Analytics.

[00:00:20] Jason Cosper: much. And y’all know who it is. It’s your boy, Jason Cosper back at it again on the world’s most influential WordPress podcast.

[00:00:42] Jason Tucker: Speaking of that podcast, find us wherever great podcasts can be found and audible. And you can go hang out with us in our discord over at wpwatercoolerslack. lol.

[00:00:54] Jason Cosper: It’s funny. The other day I ran into her Sarah was talking with one of her classmates. She’s been back at school. And she found out that person was into horror podcasts and was telling them about her podcast. Slasher podcast. And someone told her that they listen to podcasts on Amazon.

[00:01:19] Jason Cosper: And I was like, what? I was like, you mean Audible? And she was like, no, Amazon. I was like, Oh, great. This is some other place that I have to make sure that the, the feed shows up on it, there are too many places now to to get your podcast, right?

[00:01:40] Jason Tucker: Adding that to the list. Yeah. Yeah. And what’s weird is Google podcasts is now just like essentially YouTube it’s just YouTube music. That’s where you go and listen to podcasts now. And it’s video if you want to. So if you’re subscribed to us, you get the feed early because it comes out via YouTube, which is a very weird.

[00:02:09] Jason Cosper: Okay. All right. Okay.

[00:02:11] Jason Tucker: Hi,

[00:02:12] Jason Cosper: Hey to podcasts with WPwatercooler.

[00:02:17] Jason Cosper: speaking of all the different places you can get podcasts the I’m sure that as you’re watching people let me try to get in on the segue here. You’re watching where people are like listening to the podcast and everything else, like you need to see those numbers, and that really brings us to our topic of analytics. And we’re not really talking about like necessarily podcast numbers, but just folks coming to and visiting your website. And we were it’s wild. Normally give you a, another little peek behind the curtain.

[00:03:01] Jason Cosper: Sometimes like Wednesday, Thursday, we’re like, what are we going to talk about this week? But like Monday. After watching like all of the fallout of things happening with Jetpack and specifically with Jetpack stats of people erroneously getting hit with getting hit with having their site classified as Oh, this isn’t like a hobbyist site.

[00:03:34] Jason Cosper: So now you’re going to have to start paying us for stats. And so there, there are people scrambling for like analytics and figuring that stuff out and seeing like where their site traffic is coming from what’s their popular pages, stuff like that. We just thought we would take a little time and talk about that.

[00:04:04] Jason Tucker: Yeah, so install Google analytics, hit the go button and then walk away. That’s it. That’s what you do, right? Is that what you do?

[00:04:13] Jason Tucker: That’s what I do currently, but I honestly don’t really care about my stats all that much.

[00:04:19] Jason Cosper: See it’s a funny thing because neither of us really care about stats all that much. I don’t,

[00:04:27] Jason Tucker: group of people to be on the

[00:04:30] Jason Cosper: yes I don’t run any stats plugins on my domains or anything like that. However as. As I do help folks out with their sites, have plenty of like friends and family who do care about that sort of thing. I’ve had a few people come to me over the past week and they’re like, Hey apparently I have to start paying for Jetpack stats now.

[00:05:03] Jason Cosper: This was like the last reason. That I was holding on a jetpack because they were just giving me these admittedly compared to something like Google analytics, like pretty minimal stats, but they were at least showing me like the hits I was getting the things like that. And so where should I go?

[00:05:26] Jason Cosper: So I had to do a bit of research in finding that stuff and outside of Google Analytics, which honestly can tend to be pretty heavy when it comes to like the JavaScript it adds to your site sometimes the delays that loading that JavaScript and all of that stuff can add.

[00:05:51] Jason Cosper: It really Google analytics is more for and it’s fine if that, if it’s what you need but it’s more for the people who are treating their site, like a business who. Need to be able to see what campaigns are being run like how successful those campaigns are having a particular tracking tied to links that they may pass out in newsletters, things like that, Google analytics for that sort of thing is great.

[00:06:26] Jason Cosper: Like I don’t love funneling data to Google. And also there are some like lighter weight. Things out there, like I’m always concerned about performance. I’m always concerned about the amount of like JavaScript getting out of the page, like how much load time that adds especially since it’s not only the amount and the size of the JavaScript that gets loaded, it’s how long that JavaScript then takes to initialize once it’s loaded.

[00:06:58] Jason Cosper: Having some alternatives to Jetpack stats, especially if you’re not paying or not interested in paying for stats and you want some minimal stuff is, it’s a good idea

[00:07:19] Jason Tucker: Before we jump into like alternatives the idea of using just Google Analytics, there’s like a zillion Google Analytics plugins for WordPress.

[00:07:31] Jason Cosper: Yes.

[00:07:33] Jason Tucker: I’d say for the most part, do all the same thing. There are some stuff that goes on. That’s a little bit different where the way that they may set up the event tracking if you’re doing a scrolling on the page or doing some type of action on the page or something like that, those sorts of things I can see might be a little bit different.

[00:07:50] Jason Tucker: We’re not a WooCommerce show, but any type of e commerce stuff, there’s a bunch of stuff you have to do with that to be able to know like how much money was in the cart or how much money was in this or how much that the all of those pieces, those are things where you essentially get.

[00:08:06] Jason Tucker: a single pane of glass, that gives you an idea of what’s happening on your website. So that way you’re not having to dig into your not just your analytics, but also the the way in which those transactions occurred on the site too. So there’s yeah. Like I said I personally, on my personal sites, I just throw that on there, but there’s also other places.

[00:08:27] Jason Tucker: Other ways of approaching it too. So in Cosper’s, Cosper is really good at knowing the alternating because we This is what he does is performance. Figuring out how the what is the most performant or, and maybe what is even the most, the easiest ones to install as well.

[00:08:47] Jason Cosper: Yeah, absolutely. The ones that I really as I’ve done digging since everything started to go down and people were looking for alternatives. We’re really focused on like being lightweight. They all give you the same amount of detail that Jetpack Stats did.

[00:09:15] Jason Cosper: One thing to note about all of these alternatives that just like Jetpack Stats, just Google Analytics Nothing really beats being able to analyze like the log files from your site. ’cause the log files on your site log every hit that happens to your site, like the server level log files.

[00:09:42] Jason Cosper: You don’t need to add any extra tracking, you don’t need to add stuff. But you do need to run scripts that turn those log files into something that you can see and use. And in a lot of cases. You don’t get like up to the minute or up to the hour stats generation on this, if you have a web host that like generates logs for you and uses like one of these more standard packages, it’s every night you can see like what your log files look like, but they are much more exacting than Google Analytics.

[00:10:19] Jason Cosper: We were talking about this in our discord. And Alda pointed out if you want numbers for a largest site I can confirm that there is about a 40 percent discrepancy in the number of hits between logs, which is what I was just talking about, and what tracking pixels like Google analytics Jetpack stats, like the alternatives that we’re going to be talking about are reporting depending on if the audience is tech savvy or not.

[00:10:52] Jason Cosper: And in a lot of cases, what tech savvy means is if they are running it, it doesn’t have to necessarily mean folks like Tucker and I, but if you’re running an ad blocker on your phone a lot of those ad blockers try to minimize the amount of tracking that gets done to you while you’re browsing the internet.

[00:11:13] Jason Cosper: So they can mess. with analytics a little bit. Having those like tracking scripts those little bits of JavaScript for analytics that get added to your site there ends up being a discrepancy there. It’s actually in part. Not what Alda was saying, but just I already had an inkling of that, but it’s one of the reasons that we leaned on the the Benjamin Disraeli quote for our show title here.

[00:11:51] Jason Cosper: Which is the original quote is there are three types of lies, damned lies, and statistics. And in this case, analytics and statistics it’s a pretty close jump. But so with that being said, if you are just looking to have a tracking script running on your site some of the tools that we can look at here, and I will while I was vamping, I should have gotten my screen up, but why do that?

[00:12:31] Jason Cosper: Why not make there be an awkward pause in the middle of the show? Yeah All this making me remember a bunch of old things, one of which was WebAlizer.

[00:12:47] Jason Cosper: Yes. Yes. WebAlizer, definitely. So there are a few alternatives out there. One that. Is actually pretty nice and has a free tier up to 10, 000 views is one called Umami. And Umami they have a WordPress plugin that integrates and everything else. So you can get this installed, running on your site.

[00:13:18] Jason Cosper: And as long as you have 10, 000 views or less across your sites you can basically see it doesn’t look dissimilar from what you get out of a Jetpack stats the pages that they’re going to like where the traffic is coming from really just gives you a breakdown.

[00:13:43] Jason Cosper: And one of the nice things about it is All of these are more privacy focused than Google Analytics just because

[00:13:54] Jason Tucker: I’ll

[00:13:55] Jason Cosper: not Google collecting all of the data all hoovering up. This is why, when I said earlier that I’m uncomfortable with giving any of that free data to Google they’re collecting information about your site.

[00:14:12] Jason Cosper: And like, Why make it easier for them? They’re already doing it, but why make it easier? Why give them an idea of the actual traffic your site is getting? Why any of that? Umami is a good initial alternative. A lot of big companies and names use it. Really straightforward, gives you insights, like broken down by country, if that’s stuff you need to see.

[00:14:40] Jason Cosper: So that’s really nice. There is another one that this is a paid and there is. If you are industrious like Tucker or I you could install effectively like your own copy of they have code available up on GitHub where you could deploy a version of Fathom. To whatever hosting environment you happen to be running.

[00:15:12] Jason Cosper: And there’s Fathom Analytics. Yeah, they have a 30 day free trial. They’re good. They’re, they are also privacy focused. And the features and benefits here really they have a focus on privacy on GDPR. On CCPA, which is the California GDPR esque privacy law.

[00:15:43] Jason Cosper: They really do what they can to give you stats without violating any customer privacy. Giving you the information you need while also helping you like anonymize that data. Another alternative that we have is plausible.

[00:16:13] Jason Cosper: I’m trying to get these pulled up one by one here. Really clean again. Just and it’s one of the reasons that people loved Jetpack stats so much is there’s no special views or specific event tracking to drill down into. You don’t have to click around to find the view that basically gives you like the display of your stats when you log in, it just looks like this.

[00:16:52] Jason Cosper: It’s really lovely. It is about nine bucks a month. It is basically what you would be paying automatic for like any of the premium jetpack features. But it is again just like Fathom, just like Umami very privacy focused, concerned with the GDPR, concerned with CCPA.

[00:17:21] Jason Cosper: So if you’re in. A European country. If you have California customers that you have to focus on it is a very nice alternative. And most of these that I have brought up so far the JavaScript for all of this doesn’t come in at any more than like 10 kilobytes added to your page. That’s cool.

[00:17:50] Jason Cosper: Tucker, the last time you looked into Google analytics, do you know, like, how much overhead that adds to your page off the top of your head?

[00:18:01] Jason Tucker: Not off the top of my head, but it’s it’s a lot, but I have a couple of clients where the number of of ads that are on the site are larger than all of the images that are being displayed on the site.

[00:18:19]

[00:18:20] Jason Tucker: So it’s like the load’s going to be bad anyhow, just because of the fact that you’re having to load up a bunch of JavaScript for all this stuff.

[00:18:27] Jason Tucker: And ads you essentially have JavaScript within JavaScript that’s being loaded in JavaScript that’s being loaded in an iframe that’s being loaded in yet another iframe. And it’s just all the way down. Yeah that’s the rub there.

[00:18:47] Jason Cosper: right. Yeah, that is definitely the rub when it comes to that. So the, these are all. The three that I just highlighted are more of the premium something that you can just install and not have to futz with very much in the case of Fathom and Plausible I believe each one of those has an open source like server component that you can install on like a commodity on most commodity web hosting like a VPS or something like that both pretty straightforward.

[00:19:36] Jason Cosper: I was for a while running my own. Fathom server. And it worked really well, but I had to ask myself like why I was continuing to maintain something that I wasn’t really using all of that much.

[00:19:56] Jason Tucker: You’re talking to two people that literally took all of the forms off of their website for contact us stuff it’s yeah,

[00:20:04] Jason Tucker: it’s yet another, it’s yet another data point that we don’t want to look at.

[00:20:10] Jason Cosper: huh.

[00:20:10] Jason Tucker: Yeah. Find us on socials and feel free to say hi.

[00:20:15] Jason Cosper: Exactly. But find us. We’re not going to tell you where to find us. So there are a few more I tend to go away. A few people have asked me about this when it comes to recommending. Plugins to use on your site, like a more plugin oriented way of doing things where it’s like, Oh, I can just add a plugin.

[00:20:47] Jason Cosper: And it will add a few tables to my database and add some stats about my site. One of the problems that I see with this and this is something that what we’re highlighting on screen right now, if you’re watching Cocoa Analytics does Cocoa Analytics is a very Like nice, straightforward pretty lightweight as far as we shove the stats for your site into your database.

[00:21:24] Jason Cosper: It does a pretty good job of clearing that stuff out on the regular and not Adding additional database bloat. It’s probably one of, out of all of the alternatives that I’ve looked at that Oh, we’ll put a a copy of whatever open source analytics thing is out there, like into your database and then add another 20 database tables to like track what country your visitors are from, what.

[00:22:01] Jason Cosper: Whatever details you want to use or get on your customers or visitors. But it it’s all, if you’re looking at the screen right now it’s all a pretty straightforward, very reminiscent also, again, still of Jetpack stats. Tells you how many views, how many impressions you get.

[00:22:28] Jason Cosper: Let me see if I can click through to the live demo of Cocoa Analytics, it’s griping at me for using an ad blocker again. Thank you very much.

[00:22:43] Jason Cosper: Okay. The demo is

[00:22:45] Jason Tucker: Yeah, oh no, you got disconnected. Oh yeah, that is very I don’t know having those having those different types of embedded You know, data points like that being blocked by various ad blockers is always fun. And you’re just having to go through and say ignore this one too, but ignore this one too.

[00:23:18] Jason Tucker: And ignore this one too.

[00:23:46] Jason Tucker: Right.

[00:24:01]

[00:24:02] Jason Tucker: Yes.

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[00:25:21] Jason Tucker: Yeah.

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[00:27:21] Jason Tucker: Oh, yeah,

[00:27:34]

[00:27:34] Jason Tucker: Right, yeah, so one, one of the, one of the, I have a few questions regarding this, but like one, one in particular that comes to mind is you’re essentially loading up a JavaScript. That is going to be then running on your website and being presented on your website to the person’s browser.

[00:28:17] Jason Tucker: The, and then the information that’s being collected from it is now being sent back to that server. The performance hit that happens there when the if you’re using like a budget web host. For this particular type of package. Is that something that you should be thinking about if you’re going to go this route?

[00:28:51] Jason Tucker: Yeah. Like dollarhosting. com kind of thing. If you threw this on there, you’re going to see a performance hit, you think? Or you see a delay in stats or what do you feel like would be the hit?

[00:29:13]


[00:29:57] Jason Tucker: Last but not least, 60seconds Eminem. This is real life studio yet again. Huh. Oh my gosh. So big,

[00:31:01] Jason Tucker: but do they put a happy face in the bottom right corner of your page? That’s what I want to know.

[00:31:08] Jason Tucker: Is it just jet pack?

[00:31:20] Jason Tucker: So what I’m, so the I’m trying to build out a scenario here, so let’s say that you’re someone who your site did do pretty good the cat that you have on your cat blog is performing well and people are enjoying it and they keep going and checking out the website and you’ve now hit that point where you’re no longer a hobbyist and you’re now you should probably be making money off your website, but maybe you choose not to.

[00:31:47] Jason Tucker: So now you’re just, you’re still talking about your cat and everything’s cool on that website. What should that person do? What should be like the first step of now moving to a different analytics product other than Google Analytics?

[00:33:43] Jason Tucker: But there is some precision involved in this as well, because if you pick the wrong analytics package down the road you now have you have now have data that you’re now going to ditch because you’re not migrating your data from one analytics package to another. Let’s be honest here.

[00:34:00] Jason Tucker: That’s not how this works. You’re just going to go, all right I did this for May and now it’s June and we’ve moved to another package. So now we have a hole in our analytics and now we don’t have that information.


[00:34:45] Jason Tucker: A lot. I’d have to go back to WebAlizer.

[00:35:00] Jason Tucker: It’s the same reason why I pay for Gmail. It sucks, but it’s the same reason why I pay for multiple Gmail accounts for the various properties that I manage. It’s just it’s dumb. It sucks. It’s very hard to move that crap out of there. Cause now you’re dependent on all this other stuff.

[00:35:19] Jason Tucker: You got Google docs, you got this, you got that. The list goes on and then having to unwind all that stuff. So yeah the that lock in is very difficult to back out of.

[00:36:49] Jason Tucker: All right. Okay. Please subscribe.

[00:37:40] Jason Tucker: Yeah,

[00:37:52] Jason Tucker: right, yeah right. Are the robots actually ingesting my content and stealing it for for other uses? Yes, they are. Okay, good. I’m glad.

[00:39:04] Jason Tucker: So the other question I had and these are questions I know the answer to in some ways I have to be the audience here the other question is with like web application firewalls or something that’s sitting in front of your website how does that, how does, like, how does that work?

[00:39:23] Jason Tucker: These types of technologies that are all using JavaScript or something like that. Like how are those being used and what does it do to something like what Aldo was talking about where the server logs aren’t maybe not even getting hit because they’re sitting, something sitting in front of the website that’s stopping it.

[00:39:42] Jason Tucker: So what’s the other side of that? That, that coin there.

[00:40:33] Jason Tucker: Go ahead. Hang.

[00:41:52]

[00:41:52] Jason Tucker: Okay.

[00:42:32] Jason Tucker: So the, yeah, the other one I had was there’s some of these packages for Google Analytics that will take a copy of the JavaScript that runs on the website and will serve it up locally. What are your thoughts regarding something like that?

[00:42:58] Jason Tucker: Now it’s not coming off of the CDN. That’s all crazy powerful and whatnot. It’s now being hosted up by your 5 web hosting package. Where does that lie? Now you have a hundred K being loaded up off of spinning hard drives in some data center instead of a super fast SSDs that are cached across the whole internet.

[00:43:38] Jason Tucker: Yeah. We haven’t done a test is essentially what it comes down to, at least at this point.


[00:44:03]

[00:44:08] Jason Tucker: Yep.


[00:44:18] Jason Tucker: right. Cause the way that I’m thinking about this and this just popped up in my head is you end up serving up this this JavaScript file that’s been taken off of Google or wherever. And now you could potentially have a minification that’s happening on top of it, because now this file exists in your realm and not in theirs.

[00:44:40] Jason Tucker: And then it could be served up incorrectly as well. So now you’re really messing things up and now you’re like, Oh wow the site loads so slow and this happens and it’s really just the JavaScript that’s just not making it it’s not being served up at the right time.

[00:45:41] Jason Tucker: Yeah, I just think it’s funny that for we used to joke that like cache rules, everything around me, but I really think it’s more JavaScript.

[00:45:55] Jason Tucker: It doesn’t roll off the tongue and it’s not a Wu Tang song, but if Wu ever did anything about JavaScript, that’d be great. But it’s just it’s. It’s just funny. It just makes you think it’s just Oh actually caching there’s all these other layers in this this cake that you’re serving up from your web surfer.

[00:46:16] Jason Tucker: And one of them is JavaScript. And that caching part of it is already taken care of multiple times over.

[00:46:33] Jason Tucker: We, we did a good job, friend. We did a good job.

[00:47:02] Jason Tucker: Yeah, I shall. Here’s our outro. Hey, thank you very much for hanging out with us today. We really appreciate it. Visit our website at www. serverpress. com. Find all the links to subscribe to this stuff here. And like Cosper was saying, go and hang out with us in our Discord. We have a lot of fun over there and we talk about a lot of really great stuff.

[00:47:25] Jason Tucker: And our after show discussions work really well there. Talk to y’all later. Have a good one. Bye bye.

[00:47:46] Jason Tucker: This is episode number 481 of WPwatercooler, Lies, Damn Lies, and Analytics.

[00:48:06] Jason Cosper: much. And y’all know who it is. It’s your boy, Jason Cosper back at it again on the world’s most influential WordPress podcast.

[00:48:28] Jason Tucker: Speaking of that podcast, find us wherever great podcasts can be found and audible. And you can go hang out with us in our discord over at wpwatercoolerslack. lol.

[00:48:40] Jason Cosper: It’s funny. The other day I ran into her Sarah was talking with one of her classmates. She’s been back at school. And she found out that person was into horror podcasts and was telling them about her podcast. Slasher podcast. And someone told her that they listen to podcasts on Amazon.

[00:49:05] Jason Cosper: And I was like, what? I was like, you mean Audible? And she was like, no, Amazon. I was like, Oh, great. This is some other place that I have to make sure that the, the feed shows up on it, there are too many places now to to get your podcast, right?

[00:49:26] Jason Tucker: Adding that to the list. Yeah. Yeah. And what’s weird is Google podcasts is now just like essentially YouTube it’s just YouTube music. That’s where you go and listen to podcasts now. And it’s video if you want to. So if you’re subscribed to us, you get the feed early because it comes out via YouTube, which is a very weird.

[00:49:56] Jason Cosper: Okay. All right. Okay.

[00:49:57] Jason Tucker: Hi,

[00:49:59] Jason Cosper: Hey to podcasts with WPwatercooler.

[00:50:04] Jason Cosper: speaking of all the different places you can get podcasts the I’m sure that as you’re watching people let me try to get in on the segue here. You’re watching where people are like listening to the podcast and everything else, like you need to see those numbers, and that really brings us to our topic of analytics. And we’re not really talking about like necessarily podcast numbers, but just folks coming to and visiting your website. And we were it’s wild. Normally give you a, another little peek behind the curtain.

[00:50:47] Jason Cosper: Sometimes like Wednesday, Thursday, we’re like, what are we going to talk about this week? But like Monday. After watching like all of the fallout of things happening with Jetpack and specifically with Jetpack stats of people erroneously getting hit with getting hit with having their site classified as Oh, this isn’t like a hobbyist site.

[00:51:20] Jason Cosper: So now you’re going to have to start paying us for stats. And so there, there are people scrambling for like analytics and figuring that stuff out and seeing like where their site traffic is coming from what’s their popular pages, stuff like that. We just thought we would take a little time and talk about that.

[00:51:50] Jason Tucker: Yeah, so install Google analytics, hit the go button and then walk away. That’s it. That’s what you do, right? Is that what you do?

[00:51:59] Jason Tucker: That’s what I do currently, but I honestly don’t really care about my stats all that much.

[00:52:05] Jason Cosper: See it’s a funny thing because neither of us really care about stats all that much. I don’t,

[00:52:14] Jason Tucker: group of people to be on the

[00:52:16] Jason Cosper: yes I don’t run any stats plugins on my domains or anything like that. However as. As I do help folks out with their sites, have plenty of like friends and family who do care about that sort of thing. I’ve had a few people come to me over the past week and they’re like, Hey apparently I have to start paying for Jetpack stats now.

[00:52:50] Jason Cosper: This was like the last reason. That I was holding on a jetpack because they were just giving me these admittedly compared to something like Google analytics, like pretty minimal stats, but they were at least showing me like the hits I was getting the things like that. And so where should I go?

[00:53:12] Jason Cosper: So I had to do a bit of research in finding that stuff and outside of Google Analytics, which honestly can tend to be pretty heavy when it comes to like the JavaScript it adds to your site sometimes the delays that loading that JavaScript and all of that stuff can add.

[00:53:38] Jason Cosper: It really Google analytics is more for and it’s fine if that, if it’s what you need but it’s more for the people who are treating their site, like a business who. Need to be able to see what campaigns are being run like how successful those campaigns are having a particular tracking tied to links that they may pass out in newsletters, things like that, Google analytics for that sort of thing is great.

[00:54:13] Jason Cosper: Like I don’t love funneling data to Google. And also there are some like lighter weight. Things out there, like I’m always concerned about performance. I’m always concerned about the amount of like JavaScript getting out of the page, like how much load time that adds especially since it’s not only the amount and the size of the JavaScript that gets loaded, it’s how long that JavaScript then takes to initialize once it’s loaded.

[00:54:44] Jason Cosper: Having some alternatives to Jetpack stats, especially if you’re not paying or not interested in paying for stats and you want some minimal stuff is, it’s a good idea

[00:55:05] Jason Tucker: Before we jump into like alternatives the idea of using just Google Analytics, there’s like a zillion Google Analytics plugins for WordPress.

[00:55:18] Jason Cosper: Yes.

[00:55:19] Jason Tucker: I’d say for the most part, do all the same thing. There are some stuff that goes on. That’s a little bit different where the way that they may set up the event tracking if you’re doing a scrolling on the page or doing some type of action on the page or something like that, those sorts of things I can see might be a little bit different.

[00:55:37] Jason Tucker: We’re not a WooCommerce show, but any type of e commerce stuff, there’s a bunch of stuff you have to do with that to be able to know like how much money was in the cart or how much money was in this or how much that the all of those pieces, those are things where you essentially get.

[00:55:52] Jason Tucker: a single pane of glass, that gives you an idea of what’s happening on your website. So that way you’re not having to dig into your not just your analytics, but also the the way in which those transactions occurred on the site too. So there’s yeah. Like I said I personally, on my personal sites, I just throw that on there, but there’s also other places.

[00:56:14] Jason Tucker: Other ways of approaching it too. So in Cosper’s, Cosper is really good at knowing the alternating because we This is what he does is performance. Figuring out how the what is the most performant or, and maybe what is even the most, the easiest ones to install as well.

[00:56:33] Jason Cosper: Yeah, absolutely. The ones that I really as I’ve done digging since everything started to go down and people were looking for alternatives. We’re really focused on like being lightweight. They all give you the same amount of detail that Jetpack Stats did.

[00:57:01] Jason Cosper: One thing to note about all of these alternatives that just like Jetpack Stats, just Google Analytics Nothing really beats being able to analyze like the log files from your site. ’cause the log files on your site log every hit that happens to your site, like the server level log files.

[00:57:28] Jason Cosper: You don’t need to add any extra tracking, you don’t need to add stuff. But you do need to run scripts that turn those log files into something that you can see and use. And in a lot of cases. You don’t get like up to the minute or up to the hour stats generation on this, if you have a web host that like generates logs for you and uses like one of these more standard packages, it’s every night you can see like what your log files look like, but they are much more exacting than Google Analytics.

[00:58:05] Jason Cosper: We were talking about this in our discord. And Alda pointed out if you want numbers for a largest site I can confirm that there is about a 40 percent discrepancy in the number of hits between logs, which is what I was just talking about, and what tracking pixels like Google analytics Jetpack stats, like the alternatives that we’re going to be talking about are reporting depending on if the audience is tech savvy or not.

[00:58:38] Jason Cosper: And in a lot of cases, what tech savvy means is if they are running it, it doesn’t have to necessarily mean folks like Tucker and I, but if you’re running an ad blocker on your phone a lot of those ad blockers try to minimize the amount of tracking that gets done to you while you’re browsing the internet.

[00:58:59] Jason Cosper: So they can mess. with analytics a little bit. Having those like tracking scripts those little bits of JavaScript for analytics that get added to your site there ends up being a discrepancy there. It’s actually in part. Not what Alda was saying, but just I already had an inkling of that, but it’s one of the reasons that we leaned on the the Benjamin Disraeli quote for our show title here.

[00:59:38] Jason Cosper: Which is the original quote is there are three types of lies, damned lies, and statistics. And in this case, analytics and statistics it’s a pretty close jump. But so with that being said, if you are just looking to have a tracking script running on your site some of the tools that we can look at here, and I will while I was vamping, I should have gotten my screen up, but why do that?

[01:00:18] Jason Cosper: Why not make there be an awkward pause in the middle of the show? Yeah All this making me remember a bunch of old things, one of which was WebAlizer.

[01:00:33] Jason Cosper: Yes. Yes. WebAlizer, definitely. So there are a few alternatives out there. One that. Is actually pretty nice and has a free tier up to 10, 000 views is one called Umami. And Umami they have a WordPress plugin that integrates and everything else. So you can get this installed, running on your site.

[01:01:04] Jason Cosper: And as long as you have 10, 000 views or less across your sites you can basically see it doesn’t look dissimilar from what you get out of a Jetpack stats the pages that they’re going to like where the traffic is coming from really just gives you a breakdown.

[01:01:29] Jason Cosper: And one of the nice things about it is All of these are more privacy focused than Google Analytics just because

[01:01:40] Jason Tucker: I’ll

[01:01:41] Jason Cosper: not Google collecting all of the data all hoovering up. This is why, when I said earlier that I’m uncomfortable with giving any of that free data to Google they’re collecting information about your site.

[01:01:58] Jason Cosper: And like, Why make it easier for them? They’re already doing it, but why make it easier? Why give them an idea of the actual traffic your site is getting? Why any of that? Umami is a good initial alternative. A lot of big companies and names use it. Really straightforward, gives you insights, like broken down by country, if that’s stuff you need to see.

[01:02:27] Jason Cosper: So that’s really nice. There is another one that this is a paid and there is. If you are industrious like Tucker or I you could install effectively like your own copy of they have code available up on GitHub where you could deploy a version of Fathom. To whatever hosting environment you happen to be running.

[01:02:58] Jason Cosper: And there’s Fathom Analytics. Yeah, they have a 30 day free trial. They’re good. They’re, they are also privacy focused. And the features and benefits here really they have a focus on privacy on GDPR. On CCPA, which is the California GDPR esque privacy law.

[01:03:30] Jason Cosper: They really do what they can to give you stats without violating any customer privacy. Giving you the information you need while also helping you like anonymize that data. Another alternative that we have is plausible.

[01:03:59] Jason Cosper: I’m trying to get these pulled up one by one here. Really clean again. Just and it’s one of the reasons that people loved Jetpack stats so much is there’s no special views or specific event tracking to drill down into. You don’t have to click around to find the view that basically gives you like the display of your stats when you log in, it just looks like this.

[01:04:38] Jason Cosper: It’s really lovely. It is about nine bucks a month. It is basically what you would be paying automatic for like any of the premium jetpack features. But it is again just like Fathom, just like Umami very privacy focused, concerned with the GDPR, concerned with CCPA.

[01:05:07] Jason Cosper: So if you’re in. A European country. If you have California customers that you have to focus on it is a very nice alternative. And most of these that I have brought up so far the JavaScript for all of this doesn’t come in at any more than like 10 kilobytes added to your page. That’s cool.

[01:05:37] Jason Cosper: Tucker, the last time you looked into Google analytics, do you know, like, how much overhead that adds to your page off the top of your head?

[01:05:47] Jason Tucker: Not off the top of my head, but it’s it’s a lot, but I have a couple of clients where the number of of ads that are on the site are larger than all of the images that are being displayed on the site.

[01:06:06]

[01:06:06] Jason Tucker: So it’s like the load’s going to be bad anyhow, just because of the fact that you’re having to load up a bunch of JavaScript for all this stuff.

[01:06:14] Jason Tucker: And ads you essentially have JavaScript within JavaScript that’s being loaded in JavaScript that’s being loaded in an iframe that’s being loaded in yet another iframe. And it’s just all the way down. Yeah that’s the rub there.

[01:06:33] Jason Cosper: right. Yeah, that is definitely the rub when it comes to that. So the, these are all. The three that I just highlighted are more of the premium something that you can just install and not have to futz with very much in the case of Fathom and Plausible I believe each one of those has an open source like server component that you can install on like a commodity on most commodity web hosting like a VPS or something like that both pretty straightforward.

[01:07:22] Jason Cosper: I was for a while running my own. Fathom server. And it worked really well, but I had to ask myself like why I was continuing to maintain something that I wasn’t really using all of that much.

[01:07:42] Jason Tucker: You’re talking to two people that literally took all of the forms off of their website for contact us stuff it’s yeah,

[01:07:50] Jason Tucker: it’s yet another, it’s yet another data point that we don’t want to look at.

[01:07:56] Jason Cosper: huh.

[01:07:57] Jason Tucker: Yeah. Find us on socials and feel free to say hi.

[01:08:02] Jason Cosper: Exactly. But find us. We’re not going to tell you where to find us. So there are a few more I tend to go away. A few people have asked me about this when it comes to recommending. Plugins to use on your site, like a more plugin oriented way of doing things where it’s like, Oh, I can just add a plugin.

[01:08:33] Jason Cosper: And it will add a few tables to my database and add some stats about my site. One of the problems that I see with this and this is something that what we’re highlighting on screen right now, if you’re watching Cocoa Analytics does Cocoa Analytics is a very Like nice, straightforward pretty lightweight as far as we shove the stats for your site into your database.

[01:09:10] Jason Cosper: It does a pretty good job of clearing that stuff out on the regular and not Adding additional database bloat. It’s probably one of, out of all of the alternatives that I’ve looked at that Oh, we’ll put a a copy of whatever open source analytics thing is out there, like into your database and then add another 20 database tables to like track what country your visitors are from, what.

[01:09:47] Jason Cosper: Whatever details you want to use or get on your customers or visitors. But it it’s all, if you’re looking at the screen right now it’s all a pretty straightforward, very reminiscent also, again, still of Jetpack stats. Tells you how many views, how many impressions you get.

[01:10:14] Jason Cosper: Let me see if I can click through to the live demo of Cocoa Analytics, it’s griping at me for using an ad blocker again. Thank you very much.

[01:10:29] Jason Cosper: Okay. The demo is

[01:10:32] Jason Tucker: Yeah, oh no, you got disconnected. Oh yeah, that is very I don’t know having those having those different types of embedded You know, data points like that being blocked by various ad blockers is always fun. And you’re just having to go through and say ignore this one too, but ignore this one too.

[01:11:04] Jason Tucker: And ignore this one too.


[01:11:48]

[01:11:48] Jason Tucker: Yes.

[01:12:13]



[01:13:41]


[01:15:07] Jason Tucker: Oh, yeah,

[01:15:20]

[01:15:20] Jason Tucker: Right, yeah, so one, one of the, one of the, I have a few questions regarding this, but like one, one in particular that comes to mind is you’re essentially loading up a JavaScript. That is going to be then running on your website and being presented on your website to the person’s browser.

[01:16:03] Jason Tucker: The, and then the information that’s being collected from it is now being sent back to that server. The performance hit that happens there when the if you’re using like a budget web host. For this particular type of package. Is that something that you should be thinking about if you’re going to go this route?

[01:16:37] Jason Tucker: Yeah. Like dollarhosting. com kind of thing. If you threw this on there, you’re going to see a performance hit, you think? Or you see a delay in stats or what do you feel like would be the hit?

[01:16:59]


[01:17:43] Jason Tucker: Last but not least, 60seconds Eminem. This is real life studio yet again. Huh. Oh my gosh. So big,

[01:18:47] Jason Tucker: but do they put a happy face in the bottom right corner of your page? That’s what I want to know.

[01:18:55] Jason Tucker: Is it just jet pack?

[01:19:07] Jason Tucker: So what I’m, so the I’m trying to build out a scenario here, so let’s say that you’re someone who your site did do pretty good the cat that you have on your cat blog is performing well and people are enjoying it and they keep going and checking out the website and you’ve now hit that point where you’re no longer a hobbyist and you’re now you should probably be making money off your website, but maybe you choose not to.

[01:19:33] Jason Tucker: So now you’re just, you’re still talking about your cat and everything’s cool on that website. What should that person do? What should be like the first step of now moving to a different analytics product other than Google Analytics?

[01:21:29] Jason Tucker: But there is some precision involved in this as well, because if you pick the wrong analytics package down the road you now have you have now have data that you’re now going to ditch because you’re not migrating your data from one analytics package to another. Let’s be honest here.

[01:21:46] Jason Tucker: That’s not how this works. You’re just going to go, all right I did this for May and now it’s June and we’ve moved to another package. So now we have a hole in our analytics and now we don’t have that information.


[01:22:31] Jason Tucker: A lot. I’d have to go back to WebAlizer.

[01:22:47] Jason Tucker: It’s the same reason why I pay for Gmail. It sucks, but it’s the same reason why I pay for multiple Gmail accounts for the various properties that I manage. It’s just it’s dumb. It sucks. It’s very hard to move that crap out of there. Cause now you’re dependent on all this other stuff.

[01:23:06] Jason Tucker: You got Google docs, you got this, you got that. The list goes on and then having to unwind all that stuff. So yeah the that lock in is very difficult to back out of.

[01:24:35] Jason Tucker: All right. Okay. Please subscribe.


[01:25:39] Jason Tucker: right, yeah right. Are the robots actually ingesting my content and stealing it for for other uses? Yes, they are. Okay, good. I’m glad.

[01:26:51] Jason Tucker: So the other question I had and these are questions I know the answer to in some ways I have to be the audience here the other question is with like web application firewalls or something that’s sitting in front of your website how does that, how does, like, how does that work?

[01:27:09] Jason Tucker: These types of technologies that are all using JavaScript or something like that. Like how are those being used and what does it do to something like what Aldo was talking about where the server logs aren’t maybe not even getting hit because they’re sitting, something sitting in front of the website that’s stopping it.

[01:27:29] Jason Tucker: So what’s the other side of that? That, that coin there.

[01:28:19] Jason Tucker: Go ahead. Hang.

[01:29:39]

[01:29:39] Jason Tucker: Okay.

[01:30:18] Jason Tucker: So the, yeah, the other one I had was there’s some of these packages for Google Analytics that will take a copy of the JavaScript that runs on the website and will serve it up locally. What are your thoughts regarding something like that?

[01:30:45] Jason Tucker: Now it’s not coming off of the CDN. That’s all crazy powerful and whatnot. It’s now being hosted up by your 5 web hosting package. Where does that lie? Now you have a hundred K being loaded up off of spinning hard drives in some data center instead of a super fast SSDs that are cached across the whole internet.

[01:31:24] Jason Tucker: Yeah. We haven’t done a test is essentially what it comes down to, at least at this point.


[01:31:49]

[01:31:54] Jason Tucker: Yep.


[01:32:05] Jason Tucker: right. Cause the way that I’m thinking about this and this just popped up in my head is you end up serving up this this JavaScript file that’s been taken off of Google or wherever. And now you could potentially have a minification that’s happening on top of it, because now this file exists in your realm and not in theirs.

[01:32:27] Jason Tucker: And then it could be served up incorrectly as well. So now you’re really messing things up and now you’re like, Oh wow the site loads so slow and this happens and it’s really just the JavaScript that’s just not making it it’s not being served up at the right time.

[01:33:27] Jason Tucker: Yeah, I just think it’s funny that for we used to joke that like cache rules, everything around me, but I really think it’s more JavaScript.

[01:33:41] Jason Tucker: It doesn’t roll off the tongue and it’s not a Wu Tang song, but if Wu ever did anything about JavaScript, that’d be great. But it’s just it’s. It’s just funny. It just makes you think it’s just Oh actually caching there’s all these other layers in this this cake that you’re serving up from your web surfer.

[01:34:02] Jason Tucker: And one of them is JavaScript. And that caching part of it is already taken care of multiple times over.

[01:34:19] Jason Tucker: We, we did a good job, friend. We did a good job.

[01:34:49] Jason Tucker: Yeah, I shall. Here’s our outro. Hey, thank you very much for hanging out with us today. We really appreciate it. Visit our website at www. serverpress. com. Find all the links to subscribe to this stuff here. And like Cosper was saying, go and hang out with us in our Discord. We have a lot of fun over there and we talk about a lot of really great stuff.

[01:35:12] Jason Tucker: And our after show discussions work really well there. Talk to y’all later. Have a good one. Bye bye.

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EP481 – Lies, Damned Lies, and Analytics

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