Forem: Marko Saric

How much data is missing from Google Analytics due to adblockers?

Marko Saric — Wed, 01 Sep 2021 07:49:00 +0000

I looked at the analytics of a website that had a post trending on Hacker News and Reddit last week with more than a thousand upvotes and more than a thousand comments. The idea was to find out how much data is missing from Google Analytics due to adblockers and privacy-friendly browsers that the more tech-savvy audiences use more frequently.

I compared stats between Plausible Analytics (the startup that I'm working on) and Google Analytics. Google Analytics was installed using the default method. Plausible was installed using a proxy to get the most accurate data on the level of blockage. Plausible proxy runs as a first-party connection and is only blocked by those visitors who block JavaScript entirely. It is not blocked by any browser or adblocker.

Here’s the data Plausible Analytics shows for the three days in late August 2021 when the site got a lot of traffic (you can explore the stats in this public dashboard):

And here’s the Google Analytics data for the same site and the same period:

It turns out 58% of Hacker News readers, Reddit users and other techies block Google Analytics. Google Analytics is not showing all traffic. It is missing data from 58.67% of all visitors and 58.38% of all page views. Google Analytics is underreporting the tech-savvy audiences by almost 60%.

Which browser users block Google Analytics most frequently?

88% of Firefox users
50% of Chrome users
41% of Safari users

Which operating system users block Google Analytics most frequently?

82% of Linux users
74% of Windows users
61% of Mac users
54% of Android users
41% of iOS users

More stats and other details in the blog post: 58% of Hacker News, Reddit and tech-savvy audiences block Google Analytics

How not to launch on Product Hunt

Marko Saric — Wed, 02 Sep 2020 13:20:17 +0000

We’ve just had a successful Product Hunt launch for Plausible Analytics. More than 850 upvotes, more than 100 comments, featured twice on the official Twitter account and in the daily and weekly newsletters too.

And no. You don’t need to join any Slack or Facebook groups to upvote each other’s products. You don’t need a famous hunter. You don’t need to create a spreadsheet with contact details of people you’ll ask for upvotes. You don’t need to bother people by creating hype days in advance. You don’t need to gather an army of soldiers or an army of fake users either.

Let’s get started with our experience and what we learned launching on Product Hunt.

Don’t overcomplicate and overthink your Product Hunt launch

Too many startup founders spend way too much time being concerned and thinking about launching on Product Hunt.

I’ve heard founders say things such as “I’m just dreaming about when I launch on PH and after that I’m a millionaire” or “I’m trying to pluck up the courage to launch on PH” or asking “how do you know when’s the right time” and “what’s the final push to launch”.

Product Hunt is a popular platform with a supportive community and it’s a great place to get some attention for your startup and be discovered. But it’s only one of the many other great niche communities where you can do the same.

Don’t dream too much about launching on Product Hunt and getting hundreds of paying customers on the day so you can immediately quit your job. If you have such high expectations, you’re bound to be disappointed. This dream may come true to a few products but it’s an unrealistic expectation for most.

And certainly don’t go to search engines looking for launch advice or guides. When I started writing this post I had a quick look at what posts ranks on the first page of search and I didn’t like what I saw.

So much spam and so much bad and generic advice that simply cannot work. Or at least it makes your chances of succeeding much lower and gets you to focus on and waste time on useless things. No wonder many founders end up being hesitant about their launch.

Plausible Analytics launch on Product Hunt

We launched on Product Hunt on August 27th with a year and a half delay or so from the actual launch of the product. Here’s our page on Product Hunt.

What was the final push that made us decide that we’re launching on Product Hunt? No specific reason. As a marketer, I’m always looking for new platforms and places where to reach more relevant and interested people. Product Hunt was a platform we didn’t explore yet and it was about time.

On August 11th I tweeted asking what’s the best launch approach getting some useful replies. Then I went on a holiday, returned on August 24th and on August 26th on our daily call we briefly mentioned Product Hunt and agreed to go for it the day after.

There was no specific reason other than trying to see what Product Hunt could do for us. No month-long preparation and no high expectations either that Product Hunt would make us an overnight success.

Our Product Hunt referral traffic and trial conversions

We ended up having a relatively successful Product Hunt launch.

After the first 24 hours, we had 601 upvotes (finished #2 on the day), 90 comments (includes our replies too and we tried to reply to everyone) and 26 reviews with a score of 4.8/5. It was great to read all the amazing comments and we are grateful to all the people who took their time to upvote and leave feedback.

Product Hunt shared our listing twice from their official Twitter account. As we got #2 on the day, we were featured in their daily newsletter too. We also got featured in their weekly newsletter as we finished in the top 10 of the week (#7).

Within the first 24 hours, we got 1,490 unique visitors from Product Hunt to our website. We also got 22 trial signups from there.

And now, almost a week after the launch, we’re on more than 850 upvotes, more than 100 comments and 27 reviews with a score of 4.8/5. 2,560 unique visitors to our website, with a bounce rate of 44%, average visit duration of 1 minute and 44 seconds and 36 trial signups.

You can take a look at the full real-time details of the traffic we got from Product Hunt on our live demo. Product Hunt ended up being our top referral source of traffic in August even though we launched at the very end of the month.

On top of this, I believe we will see other benefits of being on Product Hunt. It’s always difficult to measure brand awareness and the impact our Product Hunt listing will have in the coming weeks and months, but I’m hoping we will continue seeing a trickle of visitors day after day.

Comparison of our referral sources and their conversions to trial

Here’s an interesting comparison of our referral sources for the full month of August (see the complete data here):

Product Hunt sent 2,399 unique visitors and 33 trial signups (1.38% conversion rate)
Indie Hackers sent 2,390 unique visitors and 18 trial signups (0.75% conversion rate)
Google organic search sent 2,215 unique visitors and 78 trial signups (3.52% conversion rate)
Twitter sent 2,059 unique visitors and 20 trial signups (0.97% conversion rate)

We’re a web analytics tool and you need to sign up for a trial and insert a piece of code into your site to try us out. If you’re launching a mobile app that is quick to download on the spot or a newsletter with a one-click subscription, you may see higher levels of conversions.

The spike of hope, the flatline of nope and why Product Hunt is not the holy grail of your startup marketing

You need to understand that Product Hunt is not the holy grail of your startup marketing. It’s not the solution to your marketing problems and it’s not the end goal of your marketing efforts.

You may launch on Product Hunt and even if you have great success such as that you finish on the top, get featured in the newsletter and so on, you will see a spike of 1,500+ visitors or so on the day and a big drop the day after.

You’ll get the spike of hope and chances are that without additional marketing efforts you’ll have the flatline of nope next. So what’s the marketing plan for after the Product Hunt launch? You cannot go launch on Product Hunt every day.

The faith of your startup should not rely on your Product Hunt launch. The big and successful Product Hunt launch is not the be-all and end-all of your marketing. It’s only one useful part of it.

Do the “marketing” work day in and day out from day one instead. Improve your product, talk to people, listen to the feedback, share your lessons and learnings, answer questions people have, build your audience and your community one person at a time.

Our marketing approach is focused on content and different niche communities. You can read more about how our approach helped us bootstrap our startup from $400 to $2,750 MRR in 135 days without paid advertising.

Two possible approaches for your Product Hunt launch

1. Go live as soon as you have a working product

Launch on Product Hunt as soon as you have something to show. This will be the first time you showcase your product to the world. You won’t have much of an audience to help you spread the word at that stage so you’ll need to play the Product Hunt game and hope to get lucky.

Ali from Instatus has a reasonable strategy for this approach:

Ask a popular hunter to submit your product
Create a cool GIF and a cool video
Do a retweet giveaway in the launch tweet

This will optimize your chances of having a successful launch even if you don’t have an existing audience.

2. Delay the launch until you’ve built an audience

Launch on Product Hunt when you’re more established and have built an audience. Then you don’t need to play the game.

Release your product, start engaging with relevant people, build your audience one person at a time over a period of few months and then go with the delayed launch on Product Hunt itself where the audience you’ve built will help you get seen.

How much time do you need to build an audience? How big audience do you need? There’s no definitive answer that would work for all the startups. If you start seeing great subscriber numbers, if people love sharing your product and if your tweets get a lot of engagement… these are all great positive signs.

We had an audience of about 1,000 Twitter followers when we launched on Product Hunt. This was an audience we’ve built in about 4 months and we didn’t do any hacks or tricks. Each of the followers is a person who has volunteered to follow us because they liked our product and/or the message we stand for.

Product Hunt launch checklist

What time to launch

The best time to launch on Product Hunt is right after midnight San Francisco time. That’s when a new day starts for Product Hunt and it will allow you to have the full 24 hours for maximal exposure as the Product Hunt home page is based on 24-hour cycles. San Francisco midnight is 9 in the morning European time (CET) or 8 in the morning UK time.

Include one nice featured image

Have a nice featured image but you don’t necessarily need to go overboard creating exclusive media for Product Hunt. This is the image that will be featured on all the social media posts so will be valuable in attracting people to click.

We already had an image that we use as our home page featured image for social media so we went with that one.

Self-hunting vs an established hunter

We submitted it ourselves as we already had an audience of people who use and like Plausible Analytics. If we didn’t have an audience, it would help to use an established hunter as they would help bring their audience by sharing it on their social media.

Product Hunt recommends submitting the product yourself: “Spending lots of time “finding a hunter” is a distraction. You know your product better than anyone else, and it makes very little difference who hunts the product and how well it performs overall.”

“It used to matter, back in the day when we sent email notification to the hunter’s followers, but we stopped doing that a long time ago.”

If you still prefer to go with a hunter, one of the people who specializes in submitting products is Chris Messina. He has a page where he goes through his process and lets you tell him about your product so he can hunt it.

Don’t ask for upvotes, buy upvotes or try to game the system

Product Hunt repeats this advice in several places: “We ask that you not mass-message people, ask for upvotes, or attempt to “game” the system in any way.”

Product Hunt has an algorithm that looks into inauthentic votes and people trying to game their system. Even in the week we launched, some products got more upvotes but somehow found themselves below us in the rankings.

So basically don’t follow any of the advice in the guides you see ranking on the top of your favorite search engine. Don’t go looking for Slack or Facebook groups where people upvote each other’s products and other such tactics.

How to start the promotion to get the upvotes rolling

Some people “prep” their audience way ahead of time. We didn’t do any of that. We told nobody about our launch on Product Hunt until our listing was live.

Then we shared the link on our Twitter and Mastodon profiles and added the Product Hunt badge for our logged-in users and the live demo visitors on the website.

We shared the link on our personal profiles too and posted it as an Indie Hackers milestone.

We shared a few more social media posts such as site traffic updates during the day and this was the extent of our Product Hunt promotional campaign. No emails were sent, no advanced notice and notifications, no prepping.

Don’t ignore Product Hunt after your launch campaign is completed

Product Hunt is much more than the daily list of launched products. There’s the “Ask Product Hunt” section, there are the “alternatives to” lists and there’s the community with discussions and advice. I recommend that you do this after your launch campaign is completed:

Add your product to the “alternatives to” lists of all the other popular products you’re competing with
Add your product to the relevant “Ask Product Hunt” threads. Some of these threads are very popular and get traffic from search engines so it’s useful to be listed and can help you get discover by more people

Read the official launch guide

Last but not least. Product Hunt has released a lot of useful advice on how to launch your product. Here’s the official launch guide. It includes all the practical info you need such as character limits and image size recommendations. Good luck with your launch!

We've increased our traffic by 1,800% and these are our top referral sources

Marko Saric — Wed, 22 Jul 2020 08:34:43 +0000

Many developers and founders struggle to figure out what to do to get some attention and drive some traffic to their startup when starting.

At Plausible Analytics, we've had more than 130,000 unique visitors since April 1st. In the last three and a half months, we've increased our traffic by 1,800%.

We're 100% self-funded and independent so all this was done without any paid advertising, affiliate marketing, sponsorship and we didn't even get to launch on a big platform such as Product Hunt yet.

As we just introduced some brand new metrics to Plausible Analytics (average session length and session length by referral source), I wanted to look at what referral sources of traffic have been best for us.

Here's the list of our top 10 referral sources and some comments on each. You can also see it on our open stats dashboard. I hope this inspires you to continue pushing and working on getting more traffic to your project.

1. Hacker News 17.4K

The first blog post I published since joining Plausible as a co-founder was "Why you should stop using Google Analytics on your website" and that went well across the different communities.

The post might have been opinionated and topical but we also got lucky that after we submitted it to Hacker News ourselves, the community there picked it up, upvoted it and started a discussion.

It could have just as well been completely forgotten with no upvotes in the first few minutes. Sometimes you need a bit of luck. This post and the fact that we got so much discussion and so many visitors from Hacker News helped kick-start our growth.

So the lesson is to publish the best stuff that you can and give yourself a chance to get a lucky break by submitting and sharing it with relevant communities. You cannot simply publish and wait for people to come and find you. Go out there and find them.

2. Twitter 8.2K

Twitter is a great source of referral traffic. If Hacker News gives you thousands of visitors within several hours, Twitter is something that can give you a few visitors every day consistently if you follow the method I'll describe.

We posted our first tweet on May 18th and have been engaging and interacting daily since then.

When starting, your audience will be small (we only have 556 followers at the time of writing) but that doesn't have to stop you. I would recommend you focus less on the number of followers and more on engaging with people.

And how do you engage when you have no followers? You start using Twitter search and look for people that are looking for solutions to the problems that your startup is solving and for people talking about relevant topics.

I use TweetDeck to search Twitter for a variety of relevant keywords about Google Analytics and I try to interact with many of those who are looking for an alternative or who have frustrations with Google Analytics. There's also the Twitter advanced search option.

3. Facebook 6.3K

We don't have an official Facebook page. And neither of us are Facebook users. This is completely organic as people share our blog posts on the different Facebook pages and communities.

Bigger pages such as DuckDuckGo decided to share our blog posts and even put a paid marketing spend behind promoting them. This also shows in the average visit duration. Facebook is at the bottom of all our top referral sources with average visit duration at 26 seconds only. It also has the highest bounce rate of 86%.

DuckDuckGo promoted our "remove Google Analytics" post and the "low" quality traffic comes from the mix of paid advertising and the fact that our product and the rest of site may not be of biggest interest to DuckDuckGo's Facebook audience.

Facebook can work in a similar way to Twitter though. There are many Facebook groups and by finding those relevant to your product, you can start engaging within those groups and start getting some attention.

4. Google 5.5K

Google search traffic is the holy grail of organic traffic for many startups. A lot of focus is spent on doing search engine optimization and trying to rank for the different search queries.

The reason is that Google search traffic is of very high quality. People are searching for a solution to a problem so those who find your solution are highly qualified leads to your startup.

This shows in our Google traffic which has the longest visit duration of all the top traffic sources with 3 minutes on average and which is also the number one source of our trial signups by far. You can see here the list of our best sources of trial signups.

We went from getting just over 400 clicks in more than 3 months before April and more than 5,500 in the period since. So how did we manage to start getting organic traffic from Google?

We started publishing content. We've published more than 20 articles since April. We covered many interesting topics relevant to web analytics, open source and the different privacy regulations that affect site owners.

For every post, we write a longer article that answers all the different questions people are asking about that particular topic. We focus on relevant and timely topics and we do our research mainly by looking at what's happening in Google's search results. We look at these areas of Google's results to give us a better idea of what people are interested in:

Google autocomplete for search queries people search for
"People also ask" section which lists a lot of additional questions people frequently ask
"Searches related to" gives us an additional list of related topics to cover

Between these three sections, we get a lot of ideas for questions to answer and different areas to include in an article. It all helps us create a longer and more complete post that looks at a topic from several different angles that people are curious about.

Many of these articles are now slowly sending us a click or two from Google every day which accumulates. You can see here the list of keyword phrases people found us with on Google.

5. Indie Hackers 4.1K

Indie Hackers community has been great to us! We're regularly posting our latest milestones and other updates but what's the key part of this is the fact that many of our users have decided to share us on Indie Hackers too.

Be it by responding and recommending Plausible in different threads to even starting threads dedicated to Plausible. That has been amazing to see!

6. Hacker Newsletter 2.6K

This came completely organic as we were featured in the Hacker Newsletter for being one of the trending posts on Hacker News that week. Get onto Hacker News and chances are you'll be getting extra traffic from other sources such as the Hacker Newsletter too.

7. LWN.net 2.5K

Another completely organic mention. Ben Hoyt posted an article about lightweight alternatives to Google Analytics and featured Plausible as one of the two recommended alternatives.

How Ben heard about Plausible I don't know (chances are he might have read one of our blog posts) but it was amazing to be featured in his post which was widely shared on Hacker News and other tech communities.

8. GitHub 2.4K

We're an open source project and everything we do such as our development and our feature roadmap is hosted on GitHub.

GitHub is a big community and a big "social network" in the first place so by being active there we exposed our product to new people who are interested in web development, open source and other aspects of what Plausible is about.

GitHub is our third best source of trial signups too.

9. Dev.to 2.2K

Dev.to is another friendly tech community that's been great to us! We focus on posting a bit shorter and more focused articles. "Why you should remove Google Analytics from your site" was our top viewed article with more than 12,000 views.

Similar to when posting on Hacker News and other platforms, the headline plays a part, the relevancy and the quality of the post too but also luck. Most importantly by being a part of another community, we're giving ourselves more chances of getting discovered by more people who are interested in what we're doing.

We are grateful to everyone who shares Plausible Analytics as without people spreading the word about us it would be difficult for us to grow and achieve our goal of reducing the number of websites and businesses online that run proprietary, user-hostile and privacy-invasive web analytics.

10. Reddit 1.9K

Reddit can be a great source of traffic. We submitted some of our posts ourselves while some of our highest upvoted posts were submitted by others too.

Communities such as /r/degoogle, /r/opensource and /r/webdev have been good to us. See here the full list of Reddit threads that sent us traffic.

Reddit can be used in similar ways like Twitter and Facebook. You can use Reddit search to look for threads relevant to your startup and the problems you are solving, then you can join those threads and engage with the people.

Conclusion

I hope this has helped get you inspired to get out there and do the best you can to try and get your startup in front of more eyeballs.

Most developers and other startup founders are self-funded and don't have a large budget to spend on paid advertising so content marketing and community engagement are perfectly suitable ways to grow.

So publish the best content that you can by answering relevant questions that real people have and then go out there into the different relevant communities and engage. Do let me know if you discover some other good sources of traffic.

By doing this you will start opening doors and start getting new opportunities. Good luck!

Are client side or server side web analytics more accurate?

Marko Saric — Tue, 07 Jul 2020 08:43:51 +0000

To understand the difference in the data between JavaScript-based analytics and server logs, I’ve compared the stats between Plausible Analytics as client-side analytics and AWStats as server-side analytics on my own website in June 2020. Here are the results.

Top line stats

Here are my top line stats for June in Plausible Analytics. You can see my complete data for the month of June in this open dashboard.

And here are my top line stats from AWStats:

There is a great data disparity between the two.

The total number of unique visitors

Plausible Analytics: 10.3k
AWStats: 21.2k

More than 100% higher number of visitors according to AWStats.

The total number of page views

Plausible Analytics: 16.8k
AWStats: 305.5k

18 times higher number of page views according to AWStats.

Top referrers

Plausible Analytics: Google 6.4k
AWStats: Google USA 7k, Google UK 3.1k

Plausible Analytics displays all traffic from Google under one referral. AWStats splits traffic from Google according to the locality. Between Google USA, Google UK, Google India and others, there were more than 10,000 visitors from Google combined according to AWStats.

Top pages

Plausible Analytics: /blog-or-vlog/ 2.5k
AWStats: /wp-cron.php 93k, /feed/ 78k, home page 67k

Most of the page views and pages that AWStats counts are made by bots to the backend pages that are not customer facing. My actual top post, /blog-or-vlog/, is 6th in the list on AWStats with 3.2k views.

Top countries

Plausible Analytics: USA 3.2k
AWStats: USA 207k (doesn’t show the number of unique visitors but a number of page views)

Interestingly enough, Russia is listed second on AWStats while it doesn’t even make it into the top 10 on Plausible Analytics.

Top operating systems

Plausible Analytics: Windows 32%
AWStats: “Unknown” 67.5% (doesn’t show the number of unique visitors but a number of page views). Windows is second with 15.6% of all page views.

Top browsers

Plausible Analytics: Chrome 59%
AWStats: “Unknown” 64.7% (doesn’t show the number of unique visitors but a number of page views). Chrome is second with 18.5% of all page views.

Conclusion

It seems very clear that the majority of data included in AWStats is made by robots. AWStats tries to isolate and exclude robots. They automatically exclude the “not viewed traffic” which includes “traffic generated by robots, worms, or replies with special HTTP status codes”.

Despite these efforts, it seems to miss out on a lot of bot traffic.

There could be a way to make it more accurate by manually excluding other bots. If I exclude back-end pages such as wp-cron.php, /feed/ and wp-login.php that the bots are trying to access, I may get something closer to the actual numbers.

Similar is the case with top operating systems and top browsers. If I exclude the “unknown” category in AWStats, the remaining table becomes a bit more usable. Same for top countries with Russia, for instance, having way too inflated numbers on AWStats compared to the reality.

How to make Google Analytics GDPR compliant so you don't need to ask for user consent

Marko Saric — Tue, 09 Jun 2020 15:35:30 +0000

I took some time to explore different options and settings in order to try and make Google Analytics GDPR compliant so you don't need to ask for visitor consent. There are many steps! Here's the summary.

Is Google Analytics GDPR compliant?

Google Analytics is not GDPR compliant out of the box. This is what Google says about what you need to do if you’re using Google Analytics:

“You must ensure that certain disclosures are given to, and consents obtained from, end users in the European Economic Area along with the UK. If you fail to comply with this policy, we may limit or suspend your use of the Google product and/or terminate your agreement”.

You must obtain legally valid consent from your website visitors to:

the use of cookies or other local storage
the collection, sharing, and use of personal data for personalization of ads

How to make Google Analytics GDPR compliant

So what if you don’t want to remove Google Analytics and you don’t want to worry about obtaining consent from your visitors but you still do insist on using Google Analytics?

You can try to make Google Analytics GDPR compliant. Go into the “Admin” section of your Google Analytics account and take these steps:

In “Account Settings”, disable all the data sharing options. Stop sharing your visitor data with Google products & services, for Benchmarking purposes, for Technical support, to Account specialists and Google sales experts.
In “Account Settings”, review and accept the Google Ads Data Processing Terms.
In “Property Settings”, disable all the Advertising Features including Demographics and Interest Reports.
In “Property Settings”, disable User Analysis including Users Metric in Reporting.
In “Tracking Info” click on the “Data Collection” section and disable all the Data Collection for Advertising Features. Disable Remarketing and Advertising Reporting Features.
In “Tracking Info” click on the “Data Collection” section and within “Advanced Settings to Allow for Ads Personalization” disallow all regions from Ads personalization.
In “Tracking Info” click on the “Data Retention” section and reduce the “User and event data retention” to the minimum amount of time possible (14 months).
In “Tracking Info” click on the “Data Retention” section and disable “Reset on new activity”.
In “Tracking Info” click on the “User-ID” section and disable the User-ID feature.
In “Product Linking” section, disable all the product linking including Google Ads linking, AdSense linking and Ad Exchange linking.
Update your privacy policy with clear information on how and why you use Google Analytics.
Enable Google Analytics IP anonymization feature by adding this to your Google Analytics code: ga('set', 'anonymizeIp', true);
Disable Google Analytics cookies. Disabling cookies leaves Google Analytics with a broken functionality. Pretty much every pageview will be counted as a unique visitor.
You need to replace Google Analytics cookies with your own storage mechanism such as localStorage or a service worker in order to fix the breakage of unique visitor counting. Here’s a guide from Google on how you can do that.

What's the alternative?

You could save yourself all this hassle and time by simply asking your visitors for consent first before loading the Google Analytics script. Many visitors may say "no" to that but at least you will be complying with the regulations.

Alternative is not to use any analytics tracking at all if you don't really need any data.

If you really want to get some stats but don't want to go through the process above, you can use a web analytics tool that doesn't use cookies and doesn't track any personal data. I'm working on Plausible Analytics with privacy in mind:

It's quick, simple to use and understand with all the metrics displayed on one page
Lightweight script of <1 KB so sites load fast. Our script is 45 times smaller script than the Google Analytics script
Doesn't use cookies so there's no need to worry about cookie banners
Doesn't track personal data so you don't need to worry about asking for data consent
It's open source with the code available on GitHub

Take a look at our live demo to see the traffic stats from our own website!

How to de-Google-ify your website

Marko Saric — Mon, 25 May 2020 09:54:23 +0000

In my previous post I introduced you to the Google Analytics alternative I'm working on called Plausible Analytics.

The benefits of using it include a faster loading site, easier to understand dashboard and the fact that you don't need to worry about getting consent for cookies and GDPR as Plausible is not using cookies nor collecting any personal data.

In this post, I wanted to explore the topic of de-Google-ing a website a bit more in depth. Google has created some great and useful products that millions of website owners use and get value from. 7 of the 10 most used third-party scripts and resources on websites are owned by Google.

This post and the alternative solutions presented are for those who'd like to make their websites more independent of the search giant and its reach.

An example is Cloudflare as they recently removed Google's reCAPTCHA and replaced it with an independent service to "address a privacy concern inherent to relying on a Google service". Let's get started.

Google Fonts

Third-party fonts stand for 72% of all fonts loaded on the web. Domains fonts.gstatic.com and fonts.googleapis.com combined stand for almost 4% of all network requests.

Alternatives to Google Fonts

Use web safe fonts (fonts that are usually pre-installed on most devices) or download and self-host whatever font you want to use. Here’s a hassle-free way to self-host Google fonts.

Google Maps

Domain maps.googleapis.com stands for 0.75% of all the network requests across the web. It’s used on 10% of the top one million websites.

Alternatives to Google Maps

OpenStreetMap is a great alternative if you’re simply embedding a map or directions on your site. It’s open-source and community-driven.

Some of the alternatives for developers are Leaflet and Mapbox that both use OpenStreetMap as one of their data sources.

YouTube

YouTube stands for 0.99% of all the network requests across the web. YouTube video embeds are used on 15% of the top one million websites.

Alternatives to YouTube

Vimeo is one of the most popular alternatives to YouTube when you want to embed a video on your site.

PeerTube is another interesting alternative. It’s a free, open-source, federated and decentralized video platform that uses peer-to-peer technology.

A federated platform allows you to join one of the existing instances or create your own which then syncs with the rest of the network. Here’s a video intro on how PeerTube works.

If you really must use YouTube…

If you really must embed a YouTube video, there’s the no-cookie option. It’s something Google created as a response to the GDPR. According to Google:

“Privacy Enhanced Mode allows you to embed YouTube videos without using cookies that track viewing behavior. This means no activity is collected to personalize the viewing experience. Instead, video recommendations are contextual and related to the current video. Videos playing in Privacy Enhanced Mode won’t influence the viewer’s browsing experience on YouTube.”

In “Embed options” of a YouTube video, tick the “enable privacy-enhanced mode”. Or simply change the domain in the embed code from youtube.com to youtube-nocookie.com.

Google Adsense

Google Adsense allows publishers and other site owners to monetize their sites using targeted advertising based on the profiling of their visitors.

Adsense scripts, DoubleClick scripts (also Google-owned) and other ad JavaScripts are found on 57% of all sites and account for 25% of all third-party requests.

Alternatives to Google Adsense

Adsense and its competitors normally pay per impression, need a lot of data collection and profiling, load tons of third-party resources that slow down your site and require a lot of page views to make money.

They are one of the main reasons for all the clickbait articles. It’s all about getting as many views as possible to boost the number of ad impressions. I would suggest you explore different monetization opportunities instead:

Try affiliate marketing where you refer your audience to relevant products that help them achieve what they’re trying to do. Instead of chasing page views, you’ll need to help people.
Sell products, courses and services that educate, inform and entertain your audience.
Work with relevant brands directly and accept sponsorships from companies.
Sell subscriptions and accept donations from your loyal fans using services such as Patreon.

Google AMP

AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) is Google’s way to try and amend some of the ways that they themselves have caused the web to become slow and bloated.

Google themselves will point the finger at their analytics and ads when you use their page speed tests. They provide guides on making these third-party resources less slow too.

Websites are bloated thanks to the overuse of third-party JavaScripts such as Google Analytics and Adsense advertising scripts so Google has created a new way to speed the web.

Alternatives to Google AMP

Rather than using these workarounds, I suggest you tackle the problem of a slow website head on. It’s possible to make your site just as fast as an AMP site without using Google AMP. Here’s how:

Restrict unnecessary elements. Understand every request your site is making and consider how useful they are. Do those flashing and distracting calls-to-action make a difference to the goals you have or are they simply annoying 99% of people that visit your site? Do you really need auto-playing videos?
Review all your third-party scripts and find lighter solutions. I already discussed several of the most popular scripts in this post. Another popular element are the official social media share buttons. There are better and lighter solutions for all of these.
Lazy load images and videos. There’s simply no reason to load your full page and everything on it as soon as a visitor enters your site. Lazy loading only loads images in the browser’s view and the rest only as the visitor scrolls down the page.

Google reCAPTCHA

Many site owners use Google’s reCAPTCHA to sort out bots and verify real human visitors. They may use it to secure their login form or to protect their comments area from spam. You may know them as those “I’m not a robot” checks that make you verify different objects such as crosswalks.

It’s not a perfect technology as it affects many normal users too such as those using a VPN, those using alternative browsers or those who use browser extensions that block certain elements.

Alternatives to Google reCAPTCHA

There are many alternatives to reCAPTCHA. Explore those such as the image based VisualCaptcha which allows you to configure your own options, Honeypot which features an invisible field that users don’t see and hCaptcha which is like reCAPTCHA but a bit more transparent.

If you really must use Google reCAPTCHA…

There’s the Invisible reCAPTCHA. It works pretty much the same as the regular reCAPTCHA but there are no checkboxes and no tests for visitors by default. Only “the most suspicious traffic” will be shown the test so some real visitors may still be affected.

Google Blogger

Google’s Blogger (aka Blogspot) hosts just under 1% of all the sites on the web. The thing is, Google doesn’t seem to care much about it. There’s a lack of development efforts and resources. Google seems to just patch things up to keep it from completely breaking down.

Look at this list of updates. Since the start of 2015, the only significant update was the introduction of HTTPS. Everyone has seen the fate of Google Reader, Google+, Google Inbox and other services Google decides to neglect.

Alternatives to Google Blogger

There are many interesting options. The most popular one is WordPress which hosts more than 35% of the web. I use it to run this site. It’s free and open-source, you can download it, do whatever you want with it and host it wherever you want.

The passionate community behind the project has created tens of thousands of free design themes and plugins that you can use to create any website that you want. It also allows you to easily export any of the content you create in case you ever decide to leave.

Other Blogger alternatives are Ghost, Hugo, Jekyll and Plume. So many options are available that I have published a full list of the best blogging platforms.

Google Analytics

76% of all sites include analytics scripts from third-party domains. The most popular analytics provider is Google Analytics. It is used on 68% of the top one million websites.

I used Google Analytics and for years it was one of the first things I integrated on a newly launched site. This is a habit developers should try to get rid of. For most people, the data Google Analytics collects is overkill. We only ever use a small share of it.

Alternatives to Google Analytics

Use analytics that are self-hosted and that don’t send any of your visitor and customer data to third-parties. Or use external analytics that collect and process a minimal amount or no personal data at all. For more simple needs, you can even use your server logs. Many solutions do exist.

For those who want to understand their search engine visibility and traffic they get from Google, there’s Search Console which is the most accurate way of doing that. And you don’t need to add any scripts to your site to use it. It’s the Google tool I use the most these days.

Matomo is one of the big players in the ethical analytics market. It’s an open-source analytics software that's built as a full-blown replacement of Google Analytics that you can either self-host on your domain name for free or you can pay them to host it in the cloud.

And I'm working on Plausible Analytics which looks at website analytics in a different way. It is not designed to be a clone of Google Analytics but meant as a simple-to-use replacement and a privacy-friendly alternative:

It is a lightweight script of 1.4 KB so it doesn't have a big impact on your site loading speed
It features all the important metrics on one page so it is quick and simple to understand what's going on
It doesn't use cookies and doesn't collect any personal data so no need to worry about getting visitor consent to store cookies and to collect personal data. It's GDPR and CCPA compliant out of the box
It is open source with the code on Github, a public roadmap and a live demo where we have opened the stats of our own website

If you really must use Google Analytics…

If you really must use Google Analytics, these are the settings to make it a little bit better:

Remove the “Data collection for advertising features” which includes the remarketing ability, audience demographics and interest reporting under “Tracking info” and “Data collection” in the Google Analytics admin section.
Disable the user-ID feature which associates visitor engagement data from different devices and multiple sessions. This setting can be found under “Tracking info” and “User-ID” in your Google Analytics admin section.
Anonymize the IP addresses of your customers and visitors by adding this piece of code to your Google Analytics embed code.

I hope you enjoyed this list and that it helps you run a more Google-free website and browse a more Google-free web!

Why you should remove Google Analytics from your site

Marko Saric — Thu, 14 May 2020 14:36:57 +0000

I'm working on a leaner and more transparent alternative to Google Analytics without all the privacy baggage. It's called Plausible Analytics and you can see the live demo here.

Here’s a look at why I believe you should stop using Google Analytics on your site and help create a more open, independent web that’s more friendly to your visitors. Let's start.

It’s owned by Google, the largest ad-tech company in the world

53% of all sites on the web track their visitors using Google Analytics. 84% of sites that do use a known analytics script use Google Analytics. It’s the most popular third-party request on the web accounting for 0.64% of all network requests.

Google Analytics is run by the largest ad-tech company in the world. A company with a business model that loves to devour all the personal data it can get access to. Google’s products are free to use because Google has built its wealth by collecting huge amounts of personal information and using these personal and behavioral insights to sell targeted advertising.

It’s a bloated script that affects your site speed

Web analytics like any other element add extra page weight. Google’s Global Site Tag and the Universal Analytics script can be considered bloat if you only care about the most useful website stats and want to make your site as lean and fast as possible.

Global Site Tag, the recommended way of integrating Google Analytics, weights 28 KB and it downloads another JavaScript file which adds an additional 17.7 KB to your page size. Every KB matters when you want to keep your site fast to load.

It’s overkill for the majority of site owners

For most site owners, the amount of data Google Analytics collects is overkill. Most people find real and regular use for only a fraction of the metrics it measures.

Google Analytics has more than 125 different reports and more than 290 different metrics you can gather your insights from. Analyzing these is a full-time job that requires a lot of time, effort, expertise and experience to do well.

It’s a liability considering GDPR and other privacy regulations

Different personal data and privacy regulations have been introduced such as the GDPR in Europe, CCPA in the US and PECR in the UK. All these privacy regulations are a good step towards a better web and are a necessary thing in the world of surveillance capitalism.

Google Analytics collects a lot of personal data. Many Google Analytics users also enable different advertising features such as remarketing, demographics reporting and interest reporting. All this collection of personal data is a liability for your site.

It uses cookies so you must obtain consent to store cookies

Google Analytics is a cookie-based analytics tool and it's not possible to use it without cookies. It sets multiple cookies and it “uses cookies to identify unique users across browsing sessions”.

Privacy regulations have a say about cookies too. PECR, for instance, requires a site owner to tell their visitors about cookies that they use to track personal data and give visitors the choice of whether to accept them or not.

It requires an extensive privacy policy

In addition to the cookie notice and the GDPR consent prompt, Google has further requirements for your use of Google Analytics:

“You must post a Privacy Policy and that Privacy Policy must provide notice of Your use of cookies, identifiers for mobile devices or similar technology used to collect data. You must disclose the use of Google Analytics, and how it collects and processes data”.

It worsens your user experience due to the annoying prompts

To abide by the privacy regulations while collecting the personal data, you need to compromise the visitor experience by displaying annoying cookie banners and GDPR or CCPA consent notices. You also need to present comprehensive privacy policy regarding analytics tracking.

Google Analytics makes the user experience on your site more inconvenient. And if you’re simply using Google Analytics for basic web statistics, it’s worth considering the dramatic effect it has on the visitor experience and the loading time.

It’s blocked by many so the data is not very accurate

Google Analytics script is blocked by millions of people who use adblockers such as the uBlock Origin and by users of popular browsers such as Firefox and Brave.

There’s no definite answer on how many people block Google Analytics as that depends on the audience of your site, but for a tech audience, you shouldn’t be surprised to see 50% or more of the visitors blocking Google Analytics.

It’s abused by referral spam that skews the data

You may have noticed referrer URLs in your dashboard that are spam. Bad actors send fake visitors to your site which then shows their URL on your referral sources list. The intention is to get you to get curious and visit their site.

This referral spam has been going on for years and it can really skew the stats you see. Many site owners put a lot of effort and spend a lot of time blocking the referral spam. Some do it manually one domain at a time while some use more automated systems.

It’s a proprietary product so you need to put your trust in Google

As it says on the very top of the Google’s privacy policy: “When you use our services, you’re trusting us with your information”. In the case of Google Analytics, you’re not only trusting Google with your information but also the information of all your website visitors.

Google Analytics is a closed source, proprietary product. There have been many rumors for years on what Google uses all the data for. Google has denied many of the accusations and rumors but there’s no way of knowing what’s going on behind the scenes. You have to simply put your trust in Google, the world’s largest ad-tech company.

Plausible Analytics as an alternative

Plausible Analytics is not designed to be a clone of Google Analytics. It is meant as a simple-to-use replacement and a privacy-friendly alternative that we believe can help many site owners.

It's quick, simple to use and understand with all the metrics displayed on one page
Lightweight script of 1.4 KB so sites load fast. Our script is 33 times smaller script than the Google Analytics one
Doesn't use cookies so there's no need to worry about cookie banners
Doesn't track personal data so it's compliant with GDPR out of the box and you don't need to worry about ask for data consent
It's open source with the code available on GitHub

Sign up for a free trial and give Plausible Analytics a chance. And if this message resonates with you, do spread the word to your favorite site owners. Friends don’t let friends use Google Analytics.

Privacy friendly and open source Google Analytics alternative

Marko Saric — Wed, 13 May 2020 09:51:05 +0000

This is my intro post with more info about the startup I'm working on.

We're building a leaner and more transparent alternative to Google Analytics without all that privacy baggage. It's called Plausible Analytics and you can see the live demo with our own stats.

Plausible Analytics is not designed to be a clone of Google Analytics. It is meant as a simple-to-use replacement and a privacy-friendly alternative. And we believe it is a great option for personal websites, blogs and even for freelancers and agencies working with clients.

Here are some ways we are different from Google Analytics:

Lightweight: Plausible Analytics script weights only 1.4 KB. That’s 33 times smaller than the Google Analytics Global Site Tag. Your site will keep loading fast.
No cookies: Plausible Analytics doesn't use cookies so you don't have to place the annoying cookie banners on your site.
No personal data tracked: Plausible Analytics doesn't track any personal data so it is compliant with GDPR, CCPA, PECR and other privacy regulations out of the box. There's no need to distract your visitors by asking for data consent.
Simple to understand: Plausible Analytics is easy to use and understand with no training or prior experience necessary. You get all the important traffic insights and metrics on one single page.
Sharing options: You can share your Plausible Analytics in several ways. We make it easy to automate regular email reports to multiple recipients, you can share a password-protected web dashboard and you can even open your stats and share them with anyone with a unique link.
Data ownership: You keep 100% ownership of your website data. Your website data is not shared with advertising companies or any other companies in general. Your website data is not mined and harvested for personal and behavioral trends. Your website data is not monetized.
Open source: Plausible Analytics is a fully open-source web analytics tool. Our source code is available and accessible on Github.
Public roadmap: With Plausible Analytics you can be a part of the development. Take a look at our public roadmap which itself is defined by our community. You can leave your feedback and have your say on metrics and features we should be adding next.

You can even try Plausible Analytics on your site alongside Google Analytics. Register for a free 30 day trial and see what you like and what you don't before deciding if it's worth leaving Google Analytics for. We would love to hear your feedback.