Big news! This site is no longer using Google Analytics and I’ve switched to a self-hosted version of brand new analytics product Fathom.
Fathom is very simple. It only tracks 4 things:
Unique Visitors,Page Views,Time on Site, andBounce Rate. It shows me a chart of page views and visitors and then gives me a break down of referrers and top performing content. That’s it. And to be quite honest, that’s about all I need from my blog analytics.…
You know what, Dave:me too! I’ve been running Google Analytics since forever and Piwik/Matomo (in parallel with it) for about a year and honestly: I get more than enough of what I need from the latter. So you’ve inspired me to cut the line with Google: after all, all I was doing was selling them my friends’ data in exchange for some analytics I wasn’t really paying attention to… and I’d frankly rather not.
So: for the first time in a decade or so, there’s no Google Analytics on this site. Woop!
Update 2023-12-13: I eventually went further still and dropped all analytics, even self-hosted variants, and it feels great.