As of today, this blog and all of my projects are Google analytics free. I do still allow login with Google on some of my apps as it is an easy way for those that don’t care to use their email to sign up, but it is the final Google service I will integrate with any of my sites.
For some time, I’ve been using Google analytics on my websites. When I say some time, I mean around a decade.
But, the truth is that in that time, I had a love affair with Google when I knew very little about tech, and have since dropped nearly all of their services in favour of free and open source alternatives. This started first with hosting my own email, then crept into not using their drive storage, the search engine itself, and has now, finally, come to ditching their analytics.
It is a disservice to your users to use tracking pixels that compromise their online privacy and allows their personal data to be siphoned up by big brother.
Thankfully, there are some easy to use and easy to host alternatives to BigAnalytics.
There are a few options in this space:
I have personally started using Umami, as it is very easy to set up in a Coolify container.
In order to do this, log into your coolify instance, navigate over to your resources, and add a new umami instance. Name it whatever you want (I named the resource Umami). Click into the bottom where you see a gear for the settings on the umami resource, and there you can add your domain. Map your port 3000 to whatever domain you want to use, and be on your way with auto-setup SSL certs and just-werks simplicity.
Like so:
You must add the :3000 at the end, as Traefik inside of Coolify will then map the internal docker service to the domain.
From there, you can login to the domain with username and setup any domains you want tracking on. You add a simple script tag within your head element in HTML (or in your _app.js file for nextJS) and instantly you now have analytics on your pages.
Simple, and without the data harvest that is Google analytics.