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Comment by bamazizi | Hacker News Reader

This comes very close to GA alternative, it's nice and fat free. The daily salt reset is a deal breaker. (basically means people visiting the site are considered unique everyday which breaks monthly/weekly unique stats and conversion tracking spanning more than 24 hours)

Our current pipeline for one app has a 14-20 days conversion and we rely on this data to optimize. Also have an marketplace app where conversions periods spans several days depending on the product and promotions. With the daily anonymization algorithm reset, every conversion will seem it took less than 24 hours.

The hunt for a GA alternative continues. BTW does anyone know/recommend a great self hosted alternative to Mixpanel?

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thanks! from our experience and testing, most website visitors say no to give tracking consent / storing cookies (up to 90+%) so this was a good balance between making something that's compliant with regulations and that's providing useful data for many use cases.

My guess is giving up conversion tracking is the #1 hurdle for adopting alternate privacy-friendly (aka. no conversion tracking) analytics solutions.

It means that people using a privacy-friendly conversion tracking solution literally cannot track conversions accurately. If you can't track conversions, it also means you can't run advertising campaigns effectively because so much of advertising relies on conversion tracking to know whether ad spend is having an ROI or just burning money.

Then again, perhaps the target users of a privacy friendly analytics solution aren't in the same category of people who are running paid ad campaigns on Adwords, etc.

yeah all the privacy regulations make it difficult to do all the tracking that some businesses are used to. it's clear from testing that if they actually enforced things such as GDPR and asked for consent, majority of visitors will say no which would make their current strategy difficult. Plausible was built with all these regulations in mind so we're more a solution for businesses that want to comply with the regulations but still get some useful data.

Couldn't you generate monthly/weekly salts to track longer-term metrics? Repeat visitors probably would not see this as that much more of an intrusion than daily stats.

Have you heard of Fathom Analytics? Maybe it meets your needs.

https://usefathom.com

Worth checking out Snowplow Analytics as a self-hosted version of Mixpanel. Good guys out of London that have largely bootstrapped it, but the business is pretty big now -- some good customers using it at large scale.

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