Stop Google Analytics

6th post of my Stop Google serie.

What is it?

Google Analytics is a service from Google for webmasters and marketers to provide them with statistics about website usage (number of visitors, how they came on the website, how they left…).

Alternatives

This is not something invented by Google of course, alternatives existed already before. I remember using AWStats a long time ago. AWStats uses log files generated by the server to produce its reports that mean that there is mostly nothing to do on the website you need to monitor to get the stats.

Recently I switched to Piwik wich is working the same way as Google Analytics: a bit of JavaScript code to include on all the webpages of your website. And of course Piwik is open source, you can host it yourself and it respect users privacy (Piwik does not track users with DNT flag for instance).

I wrote a quick tutorial on how to install Piwik.

References:

• AWStats
• Piwik