EP481 – Lies, Damned Lies, and Analytics

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This is episode number 481 of WP ORG water cooler, lies, damn lies, and analytics.

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I'm Jason Tucker. You can find me over at jasontucker. You can find me over at jason Tucker. And y'all know who it is.

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It's your boy, Jason Kossper, back at it again on the world's most influential WordPress ORG podcast.

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Speaking of that podcast, find us wherever great podcast can be found, and Audible PRODUCT.

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And you can go hang out with us in our Discord PRODUCT over at wPwatercooler slack.

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You know, it's funny.

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The other day, I ran in, or Sarah PERSON was talking with like one of her classmates.

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She's been back at school. And she found out that person was into horror podcasts and was telling them about her slasher podcast. And someone told her that they listened to a podcast on Amazon ORG. And I was like, what? I was like, you mean audible? And she was like, no, Amazon ORG. I was like, oh mean audible? And she was like, no, Amazon.

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I was like, oh, right. This is some other place that I have to make sure that the feed shows up on. There are too many places now to get your podcast, right?

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Adding that to the list.

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Yeah, yeah. And what's weird is like Google Podcasts PRODUCT is now, Adding that to the list. Yeah.

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Yeah.

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And what's weird is like Google Podcasts is now just like essentially YouTube ORG.

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It's just it's just YouTube ORG music is that's where you go and listen to podcasts now.

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And it's video if you want to.

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So if you're if you're subscribed to us, you get the feed early because it comes out

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via YouTube ORG, which is very, very weird. Okay. Okay. Hi. Hey.

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Intro to podcast with WP ORG water cooler.

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Speaking of all the different places you can get podcasts, I mean, I'm sure that,

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you know, as you're watching people, let me try to get in on the

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segue here. You know, you're watching where people are like listening to the podcast and everything else. Like you need to see those numbers, right? And, you know, that really kind of brings us to our topic of analytics. And we're not really talking about like necessarily podcast numbers, but just folks coming to and visiting your website. And we were, it's wild.Normally give you another little peek behind the curtain. Like sometimes like Wednesday, Thursday, we're like, what are we going to talk about this? Monday, after watching, like, kind of all of the fallout of things happening with Jetpackand specifically with Jetpack PRODUCT stats of people kind of erroneously getting hit with, you know, getting hit with having their site classified as like, oh, this isn't like a hobbyist site. So now you're going to have to start paying us for stats. And so there are people kind of scrambling for like analytics and figuring that stuff out and,you know, seeing like where their site traffic is coming from, what's their popular pages, stuff like that. So we just kind of thought we would, you know, take a little time and talk about that. Yeah.

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So install Google Analytics ORG, hit the go button, and then walk away, right? I mean, that's it. That's what you do, right? Is that what you do? I mean, that's kind of what I do currently, but I honestly don't really care about my stats all that much.

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You know, see, it's kind of a funny thing because neither of us really care about stats all that much.

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A perfect group of people to be on the show to talk about this.

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Yes.

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I don't run any stats plug-ins on my domains or anything like that.

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However, like, as I do help folks out, you know, with their sites, have plenty of, like, friends and family who, you know, do care about that sort of thing.

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Like, I've had a few people come to me over the past week, and they're like, hey, apparently I have to start paying for jetpack stats now.

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This was, like, the last reason that I was holding on a jet pack because they were just kind of giving me these admittedly, you know, compared to something like Google Analytics ORG, like pretty minimal stats, but they were at least showing me like the hits I was getting the things like that. And like, so where should I go? So I had to do, you know, a bit of research in finding that stuff.And outside of Google Analytics ORG, which honestly can tend to be pretty heavy when it comes to,

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like the JavaScript, it adds to your site.

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Sometimes, you know, the delays that loading that JavaScript and all of that stuff can add.

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It really, Google Analytics ORG is more for, and it's fine if it's what you need, but it's more for, like, the people who are treating their site like a business, who need to be able to see, you know, what campaigns are being run, like how successful those campaigns are,having a particular tracking tied to links that they may pass out in newsletters, things like that. Google Analytics ORG for that sort of thing is great. Like, I don't love funneling data to Google ORG. And also, there are some, like, lighter weight things out there. Like, I'm always concerned about performance.I'm always concerned about the amount of, like, JavaScript getting out of the page, like how much load time that adds, especially since it's not only the amount and the size of the JavaScript that gets lit at, it's how long that JavaScript then takes to like initialize once it's loaded.

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So having some alternatives to Jetpack PRODUCT stats, especially if you're not paying or not interested in paying for stats and you kind of want some minimal stuff is it's a good idea.

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Right.

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Before we jump into like alternatives, the idea of using just Google Analytics, there's like a zillion Google Analytics plugins for WordPress ORG that I'd say for the most part do all the same thing.

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There are some stuff that goes on that's a little bit different where the way that they may set up the event tracking, you know, if you're doing scrolling on the page

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or doing some type of action on the page

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or something like that. Those sorts of things I can see might be a little bit different. We're not a WooCommerce ORG show, but any type of e-commerce stuff, there's a bunch of stuff you have to do with that to be able to know like how much money was in the cartor how much money was in this or how much the, you know, all of those pieces those are things where you kind of essentially get a single paint of glass that gives you an idea of what's happening on your website so that way you're not having to dig into your not just your analytics but also the the way in which those transactions occurred on the site too so there's yeah you know like I said I personally on my personal sites I just throw that on. So there's, yeah, you know, like I said, I personally on my personalsites, I just throw that on there, but there's also other ways of approaching it too. So and Cospers, Coster PERSON's really good at knowing the alternatives because this is what he does is performance. So, you know, kind of figuring out how the, you know, what is the most performant and maybe what is even the easiest ones to install as well. Yeah, absolutely.

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The ones that I really, as I've done digging, since everything started to go down and people were looking for alternatives were really focused on, like, being lightweight. They all sort of give you the same amount of detail that Jetpack PRODUCT stats did. One thing to note about all of these alternatives that just like Jetpack PRODUCT stats, just like Google Analytics ORG, like nothing really beats being able to analyze like the log files from your site because the log files on yoursite log every hit that happens to your site, like the server level log files. You don't need to add any extra tracking. You don't need to add any extra tracking. You don't need to add stuff, but you do need to run scripts that turn those log files into something that you can see and use. And in a lot of cases, you don't get like up to the minute or up to the hour stats generation on this.Like if you have a web host that like generates logs for you and uses like one of these more standard packages, it's like every night you can see like what your log files look like. But they are much more exacting than Google Analytics ORG. We were talking about this in our Discord PRODUCT. And Alda PERSON pointed out, like, if you want numbers for a largest site, I can confirm that there is about a 40% discrepancy in the number ofhits between logs, which is what I was just talking about, and what tracking pixels like Google Analytics, like Jetpack PRODUCT stats, like the alternatives that we're going to be talking about are reporting, depending on if the audience is tech savvy or not. And in a lot of cases, what tech savvy means is if they are running, it doesn't have to necessarily mean folks like Tucker PERSON and I, but if you're running an ad blocker on your phone, a lot of those ad blockers, like, try to minimize the amount of tracking that gets done to you while you're browsing the internet. So they can mess with analytics a little bit.So having those like tracking scripts, those little bits of JavaScript for analytics that get added to your site, you know, there ends up being a discrepancy there. So it's actually in part not what Alda was saying, but just kind of like, you know, I already had an inkling of that, but it's one of the reasons that we leaned on the Benjamin Disraeli quote for our show title here, which is the original quote, is there are three types of lies, lies, damned lies, and statistics.

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And, I mean, in this case, analytics and statistics, it's a pretty close jump.

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But so with that being said, if you are just looking to kind of have a tracking script running on your site, some of the tools that we can look at here, and I will, while I was vamping, I should have gotten my screen up, but why do that? Why not make there be an awkward pausein the middle of the show?

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Yeah, so.

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All this making me remember a bunch of old things, one of which was

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webelizer.

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Yes.

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Yes.

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Uh, webelizer definitely. Um, so there are a few, uh, alternatives out there. Uh, one that, uh, is actually pretty nice and has a, uh up to 10,000 views is one called Umami PRODUCT. And Umami, um, they have a WordPress ORG plugin that integrates and everything else. So you can get this installed running on your site. And as long as you have 10,000 views or less across yoursites, you can basically see, I mean, it doesn't look dissimilar from what you get out of

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Jetpack PRODUCT stats. You know, you see, you know, the pages that they're going to, like, where the

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traffic is coming from,

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really just gives you a breakdown.

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And one of the nice things about it is all of these are more privacy focused than Google ORG Analytics just because it's not Google collecting all of the data, all hoovering up. This is why when I said earlier that I'm uncomfortable with like giving any of that free

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data to Google ORG, you know, they're collecting information about your site.

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And like, why make it easier for them? They're already doing it, but why make it easier? Why give them an idea of the actual

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traffic your site is getting? Why any of that? So umami is kind of a good initial alternative. A lot of big companies and names use it. You know, really straightforward, gives you insights like

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broken down by country if that stuff you need to see. So that's really nice. There is another one that this is a paid, and there is, if you are industrious like Tucker PERSON or I, you could install effectively like your own copy of,

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they have code available up on GitHub, where you could deploy a version of Fathom to whatever hosting environment you happen to be running.

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And there's Fathom Analytics PRODUCT. You know, yeah, they have a 30 day free trial. They're good. They are also privacy focused. And, you know, the features and benefits here really, they have a focus on privacy, on GDPR LAW, on CCPA, which is the California, like GDPR-esque privacy law. So, you know, they really do what they can to give you, you know, stats without violating any customer privacy. So, you know, giving you the information you need while also helping you, like,kind of anonymize that data. Another alternative that we have is plausible. I'm trying to get these pulled up one by one here. Really clean. Again, just like... Really clean. Again.

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Just like, I mean, and it's one of the reasons that people loved jetpack stats so much is like, you know, there's no, you know, special views or, you know, specific event tracking to like drill down into you don't have to like

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click around to find the view that basically gives you like the display of your stats when you log in

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it just looks like this like uh i mean it's it's really lovely it is about nine bucks a month it is

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basically what you would be paying uh automatic for you know, like any of the premium jetpack features.

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But it is, again, just like Fathom, just like Uwami PRODUCT, very privacy focused, concerned with the GDPR, concerned with CCPA. So if you're in a European country, if you have California customers that you have to focus on, you know, it is a very nice alternative. And most of these that I have brought up so far, the JavaScript for all of this doesn't come in at any more than like 10 kilobytes added to your page. Wow. Yeah.

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That's cool.

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But Tucker, the last time you looked into Google Analytics ORG, do you know like how much overhead that adds to your page off the top of your head?

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Not off the top of my head, but it's a lot. But I have a couple clients where the number of ads that are on the site are larger than all of the images that are being displayed on the site. So it's like the load's going to be bad anyhow, just because of the fact that you're having to load up a bunch of JavaScript for all this stuff. And, you know, ads, you essentially have JavaScript within JavaScriptthat's being loaded in JavaScript that's being loaded in an I-frame that's being loaded and yet another I-frame. And it's just, you know, all the way down. So, yeah, that's, that's, that's being loaded in a iframe that's being loaded and yet another i frame and it's just you know all the way down so um yeah that's that's that's that's that's the rub there

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right yeah that is uh definitely the the rub when it comes to that so these are all uh kind of the the

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the three that i just highlighted are more of like

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the premium you know something that you can kind of just install and not have to thuds with very much in the case of fathom and plausibleI believe each one of those has an open source like server component that you can install on like a commodity on most commodity web hosting, you know, like a VPS or something like that, both pretty straightforward. I was for a while running my own fathom server and I mean it worked really well, but I kind of had to ask myself like why I was continuing to maintain something that I wasn't really, you know, using all of that much. You're talking to two people that literally took all of the

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forms off of their website for contact us stuff, you know? Yeah, exactly.

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It's yet another data point that we don't want to look at. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

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Yeah, find us on socials and feel free to say hi.

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Exactly. But find us. We're not going to tell you where to find us. Exactly. But find us. We're not going to tell you where to find us.

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Exactly.

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So there are a few more. I tend to go away. A few people have asked me about this. When it comes to recommending plugins to use on your site, like a more plugin, you know, oriented way of doing things where it's like, oh, I can just add a plugin and it will add a few tables to my database and, you know, add some stats about my site.One of the problems that I see with this, and this is something that what we're highlighting on screen right now, if you're watching, Cocoa Analytics PRODUCT does. Cocoa Analytics PRODUCT is a very, like, nice, straightforward, pretty lightweight as far as like, you know, we shove the stats for your site into your database. It does a pretty good job of like clearing that stuff out on the regularand not like adding additional database bloat. It's probably one of, like, out of all of the alternatives that I've looked at, that, you know, oh, we'll put a copy of, you know, whatever open source analytics thing is out there, like into your database and then add another 20 database tables to like track what country your visitors are from, what, you know, whatever, you know, details you want to use or get on your customers or visitors.But I mean, it's all, if you're looking at the screen right now, it's all a pretty straightforward, very reminiscent also, again, still of jetpack stats, tells you know, how many views, how many impressions you get. Let me see if I can click through to the live demo of Cocoa Analytics PRODUCT. It's griping at me for using an ad blocker. Again, analytics. It's griping at me for using an ad blocker again.

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So, okay, the demo is not going to. Yeah. Oh, no. You got disconnected. Oh, yeah. That is a very, I don't know, having those, having those, having those different types of embedded, you know, data points like that, being blocked by, you know, various ad blockers is always fun. And, you know, you're just having to go through and say, like, ignore this one too, but ignore this one too. And ignore this one too, but ignore this one too and ignore this one too.

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Right. But and, and this, this actually like goes into and, and really proves, uh, what Alda PERSON was talking about in our,in our discord, uh, that, uh, you know, ad blockers end up messing with these analytic scripts.Even like, uh, up until, uh, you know, a couple couple weeks ago like i hadn't been familiar with cocoa analytics but uh there are enough people who are where uh it's already in

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uh you know the default tracking rules that i'm running uh in uh you block origin on this version of like Chrome PRODUCT that I'm currently using.

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But so I backed out of the demo, accidentally crashed my browser.

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I'm back. Thanks for filling dead air, Tucker PERSON. I appreciate that.

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But I mean, it's, again, it gives you, refers, it gives you, you know, popular pages, let's, you know, page views, total visitors, all of that stuff.

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So it really kind of, if you're looking for, for analytics, you don't want to mess with anything.

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You don't want to pay to actually, you know, for any sort of more premium offering.

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This is Cocoa Analytics PRODUCT is lightweight enough and really gets the job done. But please be aware that it does add stuff to your database. However, it does it in its own table, so it shouldn't mess with any,

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you know, loading of, you know, posts, pages, etc. But I mean, anytime you're storing stats for your site in your database, it is adding additional bloat to your database. So like, you know,

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if you do always have to be mindful of that. Yeah.

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And if you don't want to add bloat to your database, again, just like Fathom PRODUCT, just like

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plausible, there is another offering out there called Matomo PRODUCT. Matomo PRODUCT, very easy and straightforward, but it is a completely open source software, just like WordPress ORG can be installed on any host out there that supports PHP applications.

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So unless you're running on like a managed WordPress ORG host where they're like,

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all we support is WordPress ORG, if you have access to, you know, a more general purpose hosting account, you know, you have a blue host,GoDaddy ORG, dream host, site ground, whatever that can just host a standard php application you can install matomo um matomo um motomo um is a lot more robust it ends up kind of being a little more

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like a google analytics uh you get like visits visits over time like a breakdown of like what

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social networks things are coming from.

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You know, it really kind of like digs in.

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But again, if it is so important to you to have all of this information, there's the tradeoff of you can either pay them and we can look at their pricing really quick. On-premise, which is zero dollars, which is what they call, like, their open source stuff or cloud starting at, what, $2.60 per month. But I mean, that's only

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5,000 hits.

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If you're successful enough that you need to see like a breakdown of what social media posts or bringing stuff to your site, you're going to be paying a lot more than this, like pretty quickly.

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Right.

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So, you know, just like maintaining a WordPress ORG site, like, it's going to come down to, like, do you also want to maintain this analytics, like, infrastructure for yourself?

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Right.

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Yeah.

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So one of the, one of the, I have a few questions regarding this, but like one one in particular that comes to mind is you're,

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you're essentially loading up a JavaScript that is going to be then running on your website

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and being presented on your website to the person's browser.

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The and then the information that's being collected from it is now being sent back to that server.

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The performance hit that happens there when the, if you're using like a budget web host for this particular type of package,

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is that something that you should be thinking about if you're,

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if you're going to go this route?

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Yeah, absolutely. That's why they have, um, you know, the, the cloud hosting plan. That's, that's why they have the like just pay to, to set it up for me. Uh, sure. I mean, like dollar

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hosting.com kind of thing. If you threw this on there, you're going to see a performance hit, you think? Or you see a delay in stats or what, what do you feel like would be the hit? Yeah. I mean, you would, you would definitely. You would, you're going to see a performance hit, you think, or you see a delay in stats? Or what do you feel like would be the hit?

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Yeah, I mean, you would definitely see a performance hit. If you put it, especially like you said, a dollar web host, those sorts of places, those are shared web servers. Like, you are dealing with potentially noisy neighbors messing with what is happening,

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like, you know, to your measurement of web traffic.

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So, but if you really need, like, the deeply detailed stats and you don't want to have Google Analytics ORG, Matomo is a little more lightweight than Google Analytics is, and it gives you a lot of the things that you can kind of like drill down into. But they've really started to like sweat, you know, like how much JavaScript is actually being loaded and everything else.

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It's so funny because when you add Google Analytics ORG to your site and then, you know, you're running any of like the performance tests or anything like that, like lighthouse tests on your site, it's like, oh, hey, buddy, you are loading some pretty big JavaScript on your site.

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You maybe need to look into that. Right. on your site. You maybe need to look into that.

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Right. And so Google ORG is like criticizing its own thing that you've added from Google to your site. Like having something that is a little more lightweight, like Umami, like, um, you know,

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fathom, like any of that really, uh, like I said, that comes in at like seven

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kilobytes, 10 kilobytes. It's like, I think the worst one I've highlighted comes in at like

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under 14 kilobytes. Oh my gosh, so big. Yeah, a huge, massive, where, you know, I really,

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I'm, I'm, do they put a happy face in the bottom right corner of your page. That's what I want to know. Is it just Jetpack PRODUCT? It's, it's just

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I hate that little happy face. I'm, I'm sorry. I just have to say it. So what I'm, so the, I'm, I'm, I'm sorry. I just have to say it.

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So what I'm so the I'm trying to build out a scenario here.

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So let's say that you're you're someone who your site.

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Your site did do pretty good.

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You know,

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you know,

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the cat that you have on your cat blog is performing well and people are enjoying it.

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And they keep going checking out the website.

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And you've now hit that point where you're no longer a hobbyist and you're now,

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you should probably be making money off your website, but maybe you choose not to, right?

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So now you're just,

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you're still talking about your cat and everything's cool on that website.

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What should that person do?

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Like what should be like the first step of now moving to a different analytics product other than Google Analytics ORG?

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Yeah, I mean, as far as that goes, really enabling and just like installing, enabling, trying it out. In some of these cases and some people, I'm sure, will be yelling at their phones or their screen going, no, like, why the fuck would you say that? However, since a lot of these other analytics packages have such a like small package size on their JavaScript. What's what's another 7K going to hurt in like that first week or so, two weeks that you're trying things out just to see if like the numbers that you want,the metrics that you want to collect on your visitors are there? Like, you know, it doesn't, it, it adds a tiny bit of overhead temporarily for you to, like, cut off that, uh, couple hundred K that gets added by Google Analytics ORG, uh, to your site, uh,

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you know, two, two weeks from now.

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So like, uh, it's like, uh, it's like, it's like, I'm sorry, content slash trigger warning.

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Like, it's like if you get a hang nail, like you have a hang nail for a little while,

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but eventually, like you trim it off. Like, eventually, like, please don't pull it.

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Like, please go get the scissors and try you know but there is some

Speaker 22030.02s - 2035.4s

precision involved in this as well because if you if you pick if you pick the wrong analytics package

Speaker 32035.4s - 2041.94s

down the road you you now have you know you now have data that you're now going to ditch because

Speaker 12041.94s - 2049s

you're not migrating your data from one analytics package to another let's be honest here that's not how this works you're just going to go all right well um you're now going to ditch because you're not migrating your data from one analytics package to another. Let's be honest here. That's not how this works. You're just going to go,

Speaker 32049.08s - 2054.84s

all right, well, you know, I did this for May, and now it's June, and we've moved to another

Speaker 22054.84s - 2059.96s

package. So now we have a hole in our analytics, and now we don't have that information.

Speaker 02070.34s - 2077.58s

I mean, if you, if that is a concern to you, and I mean, that is the big lock-in of whatever analytics vendor that you managed to go with. I'm sure that, you know, I could, I could

Speaker 32077.58s - 2084.14s

give you grief for another hour about like Google Analytics, Tucker PERSON, why? But like, how many,

Speaker 22084.14s - 2088.58s

how many years of data do you have in

Speaker 32088.58s - 2095.52s

Google Analytics at this point? Like a lot. Yeah. And that gives you. I'd have to go back to Webalizer PRODUCT.

Speaker 12096.44s - 2106.44s

Right. That moat that Google ORG has basically created, you know, keeps you like entrenched in their ecosystem.

Speaker 32107.08s - 2112.4s

It's the same reason why I pay for Gmail. It sucks, but it's the same reason why I pay for

Speaker 12112.4s - 2117.62s

multiple Gmail accounts for, you know, the various properties that I manage. It's just like,

Speaker 32117.7s - 2123.52s

it's, it's dumb. It sucks. Yeah. It's very hard to move that crap out of there because now you're,

Speaker 12123.52s - 2141s

you're dependent on all this other stuff. You got Google Docs PRODUCT. You got this. You got that. The list goes on, you know, and then having to kind of unwind all that stuff. So yeah, the the the the the you know, that lock in is very, very difficult to kind of back out of.

Speaker 32141.66s - 2147s

Sure. But a lot of like the people who are using Google Analytics ORG is because it's because

Speaker 12147s - 2154.2s

they want a more robust thing. The people who are maybe backing away and the people I've talked to

Speaker 32154.2s - 2209.7s

who are backing away from jetpack stats, really what jetpack stats has been giving them is kind of just these like little vanity metrics that they're not necessary. Like they need they want to know that their site's not slipping. Like last month they got, you know, 5,000, 10,000, 40,000 page views, uh, that, uh, their most popular posts were,uh, you know, their most recent with maybe like one or two, like kind of long tail or more evergreen content. But like, it's not something where, uh,they want to go back to what their traffic look like in, uh, you know, March of, uh, 2018. look like in, you know, March of 2018 and, you know,

Speaker 22209.7s - 2217.88s

see what that month look like for them. Like once that month is over, they're just like, okay, well, on to the new month.Like,

Speaker 32217.96s - 2236.92s

that is really, I think the thing that separates, like Google Analytics ORG users from, you know, something like a jetpack stats, an Umami PRODUCT, a fathom, things like that, that, you know,

Speaker 02236.92s - 2242.58s

they don't need all of the very granular information.

Speaker 32242.58s - 2255.6s

They don't need to, you know, generate reports to say, like, here are the last, like, you know, four years of my web traffic.

Speaker 22255.6s - 2261s

Maybe if they were trying to, like, flip their site and sell it to somebody who was interested.

Speaker 02261.42s - 2268.7s

But, you know, outside of that, like, how important outside of just like,

Speaker 32269.22s - 2275.62s

you know, I've been doing it all this time, I feel entrenched in this ecosystem, everything else,

Speaker 22275.78s - 2278.2s

is actually having that data.

Speaker 32279.08s - 2279.24s

Right.

Speaker 22279.24s - 2284.86s

And that's really a big question that you kind of have to ask yourself when you're deciding

Speaker 32284.86s - 2286.78s

to make that jump.

Speaker 22286.78s - 2293.9s

Like, when was the last time I looked at the last, you know, 10 years of stats?

Speaker 32294.04s - 2313.5s

When was the last time that I checked to see, you know, what a very popular post is? And it can come in handy if you do um, you know, an actual like evergreen post that you're like, man, I posted this thing four years ago and it keeps doing numbers.

Speaker 22314.1s - 2321.48s

Uh, it's not, it's nice to be able to see like, uh, I posted it and then it did okay numbers the

Speaker 32321.48s - 2326.36s

first couple months. And then all of a sudden, like, some blog picked up on it or whatever.

Speaker 22326.66s - 2334.4s

So it is useful to have that stuff. But for most people who just want to be able to see that, like,

Speaker 32334.46s - 2338s

they're not shouting into a void. Right.

Speaker 12338.76s - 2344.98s

Are the robots actually ingesting my content and stealing it for, uh, for, for other uses? Yes, they are.

Speaker 32345.7s - 2352s

Okay, good. I'm glad. Yeah. Yeah.'m glad yeah yeah I'm helping I'm helping out the robots so the other the other

Speaker 12352s - 2395s

question I had and these are questions I kind of know the answer to in some ways but you know I have to be the audience here the other question is with like web application firewalls or something that's sitting in front of your website, how does that, how does these types of technologies that are all using JavaScript or something like that? Like, how are those being used? And what does it do to something like what Aldo PERSON was talking about where the server logs are maybe not even getting hit because there's something sitting in front of the website that's stopping it.So what's the other side of that, you know, that coin there? Right.

Speaker 32395s - 2556.84s

And that is the discrepancy. That's why, like, if you are going to and if you are concerned with having analytics on your site, like, you know, having the server log there as like the source of truth is good, but yes, if you have a web application firewall, if you have cloud flare in front of your site, you know, if you have a securi or any of the other providers out there that have something that like kind of helps mitigate like large influxes of traffic.So it offsets and sends the traffic, you know, to one of their edge servers and like serves up a static version of your page. Like none of that stuff is you're right coming through to your server. So even though you could treat the log file on your server as the source of truth, if you have something like a web application firewall, yes, absolutely you need to be mindful of that.You're still going to lose the people who have, you know, some sort of like ad blocker, you know, analytics blockers. Like, there are specialized ad blockers that just focus on like, don't even put Google analytics. Don't even put whatever onto my site. Like, I basically want to, you know, not leave any footprints on the internet.Like, you know, you're still going to miss those people. But if you do have something like that installed on your site, if you do have a WAF running, yes, absolutely. And you know, you do need to know your site metrics. Having a backstop of having a new mommy, a fathom, Cocoa Analytics PRODUCT, whatever you want to do. Having those things on your site, you know, to get those numbers is absolutely necessary. But you have to keep in mind that there are going to be people who are still going to be blocking that. That those numbers may be, you may mentally like want to round up a little bit just to be like, okay, well, I know that I'mlosing, you know, 10 to 40 percent of my visitors, like, who are running an ad blocker and blocking Google Analytics ORG.

Speaker 12558.04s - 2558.96s

Or, yeah.

Speaker 32559.9s - 2560.22s

Yeah.

Speaker 12560.22s - 2560.34s

Yeah.

Speaker 32560.54s - 2575.5s

The other one I had was, there's, there's some of these packages for Google Analytics ORG that will take a copy of the JavaScript that runs on the website and will serve it up locally.

Speaker 12576.68s - 2579.8s

What are your thoughts regarding something like that?

Speaker 22584.64s - 2591.12s

Now it's not coming off of the CDN that's, that's, you know, all crazy powerful and whatnot.

Speaker 12591.42s - 2595.54s

It's now being hosted up by your $5 web hosting package.

Speaker 22595.54s - 2599.26s

So, where does that lie?

Speaker 12600.16s - 2606.34s

Now you have 100K being loaded up off of, you know, spinning hard drives in some data center

Speaker 22606.34s - 2611.08s

instead of super fast SSDs that are cached across the whole internet.

Speaker 12612.12s - 2624.82s

Yeah, I mean, I don't necessarily, like, I don't know that I have a thought on it necessarily.

Speaker 02624.82s - 2625.14s

Yeah. I mean, we haven't done a thought on it necessarily. Yeah.

Speaker 32625.14s - 2625.98s

I mean,

Speaker 22625.98s - 2628.6s

we haven't done a test is essentially what it comes down to,

Speaker 12628.6s - 2630.3s

at least at this point.

Speaker 32631s - 2631.42s

Exactly.

Speaker 12632.04s - 2632.36s

That's,

Speaker 32632.48s - 2640.42s

I don't, mainly I'm refraining from saying anything because I don't want to shoot from the hip and, uh,

Speaker 12640.42s - 2640.74s

right.

Speaker 32641.24s - 2643.54s

Say some crap where, uh,

Speaker 12643.54s - 2646.82s

somebody can be like, no, no, you're wrong.

Speaker 22647.42s - 2653.2s

Like, so I would rather not say anything.

Speaker 32654.44s - 2659.32s

And then come to an opinion later.

Speaker 22660.44s - 2664.52s

Then be wrong to all of our audience right now.

Speaker 12664.9s - 2665.26s

Right.

Speaker 22665.52s - 2668.06s

Because the way that I'm thinking about this,

Speaker 12668.12s - 2669.92s

and this just kind of popped up in my head,

Speaker 22669.92s - 2673.38s

is you end up serving up this,

Speaker 12673.5s - 2673.86s

you know,

Speaker 32673.88s - 2676.92s

this JavaScript file that's been taken off of Google ORG or wherever.

Speaker 12677.58s - 2681.92s

And now you could potentially have minification

Speaker 32681.92s - 2683.38s

that's happening on top of it

Speaker 12683.38s - 2685.76s

because now this file exists in your realm

Speaker 32685.76s - 2692.32s

and not in theirs. And then it could be served up incorrectly as well. So now you're really

Speaker 02692.32s - 2698.84s

really messing things up. And now you're like, oh, wow, the site loads so slow and this

Speaker 32698.84s - 2703.32s

and this happens. And it's really just the JavaScript that's just not making it, you know?

Speaker 02703.36s - 2706.52s

Right. Right. It's not being put at the right time.

Speaker 32707.22s - 2708.28s

Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 12708.52s - 2715.86s

I've been doing some, like, tweaks to one of my sites with performance, with stuff like that.

Speaker 02715.86s - 2727.72s

And even as we kind of discussed in our spring cleaning episode, you know, getting everything into where it can be served up from a more like

Speaker 12727.72s - 2738.04s

general static, like host sort of thing. And yes, like it grabs that JavaScript. It pulls all of that

Speaker 02738.04s - 2745.1s

down. I really need to do a little more studying on that.

Speaker 12745.2s - 2749.44s

So maybe we'll come back with some follow up on this.

Speaker 32749.74s - 2750.9s

I just think it's funny,

Speaker 12750.9s - 2752.68s

but that for, you know,

Speaker 32752.78s - 2755.6s

we used to joke that like cash rules everything around me,

Speaker 12755.7s - 2761.42s

but I really think it's more JavaScript. Well, I mean, we were asked.

Speaker 32761.42s - 2762.94s

It doesn't roll off the tongue.

Speaker 12763.5s - 2783.84s

And it's not Wu PERSON-Tang song. But, I mean, if Wu PERSON ever did anything about JavaScript, that'd be great. But it's just, it's just funny. It just makes you think it's just like, oh, well, actually, caching, you know, there's all these other layers in this, you know, this cake that you're that you're serving up from your web surfer.And one of them is JavaScript.

Speaker 22784.68s - 2790.22s

And that caching part of it is already kind of taken care of multiple times over.

Speaker 12791.22s - 2791.48s

Sure.

Speaker 32792.76s - 2798.06s

Man, Say hasn't been here, and we managed to work this into 46 minutes.

Speaker 12799.32s - 2800.96s

We did a good job, friend.

Speaker 32801.1s - 2801.86s

We did a good job.

Speaker 12802.48s - 2803.12s

All right.

Speaker 32803.54s - 2828.9s

Yeah. So I'm sure there are plenty of things that we missed, you know, things that we didn't even touch on. You know, as always, like, please go join us in our Discord PRODUCT, you know, hit us up on the socials, even though we won't tell you where to find us. I mean, if you dig around, I'm sure you can. Right.

Speaker 12829.78s - 2831.64s

Tucker PERSON, buddy, you want to hit that outro?

Speaker 32832.38s - 2834.06s

I shall. Here's our outro.

Speaker 12835.5s - 2837.58s

Hey, thank you very much for thinking out with this stream.

Speaker 02837.58s - 2844.92s

We really appreciate it. Find out the links to subscribe to this stuff here.

Speaker 12845.56s - 2857.66s

And like Hossper PERSON was saying, go and hang out with us in our Discord PRODUCT. We have a lot of fun over there, and we talk about a lot of really great stuff. And our after-show discussions work really well there. So talk to y'all later.Have a good one. Bye-bye.