It sounds like a nice product, but sadly it's not exactly why GA is so popular (being a 'nice' product, that is). It is popular, because it's free, relatively easy to implement on any website, requires no self-hosting and powerful, once running. I've checked your website for pricing, but not only there's no word about free tiers, but there isn't even anything on the pricing at all. So, when it comes to majority of GA users, it's not a competitive solution.
In this space I think wordpress.com provides a decent free tier, obviously only for wordpress sites, they have the pay for premium features instead of googles usage based policy.
Usually I look for a 'pricing' tab. Clicking on 'start free trial' tell me they are going to ask me for my email, instead of telling me how pricing works
$6 is about the cost of monthly hosting for many personal websites. I'd argue theres not a good value proposition here, at the low end of the scale at least.
I think $6/mo. for fast, privacy-focused analytics for small sites is very reasonable.
There's no ad revenue to support this business — the website owner is the customer, not the product. That is a different business model from Google analytics or WordPress free analytics.
Depends what you use it for; if you're just vaguely curious about how many people visit which page on your site – which is probably what a large part of people use it for on their person sites – then $6/month is comparatively a lot, especially if you consider there are competitors which offer it for free (not just GA).
I think if they can just be clear that they will do 10 million impressions per property per month for free forever that would clarify the free tier (and match google I think).
I don't see why the price of GA is relevant to plausible's pricing.
With Google analytics, you are the product, not the customer. Free ad-supported SaaS is really a different value proposition from non-ad-supported paid services.
Thanks. I didn't check the homepage and looked for pricing info in the navigation links, felt it was needlessly difficult. Pricing should be easy to locate from every page for a product like this.
Discovering that users are having difficulty finding pricing information... might be one useful piece of data you could garner with a good analytics tool.
Also I just checked out the pricing's placement and that is utterly terrible UI - the site uses light greyshade striping in the background for difference sections and then has the pricing block proceeded by a very dark background block with no information immediately visible - this is a clear visual flag for the rest of a page being irrelevant and a footer.
And, just to clarify, the site's actual footer uses the exact same coloring for the footer along with a similar amount of excessive top-padding.
Genuine question, how would you find that users are struggling to find pricing using an analytics tool? How would you set that up / what would you look for to identify that? Something like scrolling around / back and forth implying they're struggling to find data or something?
A good signal would probably be dithering as you mentioned above - either scrolling back and forth through sections or navigating through different components if you website has a paged layout.
Additionally, as a business, you want to make sure users are following a pretty predictable flow through some limited entry points (like homepage, FAQ, information bulletins) - then either to pricing and then additional information or additional information then pricing (then, ideally, a sale).
If a user is returning to the entry point (i.e. a flow like information bulletins > home page > FAQ > information bulletins) and that happens enough then you can assume that some information users want after the FAQ (maybe, ideally, you think the pricing) isn't being delivered to them and so they're returning to their entry point to see if they browsed the information incorrectly.
If you've got good stats on how far down on a page people are scrolling that could also be something helpful to detect the specific UI issue I mentioned in the post above.
Edit:
I might suggest Don't Make Me Think by Steve Krug[1] as a resource if you'd like to learn a bit more about user flow analysis.
Hmm, fair enough. This is ~what I was thinking, making inference from their flow through the site. I have seen that book on the desk of design folks I've worked with, but I've not looked through it... not a bad idea though. Thanks.
Indeed it is, I stand corrected :) However, when I was looking at it, I've skimmed through the top menu (nothing), scrolled down to the footer (noting) and finally clicked the Documentation link (nothing). Apparently the pricing info isn't exposed well enough.
> It is popular, because it's free, relatively easy to implement on any website, requires no self-hosting and powerful, once running
Tbh, I disagree. While a lot of the above is true, it's largely popular because it's a recognisable brand, and because the majority of frontend devs are already familiar with it and haven't felt the need to explore an alternative (network effect).
While an alternative does really need to be free and easy to implement, it also needs to address the above two hurdles, which is a tough ask.
GA is also widely supported by other tools marketers know, understand, and use daily. Its appeal is definitely not limited to developers - would-be alternatives might stand to benefit by considering other users.
You don't need framework libraries. The point is, for many frameworks installing GA is just adding one file to your dependencies and entering your UA number. Installing a comparable tool that doesn't have a library involves marginally more friction.
Photoshop is the defacto-standard in image editing, yet clones which are free and copy the photoshop UI are rapidly catching up for a segment of the userbase, eg. photopea.com
If someone set up a Scroogle Analoytics which had a simple code snippet, was free, and had near-identical looking dashboard, I'd use it.
In general, you should be very careful about what third parties you allow on your page because you're delegating to them the ability to do anything that can be done from JS. I trust Google to take this seriously and not open me up to XSS, but I would be much more skeptical about Scroogle Analoytics.
(Disclosure: I work for Google, and have run Google Analytics on my site since before I joined)
As someone who runs one of those 3rd-party analytics: the JS you add to your site is small, readable, and can be downloaded and included from your own CDN. Hell, you don't even need the script, you can just write your own (not very hard actually). I took a look at Plausible a while ago, and I think the same applies here as well.
With GA, I can do none of that; it's just a massive unreadable blob I can only load from the GA servers. I just have to trust Google doesn't do anything I don't want (including XSS, but also other issues). It's not even easy to figure out what information exactly it collects last time. It's very untransparent and un-auditable and the website equivalent of loading binary kernel blobs.
> rapidly catching up for a segment of the userbase, eg. photopea.com
How true is this? There's popularity, and there's significance in the face of Photoshop's market hold. I'd love to believe there's some significant dent being made in Adobe's market share here, but I doubt it.
While GA is free Photoshop has one of the most insanely bloated pricing approaches for casual usage - the fact it's handed out like candy to students (and various institutions allow this instead of familiarizing students with alternatives) is the only reason its kept such a dominant market position.
If your boss asks you for some analytics about site usage the first thing searching the web will turn up is GA and you can have it set up on a test env in less than half an hour including acquiring an API key and reading enough docs to configure it.
I use Photoshop alternatives because they're cheaper than maintaining a perpetual license/subscription, but Photoshop is the big gorilla because it is the best photo editing app in the industry today. Bar none. And that's what lets them get away with their pricing structure.
Nobody would pay for Photoshop if it didn't provide value.
I am (1) a current Photoshop CC subscriber and (2) an owner of the second-to-last version of Photoshop that was available under a perpetual license, and I disagree that Photoshop is the best photo editing app in the industry today.
For photo retouching, I prefer Affinity Photo. One thing I especially appreciate about it is how efficient it is at handling large, 16-bit-per-channel images with many layers.
Photoshop is useful to have around mainly because it makes it somewhat easier to work with certain kinds of PSD files that I get from other people.
I also have Photoshop CC and Affinity Photo, and while I use AP for the simple stuff, it can't hold a candle to the more advanced stuff you can do in Photoshop that is still on the (long-term) plan for AP.
Many people are quite surprised to know that Photoshop has actual competition, even when they don’t really want to pay for the actual thing. It’s often easier to just pay for it than try an alternative which may or many not be right for their needs.
Free + because it's so popular, when you have a problem, there are a million resources to find answers. Not even Adobe Analytics can match that.
My mate worked at Yahoo, and they used Yahoo Analytics, and he said it was great, but that when you ran into any issues at all, good luck working out what to do!
The reality of an analytics product is that a non-techy marketing person needs to be able to solve their own issues without wasting tech time (which is the only reason why TagManager exists), and that's a REALLY hard problem to solve.
So Google Analytics is largely popular because it's a recognizable brand, and not really because it's actually a easy-to-use and useful product, and you're going to claim the same for Google Docs, and for Google Buzz and GChat and GPlus and Google Wave?
Also, unlike many smaller analytics providers, Google Analytics doesn't have glaring CSRF vulnerabilities and doesn't have creepy features that let you spy on individual users (no idea if this applies to Plausible or not).
> "[GA]...doesn't have creepy features that let you spy on individual users"
google reserves that for itself so as not to lose it's dominance of online advertising and targeting. why would they share their bread and butter with the little guys?
It's more valuable to them to be able to truthfully say they don't add GA data to it. Meanwhile offering GA for free chokes out that competitive avenue to anyone else.
No idea if that's true or not regarding Google Analytics, but you can opt out of all data sharing and I imagine Google would be in a lot of trouble if they didn't honour that.
There is no comprehensive opt out to Google tracking. If you disagree, show me the button that opts out of doubleclick (and all Google subsidiaries and data sharing partners) targeting ads at my home IP address, cell phone, car, etc.
I'm also unclear on whether "opting out of tracking" under the definition you're implying is possible. Any entity tracking you needs to track that you've opted out of tracking, which requires tracking you. Whoops.
I reject the idea that you have to be tracked to not be tracked.
Imagine a system where you opt in to tracking, if you are not opted in, no data about you is written into any system used for business analysis.
Of course you can't/shouldn't stop all writes to your systems, like server access logs, but you can draw a line between operational and business data.
Of course if you have access to both operational and business data sets you can analyze data for people who have not opted in, but I would rather live in a world where we at least try to enforce a separation between the two.
I don't think that's true at all. You can opt out of seeing the results of Google tracking in your own Google profile, but it doesn't stop them tracking you.
i'm sure there are people at google who want to honor those opt-outs in good faith, and there are those who don't.
the massive organizational system itself, nevermind the massive computational systems, acts against doing this thoroughly and auditably.
it's also hard to believe that they'd get the data out of every last nook and cranny when they don't even swap out dead hard drives in their datacenters because of time and cost to find them (as related to me by a googler a number of years ago).
and they have an army of lawyers and lobbyists for anything that falls all the way through the cracks to the public in a way that allows lawsuits (gdpr and the like).
I don’t work at Google, but I’ve worked for and with many big corporations and government entities.
The army of lawyers look within too. The problem with big companies is usually that they lobby their way to do things that you don’t like. They are usually very good at working within those parameters.
That’s why you generally don’t see data breaches in places like Google. When you do, they are usually a combination of acute issues (hacking, etc) and incompetence (Equifax). There are overlapping controls and segmentation that make it harder to rogue stuff without oversight.
At a startup or small adtech place, forget it. The controls are not there and the company has nothing to lose.
> Google would be in a lot of trouble if they didn't honour that.
There are plenty of examples where Google have not honoured such expectations of trust. They have not, to date, gotten into "a lot of trouble".
The GDPR is probably the piece of regulation most likely to possess teeth big enough to get Google into a little bit of trouble, and the task of enforcing that is down to 1 person in a deliberately underfunded department in the country where Google has chosen to locate it's EU HQ[0]
There is no will to prosecute Google for misbehaviour in this area.
Actually, GA does have a creepy feature that lets you spy on individual users. It's called the User Explorer report (under Audience in the left-hand nav). It lets you page through each hit from a particular user. This is also the report that lets you process Data Subject Access or Deletion requests under GDPR or CCPA.
I'm specifically talking about CSRF as I've found that to be quite widespread and some analytics providers have had flaws that can lead to your account being deleted or stats sent to someone else's email address, etc. I don't know if there's a similar problem with XSS, but I trust Google's security practices more than most other companies.
I see.
I always have this idea in my head, to start a service and get people to put my script on their web sites, and pull a grand scam one day by changing the script to do something malicious on those poor sites that didn't add SRI.
Can we stop with this nitpicking? You’re not paying any money, so it’s “free”. That Google analyses your data is another story: it could do it whether you’re paying or not.
Google cannot analyze your user traffic if they don't have a pixel on your site. What are they going to do? Look at your traffic logs?
Designing a website that has traffic insights while respecting your visitor's privacy requires effort.
If you want to delegate the insights, you can pay for it or let Google look at your data. The data goes straight into their ad exchange analysis. In fact, you cannot publish Google ads on your site unless you have had google analytics running on your site for a while.
