Truth be told, I’ve never been a fan of Google Analytics. Or any analytics tool, for that matter. For me, other than seeing how many people have visited my website and where, I don’t see the value of it for my blog. For other projects, it’s complicated. I see the value up to a point, but the means of achieving that value is making me uncomfortable.
Anyway, I’ve always used multiple content blockers and also deployed a Pi-Hole to my home network to reduce ads, so I wasn’t happy to use GA just to keep track of some visitor numbers. I’m not interested in knowing what are my audience’s interests are, where they come from, who they are, etc. but GA collects this information even if I don’t want it to. It was hypocritical of me to disable tracking on my browsers (so even my website couldn’t track me) but asked my website to track people.
So I ditched it. I now host my own Matomo instance, and it’s set to be cookie-less. It also has anonymisation enabled, so I don’t collect any personal information or share it with a gigantic company that lives in a grey area. I also got to remove my cookie banner, which was a massive win for me. Which idiot thought it was a good idea anyway? (And which idiot thought to legalise it?)
So, no PII, no cookies. I only see visitor numbers, which may be a bit off, but I can live with it. You are welcome to check my Privacy Policy.
Be the change you want to see in the world.
UPDATE 21/06/2023: Scratch that, I'm using Plausible Analytics. I self-hosted Plausible, which keeps no cookies, records no IP addresses or any other personal data about the visitors. It works better than Matomo for this purpose, and I've also updated my Privacy Policy reflecting the tool.
For the sake of transparency, here's what I see on Plausible:
I liked Plausible Analytics so much that I may actually write a separate post about it.