Jun 28, 2020 23:00:00

Open source and privacy-friendly Google Analytics alternative software 'Goat Counter' review

Google Analytics is often used for website access analysis, but some people may be worried about tracking. 'GoatCounter', which is open source and free for personal use, allows you to track users, aggregate unique users without cookies, and analyze access.

GoatCounter web analytics

https://www.goatcounter.com/

First, access the top page of Goat Counter and click 'Sign up'.

Enter the 'Code' that is part of the URL of the page that displays the access analysis, the domain name of the website that you want to access analyze, the email address, the password, and a simple capture, and click 'Sign up'.

Immediately a page displaying the access analysis was displayed. You haven't sent any data to GoatCounter yet, so nothing is displayed in the access analysis.

To send access information to GoatCounter, just like Google Analytics, you can embed the tracking code on the website you want to analyze access.

Once the data is sent, the access status will be displayed.

At the top of the page that displays access analysis, you can set an arbitrary period and display period such as the latest day, week, month, quarter, half year, or year. You can also specify a time period for this week, this month.

The graph shows the number of page views per hour.

Click 'Top referrers' to display the number of accesses for each

referrer .

If you click the file name of the access destination, you can also display referrer information for each access destination.

If you check 'View by day', the graph will be displayed on a daily basis instead of an hourly basis.

At the bottom of the page, you can check the browser, OS, screen size, and the percentage of access source locations in a graph.

GoatCounter is free for personal use and can analyze up to 100,000 page views per month. If you want to use it for commercial use or to analyze websites with more page views, there is a Business plan of 15 euros (about 1800 yen) per month and a Business Plus plan of 30 euros (about 3600 yen) per month.

The source code of GoatCounter is published on GitHub, and it is possible to compile the binary file and host the access aggregation server by yourself.

zgoat/goatcounter: Easy web analytics.No tracking of personal data.
https://github.com/zgoat/goatcounter