Analytics for the new website: which free tool, and who owns it?

[buzznick]

Following on from the website redesign work in #19367 , I want to open up a separate conversation about analytics.

Right now the current website has no analytics at all, which means we have no real visibility into how it is performing. We can't see how many people visit, which pages get the most attention, where traffic comes from, or whether changes we make actually improve things. As we launch the new site off the back of 3.0, I think it would be really valuable to fix that so we can measure the impact and make informed decisions going forward.

The obvious option is Google Analytics, which is free, but it brings a GDPR consideration. To use it compliantly we would need a cookie consent banner and an opt-in flow, which adds friction and tends to undercount anyway. Given that this is a privacy-conscious developer audience, I would rather look at more privacy-focused alternatives first, several of which are cookieless and need no consent banner at all.

The key constraint is that it needs to be free, since this is a community project. There are a few privacy-friendly tools out there that offer free options, and I am sure people here will have experience with ones that work well.

A couple of questions I would love feedback on:

1. Which free tool do people prefer? Something privacy-respecting that lets us avoid the consent-banner overhead. What has worked well for people?
2. Who takes ownership of the account? Whatever we pick needs a clear owner for setup, ongoing access and maintenance. How do we want to handle that?

Keen to hear what everyone thinks before we commit to anything.

[Piedone]

Google Analytics is not just privacy-unfriendly, but due to the necessary cookie popup that a lot of people reject (or don't even see because it's auto-rejected by a browser extension) it's also wildly inaccurate.

After evaluating multiple options, we at Lombiq choose Pirsch, for which we also created an integration for. However, Pirsch doesn't have a free tier. I inquired them about the possibility.

[Piedone]

Pirsch could generously sponsor this. We could add a mention of this with a backlink somewhere, like in the footer.

[buzznick]

Thats awesome 👍 Will look at adding Pirsch to the footer. Can we leave it with you to create the account? then we will add it to the new site.

[Piedone]

Yep, I can set it all up once we start coding. We'll have a common dashboard.

[dialloi659]

Matomo is also an alternative to Google Analytics. It complies with the GDPR because it is a European solution.

[Piedone]

We already added Pirsch, but thank you!