NCEAS
Investigate alternatives to Google Analytics
In light of privacy concerns and changes in data privacy regulations, it's becoming increasingly important to consider alternatives to Google Analytics. This task entails exploring other analytics services that are privacy-friendly and can still provide us with valuable user and event insights. Ideally, it would be great to use an open-source, privacy-respecting, and self-hosted solution.
Some key factors to consider during the investigation are:
- Data privacy and GDPR compliance
- User interface and ease of use
- Data insights and reporting capabilities
- Integration compatibility with MetacatUI
One possible service that has been discussed so far is Plausible Analytics
Hi @Robyn I keep getting notices about the Google Analytics changes that are upcoming. This is the final week to update Google Analytics tag (UA-) to the Google tag (G-) using the GA-4 platform for all sites. Starting July 1, tracking will stop on a site if a new GA-4 property is not connected. My impression from looking at our site is that Google might automatically create GA-4 properties for our existing ones, but I’m not sure of that. Could you look into it and try to be sure we don’t drop our tracking accidentally, especially on core sites like dataone.org, search.dataone.org, arcticdata.io, the KNB site, and the hosted repository sites? cc @nickatnceas
You may try Swetrix instead, I'm building this project. It's a well-maintained, open-source and GDPR compliant Google Analytics alternative.
In France, we are using Matomo for this purpose, in case this can help...
Good overview of the options and discussion of GA blocking for Stack Exchange: https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/381793/replace-google-analytics-with-a-transparent-privacy-respecting-alternative
From an email discussion about analytics for NCEAS:
we do have stats being collected by New Relic, and gave her directions on how to access them (via Pantheon).
I've been thinking that it might be good for us to set up our own usage tracking server... there are some existing, open source services that are more privacy-conscious but still allow website usage reporting. I installed and evaluated Matomo on the dev k8s cluster a few months ago and setup there seems fairly straightforward.