**Feature request** Ability to hide numbers

[kevquirk]

This may sound like a counter-intuitive feature, but please hear me out.

For me, what's more important when it comes to analytics is to see any spikes and where traffic is coming from. The number of visits is less important.

I think the GoatCounter UI already lends itself to being useful without the numbers, given the bar charts that are displayed.

For me, analytics are a double-edged sword. It's nice to know where visitors are coming from, but I tend to get stuck into a spiral of things like "why didn't this post perform as well this month?" etc. I think by removing the numbers, this will be less of an issue...I think.

By having a check box that hides the numbers, we can see the traffic spikes, and where the traffic is coming from (referrers can still be shows as a %) but we don't get hung up on the numbers.

Just a thought. :-)

[arp242]

I've been thinking about this issue for a bit for quite some time, although I haven't really come up with a good way to solve it.

This might be a simple but decent solution; although wouldn't showing the actual bars still mean you'd (roughly) know the number of visitors? Instinctively I'd say to hide the bars as well, and maybe replace that with the percentage of the total visits in this time frame, so you'd get something like (with refers expanded for the first link):

Rank    Visits      Path                       Title   
1       21%         /static-go.html            Statically compiling Go programs
                        68%     Google
                        15%     (unknown)
                        6%      Hacker News
                        5%      duckduckgo.com
2       9%          /go-easy.html               Go is not an easy language
3       8%          /                           arp242.net

This way everything is relative, but you can still see traffic spikes.

What do you think?

I'm not 100% sure yet it will help with "obsessing" over analytics, maybe the Visits % should be hidden as well 🤔

[kevquirk]

I like it, yeah and I think it will really help with the obsessing. I think the only question it would leave is where there are spikes in traffic, but that would be hard to know without numbers. Maybe a flag or something that says "traffic was up xx% on this day/period" - I dunno, it's a difficult one to solve for. (sorry 😄)

[gedw99]

this sounds like change tracking.. basically an alert when something trends out of mean normals would be easy to do by calculating means each night, and then if a spike happens you can send an email..

[arp242]

Yeah, I don't know exactly yet. I need to experiment a bit and see what works and what doesn't. Just hiding the numbers isn't very hard; other things might be a bit harder. I also don't want to deviate too much from the "main" logic, because while I very much like something like this, realistically very few people will people actually use it – so there needs to be some balance.

[gedw99]

good point. A man man project needs to only do what's needed. I just commented because trend analysis is what he was looking for, and i jumped in.

[arp242]

You can now set "Show fewer numbers" in the user settings; this hides the numbers:

It looks okay; but the /go-easy.html page looks a bit odd; if we enable the numbers again we can see it's a relatively small spike of 47 pageviews in an hour that dropped off very quickly:

The numbers also make it much easier to see that the /static-go.html page is much more popular overall: it just has a very different pattern, that page fairly consistently gets some search engine traffic every day for people searching for "statically compile go" and the like, whereas the /go-easy.html page got posted on HN where it got all of two votes 🙃

But ... that's not really all that clear without the numbers. It's actually quite unintuitive that the easy-go page is ranked 4th: without numbers it looks like it should be 1st.

With the bar chars that's a little bit easier to see though:

---

In the text table has a different chart (this has been the case for a long time):

The way this works is that it divides the time period in to 12 chunks and then displays a bar for that with some unicode block drawing characters in 1/8th increments. This evens out the rough spike and it looks more natural. The text table was really intended as an accessibility feature, but I think we can maybe just force display that if the "show fewer number" settings is enabled?

Another option is to just not display any chart, and merely say something like "most visited", "frequently visited", "less frequently visited", and "least frequently visited" for every 1/4th.

I'm not sure yet what the best option is here; I'll also have to look around a bit and see if there are other things that look odd, but "relatively short and small spike of traffic" is probably a fairly common scenario.