Bye Google Analytics, Hi Umami
As a digital marketers, we tend to track everything that we can. From recordings, heatmaps, proprietary trackers, profiling and more! For my job, it's perfect, but personally... I don't like getting tracked in any way.
I am using various tools that include VPN and ad blockers to keep myself clean and clear. I tried my best to move away from tech giants like Google or Facebook, we'll discuss how I did this in the future.
Considering that I would like to have a minimal tracker on my blog site, there are a couple of choices, and definitely, it's not Google Analytics. There's a lot's of discussion about why people hate and love Google Analytics at the same time, you can search and read it on the web.
First, I need a Web Analytics that is:
- Open source and self hosted
- Minimal
- Respect user's privacy
- Simple
- Extendable
And here's my list:
Yes.. I've gone with Umami instead. The reason? I found a 1 click deploy version from Railway, amazing tool with generous free tier ❤️. It's not entirely hands-free for the deployment, but it was pretty easy! After completed the 1 click deploy on Railway, follow this guide to link the project, and you're done.
🎉 Congratulation, that's all for the deployment. But here's an important step that I would like to share. If you had read Umami's Feature, you'll probably notice this sentence.
Umami is hosted by you under your own domain so you can reliably avoid ad-blockers unlike Google Analytics.
So now, make sure you have created a subdomain of the website that you're looking to track, in my case xxxx.kylewong.my and link it to your Umami Railway Project, else ad-blockers like uBlock Origin, Adguard, etc, will be able block the tracking script.
🥳 That's really it!
Up to this point, i'm liking everything that Umami has to offer. Simple integration, minimal UI, and it also comes with a sharable link to my own analytics. Here's the shareable link for this blog that might convince you into Umami 😉.
To end this topic, if there's no reason to use Google Analytics and Facebook Pixel, please don't. Pick any from the list above and respect everyone that visits your site. Cheers 🥂