Web analytics services

Web analytics services provide insights into your website's traffic, user behavior, and content performance. They help you make data-driven decisions about content, design, and marketing strategies.

# Privacy-focused analytics

Modern analytics solutions prioritize user privacy while still delivering valuable insights. Privacy-focused alternatives to traditional analytics platforms respect visitor privacy, comply with regulations like GDPR, and often don't require cookie consent banners.

# Integration with fortrabbit

All web analytics services work by including a tracking script in your website's HTML. Since you have full control over your application code, you can integrate any analytics service of your choice. All services provide a JavaScript snippet that you add to your page templates. So, there is no integration with fortrabbit required.

# Relation to fortrabbit metrics

fortrabbit provides server-side analytics called metrics too. What's the difference?

Server side analytics can be an alternative to client-side JavaScript tracking. Instead of sending data from the browser, analytics data is generated and collected on the web server. Server-side analytics work well in combination with client-side solutions to get a complete picture of user behavior and application performance. In many cases server-side analytics can provide enough insights. Mind that the data aggregation and type of data is different and can not be directly compared.

Before modern browser based web analytics become popular, tools like Webalizer, AWStats, and Analog analyzed web server log files to generate statistics. Those tools where basically a web UI for the server log files. It's kinda sad that these tools are rarely used today.

# Cookie-less tracking

Many modern analytics solutions use cookie-less tracking methods that comply with privacy regulations without requiring user consent. This approach often relies on fingerprinting.

# Limitations of fingerprinting

Browser fingerprinting attempts to identify users based on technical characteristics like device type, screen resolution, installed fonts, and other device attributes. There are some gotchas with that.

• Modern browsers include privacy features that limit fingerprinting effectiveness (Safari's Intelligent Tracking Prevention, Firefox's Enhanced Tracking Protection)
• Browser extensions like uBlock Origin may block tracking requests as well

Fingerprinting-based analytics may miss data from users with privacy-conscious browser settings, resulting in incomplete visitor insights.

# APM tools with analytics features

Application Performance Monitoring (APM) tools primarily focus on error tracking and performance metrics, but many also include analytics and user behavior features. These tools can also serve as an all-in-one solution for error monitoring and analytics. They may be more expensive and complex than dedicated analytics tools. PostHog is multi-purpose tool, that does error tracking, web analytics, dashboards and more in one go.