There is definitely a need for online analytics. Analytics are as important to me as crash reports.
* It helps me focus on the content my users need the most, and see what triggers donations.
* It helps me catch and diagnose traffic dips, and react to them.
* It helps me catch and diagnose unexpected issues. For instance, caching changes broke a component that accounts for 30% of my revenue. It would have stayed broken for a whole month if I didn't see the dip in events.
I will replace Google Analytics soon, but even as a tech-savvy person, it's a dreadful task. Google Analytics is free, simple, and incredibly reliable. Setting up your own self-hosted alternative, or paying a monthly fee for an alternative is a lot less desirable.
Yes I absolutely agree it can be useful.anf satisfying to see analytics. But it also means you send your users' data to another place where you know it will be recycled etc.
There are alternatives but as you say sadly none are as easy - probably because none have as much budget behind them. I see a number of comparison articles for gdpr compliant analytics, so it seems to have become its own market of sorts.
I have opted myself out of most Google services due to the intrusive nature, I wouldn't want to impose it on my site visitors (but I also have no need to monetize, so maybe a different ballpark).
If you want people to do the right thing, it has to be easy, or it has to pay off. GDPR is incredibly hard, and it's costly.
Just knowing what I need to do requires me to wear my lawyer hat. Actually doing it requires me to wear my developer hat, or to pay other people a monthly fee.
I will eventually move to another solution, but it has an infinitely lower impact on my users than the problems I help them solve.
I will switch this because I swore to do the right thing [1], and because I have a lot of time on my hands. I can't reasonably expect amateur bloggers to do the same. It's an unreasonable burden on people who don't run a website for a living.
Well, maybe legislation like GDPR will incentivize Google to build a less intrusive analytics suite. Or force the industry to innovate to create a new form of analytics.
* It helps me focus on the content my users need the most, and see what triggers donations.
* It helps me catch and diagnose traffic dips, and react to them.
* It helps me catch and diagnose unexpected issues. For instance, caching changes broke a component that accounts for 30% of my revenue. It would have stayed broken for a whole month if I didn't see the dip in events.
I will replace Google Analytics soon, but even as a tech-savvy person, it's a dreadful task. Google Analytics is free, simple, and incredibly reliable. Setting up your own self-hosted alternative, or paying a monthly fee for an alternative is a lot less desirable.