this post was submitted on 10 Oct 2023
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Looking for simple analytics (similar to Plausible) that supports cookies (upvote.au)
submitted 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) by dan@upvote.au to c/selfhosted@lemmy.world
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Google Analytics is broken on a bunch of my sites thanks to the GA4 migration. Since I have to update everything anyways, I'm looking at the possibility of replacing Google Analytics with something I self-host that's more privacy-focused.

I've tried Plausible, Umami and Swetrix (the latter of which I like the most). They're all very lightweight and most are pretty efficient due to their use of a column-oriented database (Clickhouse) for storing the analytics data - makes way more sense than a row-oriented database like MySQL for this use case.

However, these systems are all cookie-less. This is usually fine, however one of my sites is commonly used in schools on their computers. Cookieless analytics works by tracking sessions based on IP address and user-agent, so in places like schools with one external IP and the same browser on every computer, it just looks like one user in the analytics. I'd like to know the actual number of users.

I'm looking for a similarly lightweight analytics system that does use cookies (first-party cookies only) to handle this particular use case. Does anyone know of one?

Thanks!

Edit: it doesn't have to actually be a cookie - just being able to explicitly specify a session ID instead of inferring one based on IP and user-agent would suffice.

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[–] johnnyfive@lemmy.world 2 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (2 children)

In Plausible you can use custom events: https://plausible.io/docs/custom-props/introduction

I think this should be enough

[–] dan@upvote.au 1 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

I don't think this would fully help? It'd still show that one user performed all the events.

I just need a way of explicitly specifying a user identifier instead of it being assumed based on IP and user agent. I don't think Plausible has a way to do that. I was chatting with the developer of Swetrix and they said it might be possible to add this as a feature.

[–] johnnyfive@lemmy.world 1 points 11 months ago

you can generate a new cookie with the value you want to identify that computer and use/capture that same value in the plausible custom event