hostStuff: Umami Analytics

A privacy-focused web analytics platform.

Google Analytics is probably the largest website analytics platform out there, but it's not the only one, and it's probably overkill for 75% of web admins and managers.  How about an alternative?  How about one that was designed with privacy in mind?

Umami Analytics to the rescue!  Umami is an open source analytics platform that offers both self-hosting and a umami-hosted service.   Personally I've not used the self-hosted version, so this post is from the context of the umami-hosted version.   First off, the basic plan is free.  Yes, it's limited, but not significantly.   There are three plans available, with the Free and Pro tiers described below. The "Enterprise" tier is basically

the same as Pro, just with some custom data retention and enterprise support options.   With that in mind, what's the difference, and why is the free version good enough for most folks?  Read on!

Free Version

  • 100K events per month
  • Up to 3 websites can be configured.
  • Data is retained for 6 months
  • Support is forum community based, so best effort really.

Pro Version ($20 a month)

  • 1M events per month, then $0.00002 for each additional event.
  • Unlimited websites can be added.
  • Support for teams, with unlimited team members.
  • Support is e-mail based.  

One of the nicer features for me personally is that Publii, the tool I use to manage this whole website, they have a free plugin for Umami.  Score!  

So what does it look like?   Screenshots say more than I ever could, so have some screenies.   

This is the main dashboard for a site.
Dig in and you can see what pages were visited.
Where are your visitors coming from?
Vistors and their associated sessions. Use this to dig even deeper!
Detailed stats on those individual visitors.
The system has a lot of reports available
One of the reports can trace a vistors path through your website. Hella!
Account-level usage stats, so you know if you're getting near that 100K free-version limit.

How do you integrate a Publii site with Umami?  EZPZ!  Go to Publii's marketplace and download the umami plugin, then install it in your Publii app.  It's basically the same process as adding a theme, usiong the three vertical dots menu in the upper-right of the Publii app window.   Now you're ready to configure it.

On the very top of your Umami console, click on Settings.  This should bring up your website list, with edit and view buttons.   Click Edit on the site you want to integrate with publii.
Snag the website ID that I've sorta hidden in pink here.    Copy it to notepad or somthing.

Paste the ID you grabbed into the Data website ID field here.   

Set data host to:  https://cloud.umami.is/script.js 

Scroll down a little to set your tracking options.  I have "Do Not Track" disabled in this example due to some debugging I was doing.  Typically I turn that on because I'm not a dick.
Scroll down a little more to configure the cookie banner notice.  Again, I had it disabled while doing some debugging, but typically I leave it on.   

That's it!  Well, sync your changes in Publii, then wait about ten minutes, you should start seeing some data populate.   

 

Featured Posts

Real people do not need flashy websites, yanno? This non-flashy website is hosted with GitHub Pages, and written with Publii, a pretty awesome tool for static sites.