@jni@talkpython Hey. Does Plausible let you add and report custom events outside of page requests (e.g. buy-course, new-account, etc). I didn’t see that but maybe it does.
@mkennedy@talkpython good questions, I have no need for those things so I don’t know, but they are certainly plausible (heh) differentiators for umami. 😃 but not a reason for me to migrate my existing sites (yet). Thanks!
@jni@talkpython There are quite a few uses for that sort of thing. For example, if you have tags on posts, and you wanted to know cumulatively how many times posts with #opensource were viewed, you cannot do that directly. It might appear as 10 separate pages. But you could have a “viewed-tag-open-source" event that would give you better insight. I think Plausibility does NOT have this and Umami does and that's partly why I love it.
Their example is a vanilla form-submit button click, but it looks like you could attach these to anything that has a click on a specific element as part of the user journey.
We were curious enough to track the feature down, but not enough to drive it through to implementation, so I don't know much concrete about how it works.
@btskinn@jni@talkpython Interesting. It does sound like it. But I didn’t see in the “live demo app” any UI for viewing them like regular analytics. Maybe I missed it though
@mkennedy@jni@talkpython There's definitely a chunk of the UI for showing them. Down in the bottom left. Have to toggle a wee dropdown from something else to 'custom events' (or similar).
I'll make a note to find it again, mark up a screenshot.
@mkennedy@jni@talkpython Looks like in addition to following the setup instructions on the website side, as per that previous link, you have to flip on the Goals pane on your Plausible dashboard, and then they show up at the bottom of the analytics view.
@btskinn@jni@talkpython Got it. They should really do that for their demo site they suggest you try. Also, FWIW, Umami has something similar (haven’t really tried either). These two products seem quite similar. I’m happy with Umami FWIW. Like I said before, I like that they are super up front about suggesting self hosting, more so than Plausible. Because it’s that the analytics are on your servers/domain that make the magic happen.
@mkennedy@jni@talkpython Yeah -- Plausible's self-hosting info page specifically has an infobox telling you that the managed hosting service is the best value for most.
And, really, if you want basic, privacy-focused stats that you don't have to think a lot about, I suspect they're probably right.
But if you want deeper knowledge, then definitely taking it into your own hands gives you a lot more to work with.
@btskinn@jni@talkpython Yeah. Thing is when I first tried to research plausible, the entire site wouldn’t load because my nextdns.io was already blocking them. So do many ad blockers (even though they are ethical). And “best to use their hosting” = “25% blocked or whatever stats are real”. That’s not great. Plus you put them in your GDPR declarations, etc. Self hosting solves all of that. Just not their biz model, which is fair.
@mkennedy@jni@talkpython Mmmm, right... I'd forgotten that aspect of what you talked about, that in-housing the analytics scripts gives you access to a more complete picture since they're no longer cross-domain.
@btskinn@jni@talkpython Indeed. It’s the most important thing. Because we were getting something like 40-50% of traffic blocked on external analytics systems. I went so far as to remove them entirely. But with this new set up I feel good about putting them back and there is zero blocking, which I think is fair because it’s first party and we aren’t sharing anything or using any cookies, retargeting, etc.
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