4Analytics: private analytics for Joomla

Hi all,

I am super happy to announce the release of a brand new Joomla extension that I have worked on for the past few months: please welcome 4Analytics!

I'm sure you arealdy guessed by the name: it's a fully-featured analytics extension, one that I believe brings a few things not available just yet in the Joomla ecosystem.

But why?

For what seems like forever, measuring your website traffic was synonymous with opening a Google Analytics account, and adding a few lines of javascript by copy/pasting them to your template index.php file, or adding a plugin just for that.

But then came a few things that changed the landscape:

• privacy laws, such as GDPR in Europe, CCPA in California and a lot more in various countries around the world
• an actual concern for privacy by a growing number of users (ads and cookie blockers extensions)
• the "need for speed", or why have Google or other load several hundreds kilobytes of javascript doing plenty of things only them cared about, while you are fighting to optimize all your content and images for speed?
• the complexity of navigating analytics services dozens of pages and reports 

 And so services such as Plausible, Fathom, Umami and other were born in recent years, which you can use with Joomla already and increase your site users privacy easily.

Now there were still some issues:

• most are all "Software-As-A-Service" offerings, where data is stored on their servers, wherever that is
• alternatives such as Matomo, which you can host, are not private by default, and you need to run your own server
• the existing Joomla native analytics extensions I know of uses cookies (thus not GDPR-compliant, need a cookie-banner extension and user consent) or are online services

So now you know: what I wanted for weeblr.com was:

• a native Joomla extension, storing data on my server
• fully-private, with no cookie-banner or user-consent needed
• with no effect on the site speed
• super-easy to configure and use

But how?

 I won't get into the technical details of how 4Analytics collect views, visits and can recognize users in a fully-private manner here, but the 4Analytics documentation Technology page explains that.

If you don't care that much about the technical side of things, then the 4Analytics Privacy Statement will hopefully be enough, including a link to the Legal analysis commissioned by Plausible.

While this is of course only the first public version of 4Analytics, several months of real-world usage (thank you, Marc Dechèvre!) on multiple websites allow 4Analytics to be fully-featured from the get -go. Please head to 4Analytics product page or even its documentation to learn all about it, but here are the few things I consider major:

• stores all data on your own server: no 3rd-party can have access to your site traffic information
• strictly does not use any cookie: no cookie consent extension needed
• does not store any Personally Identifiable Information
• focus on human visits - also measures, search engines, AI bots, social networks of course
• accurate measurement of time spent on a page  (uses Beacon API)
• sends summary reports by email, optionally including links to full reports (which you can easily print)
• is extremely easy to enable and configure: one-click to measure all traffic, excluding logged-in users
• shows either "Simple" or "Detailed" reports depending on your needs

What now?

4Analytics is available now from our download area, with the now usual two subscription levels, 3 sites and unlimited.

It uses the same development technology that our other extensions, and so:

• runs the same on Joomla 3, 4 and 5
• is fully translated to 22 languages
• looks good (??)

 If you want to see that for yourself, plese join Tim Davis and myself on Tim's YouTube channel for a live discovery of 4Analytics.

Happening today at 7PM UTC (20:00 in Paris - 11AM US Pacific time).

 Cheers,

Yannick