# Recommendations for server side user metrics?

**URL:** <https://forum.djangoproject.com/t/recommendations-for-server-side-user-metrics/7303>\
**Category:** Using Django\
**Created:** [March 30, 2021, 1:05am UTC](https://forum.djangoproject.com/t/recommendations-for-server-side-user-metrics/7303 "2021-03-30T01:05:31Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 4\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![mblayman](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/flex026/user_avatar/forum.djangoproject.com/mblayman/32/101_2.png) [@mblayman](https://forum.djangoproject.com/u/mblayman)\
**Post date:** [March 30, 2021, 1:05am UTC](https://forum.djangoproject.com/t/recommendations-for-server-side-user-metrics/7303/1 "2021-03-30T01:05:31Z")

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I have a project and am entirely uninterested in using Google Analytics, Mixpanel, or any other third party tracking service.

I’m mostly interested in where people are getting to my site from so I can invest in the marketing channels that will meet users where they are coming from. I don’t have any interest in tracking demographic data or much of anything that is personally identifiable (outside of the minimum required to differentiate between different site visitors).

Does anyone have recommendations for packages that do this in a Django project on the server side? In my casual searching, I found:

- [GitHub - jose-lpa/django-tracking-analyzer: User actions tracking and analytics for Django sites](https://github.com/jose-lpa/django-tracking-analyzer)
- [GitHub - yunojuno/django-user-visit: Django app for recording daily user visits](https://github.com/yunojuno/django-user-visit)

But I have no experience with either of these, and I’d be interested to hear the experience that others have had. Thanks for your thoughts on this subject!

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**Author:** ![Jefwillems](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/flex026/user_avatar/forum.djangoproject.com/jefwillems/32/3540_2.png) [@Jefwillems](https://forum.djangoproject.com/u/Jefwillems)\
**Post date:** [March 30, 2021, 9:29am UTC](https://forum.djangoproject.com/t/recommendations-for-server-side-user-metrics/7303/2 "2021-03-30T09:29:18Z")

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A lot of sites, like blogging sites, will add a ?ref= to the end of outgoing links. What i’ve done before is logging where the users come from if a ref is included, and analysing those logs in elastic.

It’s definitely not as “feature rich” like the libraries you posted, but for me it got the job done.

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**Author:** ![adamchainz](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/flex026/user_avatar/forum.djangoproject.com/adamchainz/32/26_2.png) [@adamchainz](https://forum.djangoproject.com/u/adamchainz)\
**Post date:** [March 30, 2021, 10:35am UTC](https://forum.djangoproject.com/t/recommendations-for-server-side-user-metrics/7303/3 "2021-03-30T10:35:42Z")

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Check out [GoAccess](https://goaccess.io/), which can parse your web server logs. I use it on my site’s CloudFront logs to great effect.

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**Author:** ![mblayman](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/flex026/user_avatar/forum.djangoproject.com/mblayman/32/101_2.png) [@mblayman](https://forum.djangoproject.com/u/mblayman)\
**Post date:** [March 30, 2021, 4:45pm UTC](https://forum.djangoproject.com/t/recommendations-for-server-side-user-metrics/7303/4 "2021-03-30T16:45:26Z")

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That looks interesting, Adam. I appreciate the suggestion.