Is there any plan to add in some basic site stats? Just being able to see page view/reads, similar to what Medium offer, would be great.
You can insert any analytics suite of your choice into the head section of the Code Injection settings and have full statistics and details for every page on your site ā which is much, much more detailed and reliable than any sort of basic viewcounter 
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Thanks @John. I had GA set up perviously. The issue with 3rd party analytics is handing that data over to a 3rd party, and that cross site trackers tend to be blocked by ad blockers. I understand they offer a much more detailed experience, but it would be nice to have a simple built in option just for views/reads.
I guess I could look at running something along side my DO install to do this for now.
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The self-hosted analytics software Iāve seen a lot is Matomo (previously Piwik). The only relative downside is itās based on PHP - not that PHP is bad, but you have an additional dependency to maintain
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Another self hosted analytics would be Fathom.
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Thatās an interesting point 
ā how are you handling that currently on other (non-ghost) properties, out of interest?
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The team Iām currently working with are looking at using ahoy (ruby), which is what Instacart uses. GitHub - ankane/ahoy: Simple, powerful, first-party analytics for Rails
It required building youāre own panel to view the data, but negates the whole 3rd party/cross-site issue, and also helps with page load times.
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I use GoAccess now, as I found that GA was being stripped/blocked by decent adblockers, and I was a bit worried about privacy concerns.
GoAccess isnāt as pretty or as rich in analysis, but itās very simple - doesnāt involve any javascript which might get blocked - and just analyses the access log of your web server, so doesnāt require any maintenance after the initial setup.
As well as the neat command line version, thereās a pretty slick web GUI, which updates the figures and panels āliveā (using websockets).
Just wanted to add my 2 pence on this, as nobody else had mentioned it and I think GoAccess fits the bill for a simple stats tool. 
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Iād recommend it too. I have been using it for a while now.
Sorry to bump an old thread, but something worth noting is that when the private mode is enabled, you donāt see (Google) Analytics when injected via the control panel on that specific page. Iāll be looking for a workaround within the code, but itād be nice to have stats for that page to learn if users are visiting the site without proceeding.
Totally unrelated, just out of curiosity: can removing GA affect your ranking/visibility in google search?
I totally like the idea to have a simple stat for posts read - from that basic stat one can decide to go with a solid webstat solution like GA or have a self hosted solution like piwik for example.
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Hi, bumping this topic a bitā¦
Using GA has several additional drawbacks apart from handing data over to 3rd party. Loading additional resources in regards to external JS and therefore more HTTP(S) requests are slowing down the load performance of the page, even while using the new async Google Tag Manager (gtag.js). And on top of that Google somehow violates there own recommendations of Lighthouse in regards to content caching.
Having a simple view counter within Ghost would open new possibilities in regards to displaying short lists, like ie. āMost Read Storiesā. I find this functionality quite interesting and know it from Joomla CMS.
As for more full-fledged analytics, I second GoAccess as the tool of choice but that is unrelated to Ghost itself, as GoAccess parses the web server log files directly to produce the reports.
So long, JoKi
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I missed exactly the same pointed by @webbhostnet @ponnuki and @jochenkirstaetter and thatās why I built Ghostboard as specific analytics for Ghost, maybe someone find it interesting
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Thanks for this!
If youāre not web dev friendly itās fairly simple as far as adding it manually with Ghost (using the default Casper v2.9.1). Since youāre adding a custom file, you just add your custom private.hbs file to the content/themes/casper directory of your Ghost installation (make a copy from that directory while the feature is enabled). Iāve included mine below with the GAID excluded:
<!doctype html>
<!--[if (IE 8)&!(IEMobile)]><html class="no-js lt-ie9" lang="en"><![endif]-->
<!--[if (gte IE 9)| IEMobile |!(IE)]><!--><html class="no-js" lang="en"><!--<![endif]-->
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html" charset="UTF-8" />
<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=edge,chrome=1" />
<title>{{@blog.title}} - Private Site Access</title>
<meta name="HandheldFriendly" content="True">
<meta name="MobileOptimized" content="320">
<meta name="viewport" content="user-scalable=no, width=device-width, initial-scale=1, maximum-scale=1">
<meta name="apple-mobile-web-app-capable" content="yes" />
<link rel="shortcut icon" href="{{asset "favicon.ico"}}">
<meta http-equiv="cleartype" content="on">
<link rel="stylesheet" href="{{asset "public/ghost.css" hasMinFile="true"}}"/>
<!-- Global site tag (gtag.js) - Google Analytics -->
<script async src="https://www.googletagmanager.com/gtag/js?id=YOUR-GAID"></script>
<script>
window.dataLayer = window.dataLayer || [];
function gtag(){dataLayer.push(arguments);}
gtag('js', new Date());
gtag('config', 'YOUR-GA');
</script>
</head>
<body>
<div class="gh-app">
<div class="gh-viewport">
<main class="gh-main" role="main">
<div class="gh-flow">
<div class="gh-flow-content-wrap">
<section class="gh-flow-content">
<header>
<h1>This site is private</h1>
</header>
<form class="gh-signin" method="post" novalidate="novalidate">
<div class="form-group{{#if error}} error{{/if}}">
<span class="gh-input-icon gh-icon-lock">
<svg version="1" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" width="24" height="24" viewBox="0 0 24 24"><g><path d="M12 14c-.552 0-1 .449-1 1 0 .365.207.672.5.846v2.654c0 .276.224.5.5.5s.5-.224.5-.5v-2.654c.293-.174.5-.481.5-.846 0-.551-.448-1-1-1zM20.5 9h-2.5v-3c0-3.309-2.691-6-6-6s-6 2.691-6 6v3h-2.5c-.276 0-.5.224-.5.5v14c0 .276.224.5.5.5h17c.276 0 .5-.224.5-.5v-14c0-.276-.224-.5-.5-.5zm-13.5-3c0-2.757 2.243-5 5-5s5 2.243 5 5v3h-10v-3zm13 17h-16v-13h16v13z"/></g></svg>
{{input_password class="gh-input" placeholder="Password"}}
</span>
</div>
<button class="gh-btn gh-btn-blue gh-btn-block" type="submit"><span>Enter Now</span></button>
</form>
{{#if error}}
<p class="main-error">{{error.message}}</p>
{{/if}}
</section>
</div>
</div>
</main>
</div>
</div>
</body>
</html>
Once you have that saved with your GAID on line 21 and 27 you will need to restart Ghost and should be active from there. Alternatively you could add the handlebar call for
{{ghost_head}}
This should work in general Iād presume, but your mileage may vary 
Iām using GoAccess, but struggling to get real-time html reports to show in the browser. Have you had any luck with this in conjunction with Ghost?
Yes, it works fine with Ghost (or anything else running on/with a webserver really, as it just parses the access log).
For the realtime stats to work, you need to get the websockets server working and preferably reverse-proxy it with nginx (or your webserver of choice) so that itās available on https/443.
When itās working properly, the little green indicator on the left of the stats page will remain ālitā and youāll be able to see your stats updating without refreshing the page, as you click through links on your Ghost blog.
+1 for Ghostboard!
Itās built specifically for Ghost blogs. No cookies, GDPR compliant. You can see your most popular tags, you get some nice SEO tips such as āthis blogpostās URL is a bit too longā. You get average word count and more. Deffo the better choice. It costs $9 a month ($7 if billed annually).
Not related to dev or anything, just a user :)
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It sounds interesting, maybe too expensive for a blogger who writes just for fun. In my opinion there should be a free version with maybe a few features.
Does Ghost will do something similar natively?
In my humble Opinion, something like Statify (Statify ā WordPress-Plugin | WordPress.org Deutsch) from WordPress would be a neat and reliable Solution to the Problem, converted for Ghost and with better implementation in Terms of (maybe?) using another DB for itās work or something like that.
I personally donāt like the Fact to store all of the collected Data from an Analytics Plugin/App within the same Database because it creates a Mess.
Donāt know how this could made possible, just an idea.