> Which articles generate the most income, and why?
Your affiliate partner will tell you which links bring what income assuming you're using unique links.
Otherwise the server logs will give you a good page view count. Sure, it'll include bots, but bots that have no interest in the content would tend to be randomly distributed across all articles and thus not skew the results too much.
> Which components are useful, and which are just noise?
Not sure what you mean by components? If you're talking about different links or forms (like a newsletter) then the forms would also generate log entries on the server and can be counted there.
> Where are my visitors from?
Server logs and GeoIP.
I see nothing here that justifies ratting out your users to Google just to save a tiny bit of effort.
They can't tell me how much money those users actually bring me. 70% of my content is not monetised.
> Your affiliate partner will tell you which links bring what income
My affiliate partners go from Amazon to people who fax things around. Their data is not always accurate or complete, if they gather it at all. I used Google Analytics to spot many such problems in the past.
> the forms would also generate log entries
That would just confirm that a form was submitted. It won't tell me on which pages it performs poorly. It won't tell me that people opened a collapsible, but didn't like its contents.
> Server logs and GeoIP
The point isn't just to know where users come from, but how to better serve them. Server logs won't answer questions like "are there enough non-EU, Spanish-speaking visitors to warrant translating this page?"
> I see nothing here
It might have something to do with myopia. Your judgements are based on inaccurate preconceptions of how websites operate.
> That would just confirm that a form was submitted. It won't tell me on which pages it performs poorly
The browser sends you a referer header. You need to do some work with data analysis/transformation to derive insight from this (by comparing the number of visits on the parent page vs the number of form submission where the referer is that parent page) but it is absolutely doable. If you don't want to do something like this I'm sure self-hosted analytics tools like Matomo (formerly Piwik) can do this out of the box.
> are there enough non-EU, Spanish-speaking visitors
Maybe some people have reasons to not want you to know that they are non-EU and Spanish speaking, and this is something new privacy regulations are attempting to address.
> Your judgements are based on inaccurate preconceptions of how websites operate.
My judgements are based on not wanting to be stalked on the web (especially by a third-party adtech company like Google), and seems like at least in Europe the law agrees with me. Whether this makes your business unprofitable is not my concern (if your business model becomes unprofitable by a reasonable request like not stalking users without their consent then I'd argue this was never a good business model to begin with).
On that note, I guess let's agree to disagree and let the privacy regulators decide for sure (given their current track record I wouldn't worry for another few years).
Server logs can tell you that.
> Which articles generate the most income, and why?
Your affiliate partner will tell you which links bring what income assuming you're using unique links.
Otherwise the server logs will give you a good page view count. Sure, it'll include bots, but bots that have no interest in the content would tend to be randomly distributed across all articles and thus not skew the results too much.
> Which components are useful, and which are just noise?
Not sure what you mean by components? If you're talking about different links or forms (like a newsletter) then the forms would also generate log entries on the server and can be counted there.
> Where are my visitors from?
Server logs and GeoIP.
I see nothing here that justifies ratting out your users to Google just to save a tiny bit of effort.