Best strategy for link analytics

I have a blog with multiple pages. At the end of each article there’s a “Donation button”. Here’s my questions:

• What’s the best strategy to monitor the number of clicks sorted per article?
• How do I know the pages that resulted with the largest conversions?

I’d like not to use Google Analytics for privacy concerns but I am open to use tools like Plausible (or other open source projects). Plus, I have access to a VPS, so I can use that for some sort of backend.

I apologize if the question has been asked already (searched the site but did not find an answer... probably not using the correct terminology?)

Thanks for your help