What is the best Google Analytics alternative?

Which website analytics program should you use? Since Google Analytics 3 stopped on July 1, 2023, and Google Analytics 4 leaves much to be desired, many people are looking for an alternative. We have already made the switch to Matomo, and in this article, we explain why.

Google Analytics is the go-to website analytics program. Estimates vary that somewhere between 40% and 80%(!) of websites use Google Analytics. And certainly, Google Analytics 3 was such a huge leap forward that it was never a question whether you would install it. You received a wealth of information and detailed insight into the behavior of your website visitors. Fantastic.

But Google Analytics 3 has now been replaced by what many consider the worse Google Analytics 4. Should we actually make the switch, and what do we use ourselves? We answer that in this article.

Why Google Analytics is controversial

Google Analytics is under fire due to privacy concerns and potential violations of the European GDPR law. The Swedish court banned the use of Google Analytics, and strong rulings have also been made in France, Austria, Denmark, Norway, and Italy. The tool stores a lot of user data on Google’s own servers, raising doubts about data security and ownership. Moreover, this data can be stored outside the EU, which adds extra legal complications. The detailed tracking, such as the use of cookies, is also seen as too invasive. All this makes it difficult for companies to comply with privacy laws, which can result in heavy fines and reputational damage.

For many companies, this is precisely the reason to look for an alternative. We can even add a bit more to that.

Google Analytics 4 in practice

Our clients are mainly interested in clear numbers and insights about, for example, visitor numbers, conversions (and how they were achieved), the origin of visitors, and which content performs well. We want to present that as simply and clearly as possible.

And that makes Google Analytics 4 quite difficult because you practically need a manual for everything.

Additionally, there are quite a few challenges or things that are simply not possible, such as:

• Clumsy UX/UI, very unintuitive
• ‘Time Series’ graphs always show everything at the day level
• A landing page can only be viewed indirectly
• Changing URL structure prevents comparisons with the past

Search Engine Land had a fun overview of the predominantly negative reactions from marketers to Google Analytics 4.

Conclusion

The combination of these two factors – uncertainty about GDPR implementation and a flawed product – means that we prefer not to use Google Analytics 4 anymore. We don’t want to find out later that its use is no longer allowed, and we were not happy with it anyway. That meant we had to look for a replacement!

Best Google Analytics alternative

At Merkelijkheid, we saw this coming, of course. That’s why we already looked at alternatives in 2022, including Matomo, Piwik Pro, Plausible, Fathom, Simple Analytics. After much consideration, we ultimately chose Matomo.

Matomo offers similar insights as Google Analytics 3 but provides several important advantages:

• Install on your own server
• Privacy / GDPR friendly
• Integration with our dashboarding tool
• Data accessible via API

In other words, much more control over the software and the GDPR risk completely covered.

Remarkable: What was nice to notice is that visitor numbers on all websites increased. Google Analytics was regularly blocked by AdBlockers and other programs, which in some cases meant that 10% of visitors could not be analyzed. With Matomo, this suddenly became possible.

Would you like to know more about our decision or see how we set this up? Then contact us. We would be happy to show you how we would set this up for your website.