What is the best Google Analytics alternative?

Google Analytics is the go-to website analysis 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 wasn’t a question of whether you would install it. You received a wealth of information and a precise insight into the behavior of your website visitors. Fantastic.

But Google Analytics 3 has now been replaced by the, according to many, inferior Google Analytics 4. Should we even 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 in France, Austria, Denmark, Norway, and Italy, strong statements have been made. The tool stores a lot of user data on Google’s own servers, raising doubts about data security and ownership. Moreover, these data can be stored outside the EU, creating additional legal complications. 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 high fines and reputational damage.

For many companies, this is the primary reason to look for an alternative. We can add even more reasons.

Google Analytics 4 in Practice

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

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

Additionally, there are a number of challenges or things that are simply not possible, such as:

• Cumbersome UX/UI, very non-intuitive
• ‘Time Series’ charts always show everything at the daily level
• A landing page can only be seen via a detour
• Adjusting the URL structure prevents comparisons with the past

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

Conclusion

The combination of these two factors – uncertainty about GDPR/AVG implementation and a deficient product – means that we would rather not use Google Analytics 4. We do not look forward to finding out that its use is no longer allowed and were already not happy with it. That means we had to look for a replacement!

Best Google Analytics Alternative

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

Matomo offers similar insights to Google Analytics 3 but provides several key advantages:

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

In short, much more control of the software and the GDPR/AVG risk is completely covered off.

Interestingly: What was fun to note is that the visitor numbers for all websites went up. Google Analytics was regularly blocked by AdBlockers and other programs, so in some cases, 10% of visitors could not be analyzed. With Matomo, this suddenly became possible.

Would you like to know more about our decision or would you like to see how we have set this up? Feel free to contact us. We would love to show you how we would set this up for your website.