Our trusted alternatives to Google Analytics
You might have heard of Google Analytics from any IT or website-y people you work with.
Google Analytics is a web analytics service that tracks your website traffic and provides reports for you on how people use your website.
Data helps to make informed decisions when running an organisation, business or charity. And, analysing website data properly helps you to make the best decisions on how to make the most of your website.
It’s so important to have a website analytics tool set up on your website to help you be the best you can be.
Benefits of website analytics:
1. Personalise the users experience
Learn more about the users of your website, what they like and dislike. The more you know about someone, the better you can adjust your content for them.
2. Help you make decisions
See which pages people prefer and what type of content your users are engaging with. It will help you do more of what is working well, and show you which parts to delete or improve.
3. Improve efficiency of your website
Analytics help you to identify things that are wrong on your website and learn from mistakes.
4. Make your website safer
Detect abnormal behaviour and prevent attacks on your site.
So, analytics are helpful. Great. But, do you always have to use Google Analytics?
Short answer: No.
Longer (and more helpful) answer: No you don’t have to.
Truth be told: we use the newest version of Google Analytics on our Wild SEO Agency website. And, we wouldn’t use something that we weren’t happy with. But, we also recommend the following…
5 Google Analytics Alternatives to explore
#1: Google Analytics 4
Same, same but different to Google Analytics as you know it…
Think of GA4 as the Google Analytics upgrade. It’s the fourth iteration of Google’s free website tracking software.
It’ll be the default version of Google Analytics. It focuses on customer privacy in line with GDPR laws. It’ll also allows you to track data on applications as well as on your websites.
#2: Matomo
A highly adaptable tool that can work using a free version and it offers customisable reports.
There’s also no limitation on how much data you can store or websites you can analyse.
From an SEO point of view (our favourite POV) the analytic platform integrates directly with Google Search Console, which is very helpful.
Woah, sorry, we’re getting very jargon heavy here.
Integrating means: talks well and easily with different types of software. And, Google Search Console is one of our favourite free SEO tools that you can use to almost instantly improve your website.
#3 Piwik PRO Analytics Suite
An analytics suite with a focus on user privacy and data security with the option of a free core plan - and the promise it will be free forever! This is a great option for the security conscious small business.
You can adjust what data you collect, the dashboard that you use to do your analyses and the types of reports you receive.
#4 Fathom Analytics
The speedy set up on Fathom analytics means you’re good to go in a matter of minutes. It’s easy to use and the code that they use to review data loads faster than Google Analytics - meaning that Fathom is great for your page loading times… an SEO positive!
They have lots of creative ideas on their website and a free trial for you to figure out if Fathom is for you.
#5 Clicky
Clicky processes website data and your users activity in real time. So you can know what’s going on on your site at any given time.
The data they collect is easy to interpret - you don’t have to be a techy person. And, it’s used by more than a million people around the world.
Their no-thrills simple website has some interesting ideas that make them stand out from a lot of other Google Analytics alternatives.
Many different pricing plans, starting with a free option that would be a sufficient analytic tool for a small business, charity or church website.
How to choose an analytics tool
We’ll level with you - there are so many great alternatives to Google Analytics. This short list of 5 is just us beginning to show you the wealth of knowledge and experience out there that you could make the most of.
You’ve got to work out which is the best analytics tool for you.
If you have the time, patience, and the interest to find out more - we recommend this in depth look at 30+ of the best Google Analytics Alternatives.
Don’t worry if you get bored of reading the list, or overwhelmed with the amount of information, we can help you decipher which analytics tool is best for you.
We’ll also help you implement it to your website so that you can start to analyse and learn from your website data!