A Google Analytics alternative

Why people look for something else

Not because GA is a bad tool. Because it is a tool for something larger than the question of how many people read your blog yesterday.

• 01

  A consent banner, because the script writes to the device

  Google Analytics stores its own cookies in the browser. Article 5(3) of the ePrivacy Directive requires consent for any storage or access on a user device that is not strictly necessary to deliver the service. Hence the banner, and the banner costs you: the traffic that declined disappears from your statistics along with it.

• 02

  Reports written for an analyst, not for a site owner

  GA4 describes the world as events and parameters. It is a very capacious model, but before you see your most read pages you pass through properties, data streams, consent mode and event configuration. Most sites need five numbers, not a language in which every question can be asked.

• 03

  A share of the requests never lands

  Google Analytics endpoints have been on blocklists for years, and browsers keep restricting third party scripts. Configuration does not get you out of it: the more your visitors know these tools, the more your report undercounts exactly the group you care about most.

• 04

  Event history shorter than a year over year comparison

  On a standard property, event level data is kept for at most 14 months, and on high volume properties Google reduces that setting to two months. A year over year comparison on raw events stops being possible at that point, although aggregated reports remain.

Which one to pick

One of these tools is part of an advertising system and the other is a traffic counter with decent reports. They are not competitors in every situation.

The questions that come up most

Do I really not need a consent banner?

Not for the measurement itself. The consent requirement in Article 5(3) covers storing and reading data on a device, and we store nothing. If your site uses anything else that writes to the device, embedded video or advertising pixels for example, you will still need a banner because of those.

Will you import my history from Google Analytics?

No. GA data describes different visitors counted a different way, so gluing it onto our charts would produce one series with a step in the middle. What works in practice: leave both tools running side by side for the first month, compare the direction of change, then switch the old one off.

Will the numbers match GA?

They will not, and a match would not be good news. We see traffic GA never will, because we ask for no consent and are blocked less often. We also count a visitor differently, because we hold no identifier that outlives a single day. Compare directions and proportions, not values.

Google Analytics is free, so where are the savings?

Not on the invoice. In the setup and learning time, in the banner that costs you part of your visits, and in the data that never arrives. If your site uses one percent of what GA can do, you are paying that price for something you do not use.

Is GA data not lawful again under the data protection framework?

Transfers to the United States have been covered by a European Commission adequacy decision since July 2023, so the transfer question looks different today than it did in 2022. Our argument is not that GA is unlawful. It is that we send nothing outside the European Union, so that question is simply absent from your records of processing.

Do you measure events and conversions?

Yes. Custom events, goals based on a path or an event, funnels and channel attribution. Goal matching is computed when the report is read, so a new goal covers the history you already have from the moment you add it.