Google Analytics is the world’s best-known analytical software and perhaps your first port of call when it comes to analyzing your website data. It is free for most cases, flexible enough to cover various usage scenarios, and cloud-hosted for marketers’ convenience. We have to admit, on the surface, there is little reason to consider Google Analytics 4 alternatives. But if you look a little bit closer, you may discover that even Google tools have some shortcomings.
Why Consider Alternatives?
The plethora of Google Analytics-related courses gives a hint about the complexity and learning curve of the platform. Data analysis is not an easy job, and if you have a platform that tries to accommodate a variety of use cases, you may be sure that there will be plenty of options, caveats to remember limitations and tricks known only to the most advanced marketers.
But this is not the main issue with Google Analytics. There are some core problems that are not easily fixable that make many analytics professionals look for an alternative.
The Migration
Let’s start with something that’s on everyone’s mind involved in online analytics: the forced migration from Google Analytics 3 (Universal Analytics) to Google Analytics 4.
The change is not just a matter of UI refresh – it changes how Google Analytics approaches data. Migrating data is not an easy process – in many cases, marketers need to rethink their analytic strategy and adjust it to the new platform.
This process is a real struggle for many, but a necessity for all.
And for some – the best moment to consider looking for a Google Analytics alternative. The reasoning is that since they have to learn a new platform anyway, they may learn a completely new one that also fixes some other problems that Google Analytics still has that we list below.
People never like to feel forced to do something, and if someone or something forces them to move complex setups that took a long time to polish – the outrage is understandable. This is very much in Google’s fashion – kill or redesign an app without giving much thought to how it affects its loyal users and their user experience.
Data Privacy
Google, like other tech giants, is not doing well on the privacy forefront. While it does a lot to make you feel like it is protecting its users from external threats, it does very little to make them feel safe from Google itself.
There are several problems: firstly, data that is recorded in Google Analytics 4 is scanned to train Google’s algorithms for media buying. You may feel indifferent to that, but others may be worried or even outraged.
Secondly, GDPR. Europe’s leading data privacy initiative forced many smaller players to adjust or leave the common market, but not Google. Analytics technically are not legal when used to track and store data of EU citizens since the location of the servers that store this data cannot be guaranteed to be within EU jurisdiction.
If those privacy issues are a problem, then you may consider some of the GA alternatives more oriented towards privacy and protecting personal data.
Visitor Redirection
This issue is connected with how Google Analytics was designed to operate. The most typical use case scenario for Analytics is to measure performance and customer behaviour on users’ own web pages.
However, performance marketers or agencies have a slightly different approach to digital advertising and, consequently, different needs from their analytical tools. They often have to conduct large-scale A/B tests of landing pages or offers. This means quickly switching destinations of user journeys.
Google Analytics 4 is not designed for certain functions unlike many of its alternatives. Performance-oriented ad trackers, for example, allow for rotating offers and landing pages, smart traffic distributions, weights, rules, and more, to ensure that the right people see the most engaging version of the page.
Real-time Data
If real-time analytics are important to you, it is better to look for Google Analytics 4 competitors because although it has real-time reports, it is limited to only a few selected dimensions. Platforms on this list mostly support real-time data access.
So, What Are the Google Analytics 4 Alternatives:
- Adobe Analytics
This is an enterprise-level analytics solution that provides comprehensive and customizable reports on web, mobile, social, and offline channels. Adobe Analytics also integrates with other Adobe products such as Experience Cloud and Marketing Cloud. Adobe Analytics is aimed at the biggest players, while Google Analytics 4 can be used by small e-commerce business owners. Because of that, Adobe is more expensive from a pricing point of view and more difficult to set up but offers unprecedented analytical powers that overshadow even GA4.
- Fathom Analytics
This is a privacy-focused analytics tool that does not use cookies or collect any personal information from your visitors. Fathom Analytics is GDPR compliant by not tracking individual users or sessions. Instead, Fathom Analytics provides aggregative information on your website’s performance. Some of the cons are its lack of advanced features such as event tracking, funnel analysis, and behavioral analytics.
- Piwik Pro Analytics Suite
This is a self-hosted analytics platform that balances the need for user privacy and in-depth analysis. This is a rarity, but for people for whom privacy protection is as important as breathing, a self-hosted analytical suite is a lifesaver. The obvious cons, apart from the hardships of setting it up, are added costs of running a server. Some other cons include its limited integrations with third-party tools.
Piwik Pro Analytics has a modular structure and allows its users to pay only for features that they will actually use. These features include Consent Manager and Tag Manager.
- Matomo Analytics (formerly Piwik)
Matomo was formerly known as Piwik and is not associated with Piwik Pro. It markets itself as an ethical alternative to Google Analytics. It can be either self-hosted or cloud-based. It is an open-source platform, whose integrity is reviewed by various contributors.
On the feature side, Matomo allows you to track and analyze web, mobile, app, social, and e-commerce data with various features such as heatmaps, session recordings, A/B testing, and form analytics. Its features can be extended with plugins. Some of the cons are its technical requirements for installation and maintenance, its potential security risks due to self-hosting, and its lack of support for cross-device tracking.
- Clicky
Yet another ‘privacy-friendly’ entry on our list, Clicky is a web analytics tool that offers the usual features: individual user tracking, heatmaps, and custom reports with real-time data, packing it into a much more user-friendly UI. Additionally, it has some features that Google Analytics 4 does not have, such as uptime monitoring. GA4 is still better for cross-device tracking but if you need a web analytics tool, Clicky will suit your needs.
- Open Web Analytics (OWA)
In many ways, Open Web Analytics is the complete opposite of Google Analytics 4. It is an open-source, self-hosted, and privacy-focused web analytics platform, while GA4 is proprietary software developed by a huge corporation that uses your data for its own purposes.
Feature-wise, Open Web Analytics allows you to track website traffic and user behavior. It offers a wide range of features, such as visitor tracking, goal tracking, and clickstream analysis. One of the biggest advantages of OWA is that it’s self-hosted, which means that you have full control over your data and privacy but, at the same time, makes you responsible for maintaining a server.
- Voluum
Voluum is a performance ad tracker that is loved by individual marketers and agencies alike. It is a cloud-hosted tracking and analytical software that uses various cookie-safe methods to collect data on your website visitors. Being developed by an EU-based company, it follows GDPR regulations.
Voluum integrates via API with some of the most popular ad networks, including Facebook and Google Ads. It employs machine learning to redistribute traffic among landing pages and offers to bring you the most profit. Voluum is not a direct competitor to Google Analytics but rather is aimed at slightly different users.
There Is Always an Alternative
Nowadays, marketers are spoiled for options when it comes to selecting the right platform for website analytics, whether it comes from Google or another company. The thing is that there are so many use cases, scenarios, and even working styles that it is hard to pinpoint a platform that would work for all.
The important thing is to learn about the pros and cons of each platform and then select the one that seems to fit the most. Most of the platforms will still deliver the same core metrics: page views, bounce rates, and conversion rates. So each Google Analytics alternative from this list should bring you some benefits.
