Feb 16, 2023
12 mins read
Leveraging data is the most significant advantage for online businesses to survive and scale in the digital space.
The adoption of business intelligence tools and analytics software has increased in the last decade. As a result, the market share for analytics solutions is expected to grow, reaching 18 billion by 2025. Businesses utilize data analytics to make informed decisions, improve the customer experience, mitigate risks, streamline processes, and augment security.
Google Analytics is the first name that pops into mind while thinking about analytics tools. It dominates the web analytics industry. But with growing awareness regarding data privacy concerns, businesses are considering Google Analytics alternatives.
This article tells you what's wrong with Google Analytics and why you should invest in a Google Analytics alternative. And we'll also explore the best alternatives to Google Analytics.
Google Analytics is free to use but has its shortcomings. Below is the list of reasons you should consider using an alternative to Google Analytics.
Though Google Analytics is popular for web analytics, it offers compromised user privacy. It records user information such as session statistics, website details, geo-location, and browser/device information. Google uses this data to improve its products and for ad targeting & personalization.
Google has a history of facing a series of lawsuits for breaching customers' privacy and incurred heavy fines from regulatory authorities.
Google Analytics is not GDPR compliant. Google uses third-party cookies to track user behavior data. It uses this data to make ads that earn billions in revenue by offering free products such as Gmail, Google Search Console, Google Docs and Google Analytics, etc., in exchange for user's data.
Despite the raised concerns about how Google uses personal data, it has continued to delay dropping third-party cookies till 2023 despite constant updates.
Another problem with Google Analytics is of technical skills required to use it. It is hard to use without background knowledge and training. People also look for Google Analytics alternatives because of the learning curve to understand its proper usage.
This analytics tool is also not user-friendly for reports.
The issues mentioned above with Google Analytics make way to look for alternative analytics tools.
The following are some major factors that help you choose an alternative to Google Analytics.
Platform Freedom:
The best analytics tool informs you about your product performance and user behavior. You can make practical and constructive business decisions with the correct information and data.
Below are the top alternatives for Google Analytics. We have divided the alternatives into two categories: product analytics tools and web analytics tools. Let's explore them one by one.
Product analytics tools track how users interact with your product or service. They analyze the actions and events performed by the user and provide insight into trends, conversions, user needs, and retention rates.
Product analytics tools help you understand the product's performance and usage. These tools can enhance the customer experience and direct marketing practices.
Let's see the top five product analytics tools as Google Analytics alternatives.
Usermaven is a powerful yet simple analytics suite; it lets you analyze traffic metrics in real time. It gives a deeper understanding of how the users engage with your SaaS products. It offers insights on customer onboarding, product engagement, feature adoption, and retention.
Their motto clearly states their vision:
"You don't need to be a data scientist to comprehend what you're seeing."
Usermaven is privacy friendly and GDPR and CCPA complaint analytics platform. They don't sell data to anyone. Users can request to export or delete data anytime.
Like Google Analytics, Usermaven provides event tracking and goal conversion analysis with its auto-capture technology. Other Usermanven features include funnel analysis, marketing attribution, engagement metrics , feature audit report, and audience segmentation. You can enjoy team collaboration by providing analytics dashboard access.
Pricing
Usermaven has different plans to meet diverse business needs.
Amplitude is a product analytics platform for mobile and web applications. It is focused on user behavior and predictive analytics across websites and applications. It can perform user segmentation, revenue & funnel analysis, and offers insights about customer retention rate.
It provides real-time analytics enabling users to evaluate your marketing efforts' impact on your sales. It encourages team collaboration and provides built-in guidance.
Pricing
You can contact sales for a quote on the following paid pricing plans.
Mixpanel is another product analytics software that works on the web, mobile, and other smart devices. It gives a deeper real-time insight into the customer's behavior by generating interactive reports.
It analyzes popular features on web apps, conversion rates, application usage, and retention rate. It allows you to build retroactive funnels that can be used to analyze why and when users drop off.
Mixpanel lets you create custom dashboards and generate automated alerts when the product metrics change with a team-sharing feature. It flags downward trends like cart abandonment spike or drop in user activation. Moreover, Mixpanel uncovers hidden trends by breaking down any event or user's property in real time.
Pricing
Mixpanel comes with three different plans.
Related: Top Mixpanel Alternatives
Heap is capable of powerful analytics that measure product adoption to help your products' growth.
It provides automatic data capturing to record customer interaction, page clicks, page views, etc. In addition, Heap has an advanced dashboard for constant activity tracking of different customers' behavior while interacting with the product.
Heap offers direct data access (the same recorded information usually stored in a centralized location) to all team members. In addition, the customer journey mapping by Heap provides customer engagement insights about the product.
Pricing
Woopra is another analytics tool with behavioral triggers and automation. It provides automatic triggers in real-time based on the user's behavior. It is capable of individual-level analysis offering details about different users' activities like who is making payments, opening emails, or using the product's key features.
It is similar to Google Analytics in that a tracking code is placed on a website to gather customer information and build reports. You can view critical reports about people, customer journeys, and trends.
With Woopra's Schema, you can define which type of user data needs to be tracked. Schema can be based on both the action and visitor data.
Pricing
Woopra is available in four packages.
Website analytics tool measures and analyzes the traffic and usage of a website. It helps you understand how many people visited your website, which pages are accessed the most, and how much time users spend on a page. Most importantly, it lets you calculate the conversion rate of anonymous users to registered users.
Let's see the top five website analytics tools used as Google Analytics alternatives.
Usermaven is a great Google Analytics alternative for website tracking. It is lightweight, quick, and easy to install. Neither does it use any tracking cookies, nor stores personally identifiable information (PII).
Usermaven is GDPR and CCPA-compliant in the EU. It collects users' data anonymously and provides all metrics on a single page. It assists users in making informed decisions. Ad-blockers block most analytics tools, such as Google Analytics. But Usermaven gives you accurate data with white-labeled tracking pixels.
You can use Usermaven on an unlimited number of websites, as its pricing is based on the number of events. You can keep your team updated by sharing your dashboard with multiple users with different roles. It offers 100% traffic data using white-labeled tracking pixels without breaching customer privacy.
Other features include data filters for comparison, marketing & UTM tracking, and API access. Usermaven also offers weekly and monthly email reports, so you can attend important events.
Pricing
Usermaven has three different plans.
Plausible is an open-source privacy-friendly analytics solution. It tracks events, goal conversions, and campaigns. Plausible is hosted in the EU with full compliance with GDPR, CCPA, and PECR.
Plausible summarizes everything on one page, such as the number of users visited hourly, daily, or monthly, total page views, the visit duration, and much more. It is a lightweight tool that doesn't use cookies to track or collect personal data.
It is straightforward to integrate Plausible. You have to add one line JavaScript snippet in the "head" section of the HTML page. You can analyze marketing campaigns, integrate Plausible with Search Console and enjoy email & slack reports.
Pricing
Another privacy-oriented alternative to Google Analytics is Piwk Pro. This tool can help track web, app, product, and user behavior. It provides privacy-friendly analytics by ensuring compliance with strict US, EU, Russian, and Chinese data protection laws.
This analytics software allows multiple site tracking. It offers customer journey optimization and user flow tracking and helps you build conversion funnels. You can enjoy customization options, drag & drop editor, and data exports. It integrates with Google Ads and Search Console. Moreover, Piwik Pro provides data retention.
https://blog.contentstudio.io/content-funnel-conversions/Pricing
Piwik Pro has two packages.
Stat Counter provides crucial insights for time-strapped business owners. This tool is perfect for watching their visitors' real-time live feed, detecting click fraud, and tracking paid traffic.
With an easy-to-use dashboard, users can easily track their traffic sources, visitor location & engagement. It provides information about the popular pages to optimize them.
Stat Counter can even allow its users to track visitors whenever they come or leave their site. You can store notes about visitors and add descriptive information by labeling them.
Stat Counter's instant email report feature lets users quickly get the summary stats with information on your site's performance. The reports can be generated daily, monthly, and yearly.
Pricing
Stat Counter includes a free plan as well as a paid plan for its users as follows:
Microsoft Clarity provides instant site heatmaps, automatically highlighting the parts where the visitors interact the most and how far the visitors scroll a site. It also tells where the visitors are clicking the most.
With recorded sessions, the users can easily see how the visitors use the website. It gets easy to point out what to improve or remove to make the user experience much smoother. You can test out new features with Microsoft Clarity.
Microsoft Clarity makes it possible to turn problems into opportunities.
How?
It allows its users to quickly discover where the visitors get frustrated and leave the site.
With this tool, it is also possible to connect it with Google Analytics to enjoy the full power of both tools simultaneously. Apart from being a critical website analytics tool, being completely free makes it worth much more. You get to enjoy Microsoft Clarity's all features for free.
To ensure compliance with the privacy regulations, analytics tools need to save businesses by offering data and IP address anonymization, user control over data, and cookie-less tracking.
Below list includes some of the best privacy analytics tools alternatives to Google Analytics.
Google Analytics is one of the most popular free analytics tools, without a doubt. But its popularity is not enough to choose it as your analytics solution. For businesses concerned with privacy, it's not the best available option.
Choosing privacy-friendly analytics will cost you money. But the products discussed above, such as Usermaven, are worth the price as they meet your business requirements. You can get started with the Usermaven free plan and upgrade as your business grows with us.
Investing in an excellent analytics tool gives massive returns and maximizes your website & product performance.
Yes, there are free alternatives to Google Analytics, such as Usermaven, Heap, Woopra, Piwik Pro. etc.
GA4 is the next-generation analytics tool that collects website and app data. It focuses on event-based data instead of session-based data. It will take down Google Analytics in 2023. All Google Analytics accounts will stop data collection from October 1, 2023.
Google Analytics uses cookies and JavaScript to track the audience and their behavior. Most of the users don't allow cookies and block google tracking tactics. Therefore, Google Analytics doesn't paint a complete data picture
Due to internal traffic and bot activity, the network can be overloaded. This leads to frequent changes in metrics and can confuse the user. Google Analytics is free. However, it is not a nonprofit organization. The data collected is shared with third-party advertisers and raises a privacy concern.
To choose a Google Analytics alternative, you must know your requirements. Ask the following questions:
Answering these questions will allow you to choose the analytics tool that is best for you. Moreover, look for a tool that is GDRP compliant and offers platform freedom. Customization, ease of use, security, and support are essential factors to consider when choosing an alternative.
Google Analytics is not GDPR compliant. It uses cookies to track users' data and processes it outside the EU. You need consent from your website visitors to activate Google Analytics cookies. Also, you have to include details about personal data processing in your website's privacy policy.1.1.
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