April 3, 2023 • 17 mins
In this episode of The Opinionated SEO, we discuss an alternative to Google Analytics, specifically for those who don't want to switch to GA4. We introduce one of my favorite alternatives, which is a lightweight and open-source web analytics tool that is fully compliant with GDPR, CCPA, and PECR - Plausible Analytics.
https://plausible.io/
Here are some key takeaways:
1. Plausible is a simple and intuitive alternative to the complex interface of Google Analytics.
2. With Plausible, you own 100% of your website data, and there is no need for cookie prompts.
3. Plausible's script is more than 17 times smaller than Google Analytics, making it a faster and more efficient option.
4. Plausible is fully compliant with GDPR, CCPA, and PECR, and does not share data with third-party advertisers.
5. Plausible offers real-time data and custom goals and events, making it a great alternative for those with small to medium-sized websites or personal blogs.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Phil (00:00):
Hello everyone and welcome to the opinionated s e o.
Today I wanna talk aboutGoogle Analytics alternatives.
So we all heard GA fouris happening basically in
three months, and you'vegotta switch over from GA
three Universal Analytics.
Well, what if you don'twant to, and here's the
(00:21):
thing, if you aren't runningsome of the newest Google
ads, types of advertising,you may not need GA four.
If you are like me and you'vegot a couple dozen sites out
there that just need the basicsof analytics, you don't need
(00:43):
to get too crazy with, uh, userjourneys and things like that.
Maybe a more lightweightapproach is the way to.
So today I want to talk aboutone of my favorite alternatives,
which is called plausible.
All right, so I'll readtheir two sentence opening.
Plausible is intuitive,lightweight and open source
(01:06):
web analytics, no cookies, andcompletely compliant with gdpr.
C C P A and P E C R madeand hosted in the eu,
it works great.
Here's the thing thatI really like about it.
First of all, no cookies,meaning you don't need that
cookie bar on the bottomunless you're actually using
(01:26):
cookies for something else.
The other thing, it'sless than one kilobyte.
It's something like 40 timessmaller than Google Analytics.
so I want to go through acouple of the kind of Google
analytics verse plausible whenyou're going back and forth and
they've got a whole website.
(01:47):
You go to plausible.io andsee this for yourself, but I
thought I would just kind ofgo through it a little bit.
Their number one thing theysay is, Google Analytics is
complex, plausible is simple.
And when I first installedit, I really felt like
it's almost there.
I maybe need one or two things.
And after going through thedocumentation, it actually
(02:07):
had that and it was veryeasy for me to set up and
I'm extremely happy with it.
So the main thing they say,It's a set it one time really,
and it just starts collectingthe data and you really don't
need much more than that.
There aren't any layersof navigation menus.
You don't have tocreate custom reports.
Pretty much everythingis right there.
(02:28):
And the other thing I reallylike about it too, which is
their number two point is you.
Own the data, right?
So a hundred percent of theownership of your website
data, your privacy of yourvisitors, all of that is there.
And they have a self-hostedversion that you could
put on your own server.
It is open source, so you canhave it set up, you can see
(02:49):
all the source code, make sureyou're happy with that, and
having that completely saved.
They have a cloud version,which is super easy
to set up and install.
And by the.
This is $9 a month for up to50 websites, and I think 10,000
visits, something like that.
But we're talking when youstart getting into 10 or
20, $30 for, you know, tensand tens of thousands of
(03:09):
visits, you're pretty muchnot spending that much money.
But there's something tobe said about the fact
that it doesn't send any ofyour data to third parties.
None of this data isshared with advertisers.
All of the data is yours.
And it's fully compliantwith pretty much all
of the data privacies.
It's also open source, andit's available in GitHub so
(03:32):
you can go through it, haveyour developers look at it
and feel pretty confidentabout what kind of data
it's actually collecting.
It's been a big shiftwhere people are caring
about their privacy.
And with the advent of somany ad blockers, we're
just seeing more and morepeople, very privacy focused.
(03:52):
Being able to say thatyou aren't tracking people
through cookies, seems tobe a selling point for a lot.
Now when we're talkingabout compliance and
privacy regulations.
Gdpr, c, cpa, pcr, There'ssomething to be said about
making sure that you are notaccidentally collecting data
on people when it's actuallya liability for you to do so.
(04:16):
the Austrian and French dataprotection authorities have
decided as of January of 2022that the Google Analytics
implementation violates gdpr.
That can be an issue if you'redoing anything outside of
the us, but let's be honest,even here in the States, I'd
(04:38):
much rather if I don't needthat data to not have it.
So that's the other thing.
I don't need to have gdpr,C C P A P, ECR R, or Cookie
prompts, unless I'm actuallycollecting cookies outside
of Google Analytics becauseI'm using plausible now.
Let's talk about.
The actual size of this script,plausible analytics script
(05:02):
is more than 17 times smallerthan the Google Analytics
script, and more than 45 timessmaller than the recommended
analytics integrationusing Google Tag Manager.
Okay?
So think about that.
I mean, this is aone kilobyte file.
Compared to like a 40to 50 kilobyte file.
It may not seem like a lot, butremember that can't be cashed
(05:26):
because that has to get thatunique information every single
time and it's a separate server.
So it's just thatmuch more of a call.
And I think we've all seenthat on page speed insights
and it says you're callingout to third party tools and
hey, it's Google Tag Manager,it's Google Analytics.
You're like, this is Googleitself saying, hey, you
shouldn't be doing this.
And in a sense, This is a waythat you could work around it.
(05:50):
85% of all websites haveGoogle Analytics on it.
So think about that.
One company can prettymuch track 85% of websites.
That's.
Pretty scary to me actually.
They're the largest advertisingcompany in the world, and
they have the most databecause of that, and so I'd
(06:12):
almost rather not be givingthem that much information.
Remember, analytics scriptis also blocked by people
who are using uBlock Origin,Firefox and even some other
browsers are completelyblocking Google Analytics.
Plausible isn't part ofthe ad tech industry.
It doesn't track anyof your personal data.
(06:33):
A lot of these blockersaren't blocking it, so you
may actually get more data.
. You're probably alsothinking, why should I
have to pay for analytics?
Right.
Well, and you know theold story, if it's free,
then you're the product.
Well, yeah, that'sexactly what it is.
I'm actually happy paying my$9 $19 a month to a service
(06:54):
that's open source that givesme the data that I want, and
I know that it's not goingtowards advertising , my user's.
Isn't being sold, it'snot being shared or being
utilized by third parties.
And that's a reallyimportant part because a
lot of my sites are actuallylead gen type sites.
(07:14):
I'm trying to bringpeople to my site.
I don't want someone else tohave them now grouped into
their advertising audiencebecause they visited my site.
I wanna keep thatdata to myself.
And so this is one of thereasons why I like this as
an alternate, , I want totalk a little bit about what's
actually in the interface,what kinds of things I can do.
(07:36):
So I'm gonna just jump into.
My setup and just letyou know the basics of
what I have on here.
So so setup.
A minute, and if you haveWordPress, it's kind of neat.
They have a plugin, whichbasically is the smallest,
lightest weight pluginI've pretty much ever seen.
You put a little codein, hit a button, and
it's basically set up.
You don't have toreally do anything else.
(07:59):
In the initial interface,I've got unique visitors,
total visits, total pageviews, views per visit, bounce
rate, and visit duration.
Every single one of theseI can then filter on.
I've got sources, mytop pages, locations.
Devices and I havegoal conversions.
(08:20):
And in this case, what Iwant to do is maybe I want
to look at top sources.
I can set that as a filter.
I can do my top pages and Icould look at top entries,
top exits, or just ingeneral Top pages, locations.
I could do countries,regions, or cities, devices.
I could look at browser.
OS and the size.
And then goal conversionscan also be set up.
(08:42):
And they have a pretty,they have a couple that
are sort of standard, andI have an outbound click as
one of my goal conversions.
And in this case, thisis a website that I have
one of my other projects,which is a podcast for
first time home buyers.
And it actually has a lot oflistings, but it has links out
to the podcast on differentnetworks like your Apple.
(09:03):
, podcasts or Spotify, and Ilike to track to see how many
people are clicking onto thator what pages they're going to.
I do run Google adsto this as a test.
I do run Facebook and Instagramads as well, and I'm able to
see when people have clickedon those and come here.
but really this is99% of what I need.
(09:25):
I'm able to filter by time.
And by the way, guys, it's.
And lightweight, and that'spretty much all I needed.
Now, the main reason I startedlooking for an alternate is I
wanted something really easy.
I wanted to know wherepeople were coming to for
one of my pages on my site.
(09:46):
And so I went to thatpage here in this example.
I went onto Plausible,and I'm gonna look
over the last 30 days.
So I go and I click the url, orI could type it in as a filter
and I choose last 30 days.
And it tells me the topsources, the locations, the
devices, and how many goalconversions I had from that.
(10:07):
And guess what?
That's the information I needed.
Because what I wanted tobetter understand is where
people were finding that page.
Were they finding it froma Google search in this?
It was actually coming fromsome Reddit posts, , for me to
find that in GA four requiredme to pretty much create a
custom report just to findthe source for those pages,
(10:31):
It was cumbersome because Ilike jumping back and forth.
Okay, I looked at that.
Now I want to see who else waslooking, what other pages did
they go to from those sources?
And it required me tocreate several custom
reports within GA four.
And I realized I wasspending more time creating
customer reports as I wasresearching than actually
getting information outof it and realized, It's
(10:54):
not gonna get any better.
I'm not using this foran e-commerce platform.
I'm not trying to taketens of thousands of people
that visited in one dayand create user journeys.
I wasn't trying to tracka hundred types of events.
I have a verystraightforward website.
I know what my goals are andI realized that GA four is an
overkill for what I needed.
(11:15):
And when I started usingplausible and installed it,
I realized that for what I'm.
It actually is thefastest approach.
And what's kind of neat isI can own all of this data.
It has very few settings,but it has just what I need.
I am able to implement it.
In this case, it's on aWordPress site and it's either
(11:38):
a few lines of JavaScript ora single plugin that I drop in
there and tell it what the ideais of my account, and that's it.
It's ready to go.
It couldn't be easier.
It does have search consoleintegration, and so that
can also allow me to pullkeyword data from Search
(11:58):
Console, so I could see that,.
It does have theability to email me out.
Reports a weeklyemail, monthly email.
Or if I'm getting somekind of traffic spike,
it also has a singlepermanently delete button.
So if I decide I'm done,I don't want this data
out there anymore, I candelete and it's gone.
(12:19):
I don't have to worry aboutthat being in some kind of
database or anything likethat for years to come.
That's gonna beused for advertis.
It's very easy to shareand invite other people.
To the platform so that they canhave visibility into the metrics
and with their WordPress plugin.
(12:40):
It actually will takethe analytics dashboard
from their site and it'llactually implement it onto
the WordPress admin section.
And the last thing I canimport existing data from
my Google Analytics account.
Now, I didn't do this becauseI actually decided that I
wanted to start fresh and at apoint I actually had these both
(13:00):
running side by side becauseI want to see if there were
any data discrepancies, andI was pretty happy with the
data that it was providing me.
and as I'm using the interface,I'm reminded again, it has
real time, which is great.
I can see what's goingon on my site, right.
It has the data for today, andhere's the other thing, because
(13:20):
it's my own data, my data isnear real time, so it's gonna
show me pretty much up to theminute where in analytics,
sometimes it's delayed fora couple hours or maybe even
almost the whole day, dependingon what time of day it is.
One of the other issuesthat I was coming across
to was data sampling.
So data sampling iswhen an analytics tool.
(13:43):
It takes a subset ofall the data to show
or visualize the data.
Plausible doesn't do anydata sampling by default.
The stats in the dashboard area hundred percent accurate data
of what happens on your site.
Now, there are some dashboardviews that have a lot of data,
and if there's more than 20million page views, right?
20.
(14:04):
They do some limited datasampling to make the dashboard
load faster, but they donote that they do collect
and store a hundred percentof the data no matter how
many page views you have.
And they do have a statsAPI that always has
completely uns sample data.
So you could create yourown dashboard if you wanted,
(14:25):
that didn't have any samplingif you are over that 20
million mark that you need.
Again, these are allthings that GA four just
doesn't cut it for me.
Another thing that peoplehave asked about is custom
goals and events, and there'sa ton of types of custom
goals, page view goals, customevent goals like measuring
(14:45):
button clicks, purchases,subscriptions, form completions,
clicks on videos or audioelements, things like that.
All of those are available.
There's maybe a little bitmore, uh, set up as far as
the way these go than maybein your standard analytics
you have to add a little extrascript for your implementation.
But aside from that,It's actually really
(15:07):
pretty straightforward.
It does a great job takingUTM codes and making sure
that that's in there.
It does a great job ofintegrating search console,
knowing locations, the typesof devices that are available,
and allowing you to filter yoursegments by your audience type.
And it actually does a reallygood job of being able to,
in the interface, being ableto filter by page type by
(15:30):
URL using different typesof filtering and wild cards.
So again, there's just alot that this tool can do
for such an inexpensive andeasy to implement solution.
I really highly suggest you giveit a shot because this might
even be something that sitsnext to your GA four upgraded.
(15:51):
And you use it for your quickstats, your daily checks,
where maybe GA four, you haveto have a round because you're
using it with Google AdsNow, I haven't used this
on an extensively hightraffic site, and I don't
know if I would, but for thepurposes of what I'm doing,
this is an excellent tool.
I really think if you'vegot something, maybe it's a
(16:13):
personal blog, maybe you've gota small little e-commerce site
or something like that, andyou're, you're tired of Google
Analytics or GA four just seemscumbersome for what you do.
You know what, give this a shot.
Even if you just installedon there, I think they give
a 30 or 60 day free trialwhere you could throw it
on there and see all of it.
You could do a self-hostedversion as well.
But it's definitely somethingthat I would encourage you
(16:34):
to try out and maybe haveit sitting side by side.
And I do find that I'm reallyhappy with the interface.
It's really fast, and I'm ableto get the information that I
need without waiting throughmenu, after menu, after menu,
or creating custom reports.
So give it a shot.
Let me know what you think.
All right guys.
Thanks for listening.
Have a great day.
Hello everyone and welcome to the opinionated s e o.
Today I wanna talk aboutGoogle Analytics alternatives.
So we all heard GA fouris happening basically in
three months, and you'vegotta switch over from GA
three Universal Analytics.
Well, what if you don'twant to, and here's the
(00:21):
thing, if you aren't runningsome of the newest Google
ads, types of advertising,you may not need GA four.
If you are like me and you'vegot a couple dozen sites out
there that just need the basicsof analytics, you don't need
(00:43):
to get too crazy with, uh, userjourneys and things like that.
Maybe a more lightweightapproach is the way to.
So today I want to talk aboutone of my favorite alternatives,
which is called plausible.
All right, so I'll readtheir two sentence opening.
Plausible is intuitive,lightweight and open source
(01:06):
web analytics, no cookies, andcompletely compliant with gdpr.
C C P A and P E C R madeand hosted in the eu,
it works great.
Here's the thing thatI really like about it.
First of all, no cookies,meaning you don't need that
cookie bar on the bottomunless you're actually using
(01:26):
cookies for something else.
The other thing, it'sless than one kilobyte.
It's something like 40 timessmaller than Google Analytics.
so I want to go through acouple of the kind of Google
analytics verse plausible whenyou're going back and forth and
they've got a whole website.
(01:47):
You go to plausible.io andsee this for yourself, but I
thought I would just kind ofgo through it a little bit.
Their number one thing theysay is, Google Analytics is
complex, plausible is simple.
And when I first installedit, I really felt like
it's almost there.
I maybe need one or two things.
And after going through thedocumentation, it actually
(02:07):
had that and it was veryeasy for me to set up and
I'm extremely happy with it.
So the main thing they say,It's a set it one time really,
and it just starts collectingthe data and you really don't
need much more than that.
There aren't any layersof navigation menus.
You don't have tocreate custom reports.
Pretty much everythingis right there.
(02:28):
And the other thing I reallylike about it too, which is
their number two point is you.
Own the data, right?
So a hundred percent of theownership of your website
data, your privacy of yourvisitors, all of that is there.
And they have a self-hostedversion that you could
put on your own server.
It is open source, so you canhave it set up, you can see
(02:49):
all the source code, make sureyou're happy with that, and
having that completely saved.
They have a cloud version,which is super easy
to set up and install.
And by the.
This is $9 a month for up to50 websites, and I think 10,000
visits, something like that.
But we're talking when youstart getting into 10 or
20, $30 for, you know, tensand tens of thousands of
(03:09):
visits, you're pretty muchnot spending that much money.
But there's something tobe said about the fact
that it doesn't send any ofyour data to third parties.
None of this data isshared with advertisers.
All of the data is yours.
And it's fully compliantwith pretty much all
of the data privacies.
It's also open source, andit's available in GitHub so
(03:32):
you can go through it, haveyour developers look at it
and feel pretty confidentabout what kind of data
it's actually collecting.
It's been a big shiftwhere people are caring
about their privacy.
And with the advent of somany ad blockers, we're
just seeing more and morepeople, very privacy focused.
(03:52):
Being able to say thatyou aren't tracking people
through cookies, seems tobe a selling point for a lot.
Now when we're talkingabout compliance and
privacy regulations.
Gdpr, c, cpa, pcr, There'ssomething to be said about
making sure that you are notaccidentally collecting data
on people when it's actuallya liability for you to do so.
(04:16):
the Austrian and French dataprotection authorities have
decided as of January of 2022that the Google Analytics
implementation violates gdpr.
That can be an issue if you'redoing anything outside of
the us, but let's be honest,even here in the States, I'd
(04:38):
much rather if I don't needthat data to not have it.
So that's the other thing.
I don't need to have gdpr,C C P A P, ECR R, or Cookie
prompts, unless I'm actuallycollecting cookies outside
of Google Analytics becauseI'm using plausible now.
Let's talk about.
The actual size of this script,plausible analytics script
(05:02):
is more than 17 times smallerthan the Google Analytics
script, and more than 45 timessmaller than the recommended
analytics integrationusing Google Tag Manager.
Okay?
So think about that.
I mean, this is aone kilobyte file.
Compared to like a 40to 50 kilobyte file.
It may not seem like a lot, butremember that can't be cashed
(05:26):
because that has to get thatunique information every single
time and it's a separate server.
So it's just thatmuch more of a call.
And I think we've all seenthat on page speed insights
and it says you're callingout to third party tools and
hey, it's Google Tag Manager,it's Google Analytics.
You're like, this is Googleitself saying, hey, you
shouldn't be doing this.
And in a sense, This is a waythat you could work around it.
(05:50):
85% of all websites haveGoogle Analytics on it.
So think about that.
One company can prettymuch track 85% of websites.
That's.
Pretty scary to me actually.
They're the largest advertisingcompany in the world, and
they have the most databecause of that, and so I'd
(06:12):
almost rather not be givingthem that much information.
Remember, analytics scriptis also blocked by people
who are using uBlock Origin,Firefox and even some other
browsers are completelyblocking Google Analytics.
Plausible isn't part ofthe ad tech industry.
It doesn't track anyof your personal data.
(06:33):
A lot of these blockersaren't blocking it, so you
may actually get more data.
. You're probably alsothinking, why should I
have to pay for analytics?
Right.
Well, and you know theold story, if it's free,
then you're the product.
Well, yeah, that'sexactly what it is.
I'm actually happy paying my$9 $19 a month to a service
(06:54):
that's open source that givesme the data that I want, and
I know that it's not goingtowards advertising , my user's.
Isn't being sold, it'snot being shared or being
utilized by third parties.
And that's a reallyimportant part because a
lot of my sites are actuallylead gen type sites.
(07:14):
I'm trying to bringpeople to my site.
I don't want someone else tohave them now grouped into
their advertising audiencebecause they visited my site.
I wanna keep thatdata to myself.
And so this is one of thereasons why I like this as
an alternate, , I want totalk a little bit about what's
actually in the interface,what kinds of things I can do.
(07:36):
So I'm gonna just jump into.
My setup and just letyou know the basics of
what I have on here.
So so setup.
A minute, and if you haveWordPress, it's kind of neat.
They have a plugin, whichbasically is the smallest,
lightest weight pluginI've pretty much ever seen.
You put a little codein, hit a button, and
it's basically set up.
You don't have toreally do anything else.
(07:59):
In the initial interface,I've got unique visitors,
total visits, total pageviews, views per visit, bounce
rate, and visit duration.
Every single one of theseI can then filter on.
I've got sources, mytop pages, locations.
Devices and I havegoal conversions.
(08:20):
And in this case, what Iwant to do is maybe I want
to look at top sources.
I can set that as a filter.
I can do my top pages and Icould look at top entries,
top exits, or just ingeneral Top pages, locations.
I could do countries,regions, or cities, devices.
I could look at browser.
OS and the size.
And then goal conversionscan also be set up.
(08:42):
And they have a pretty,they have a couple that
are sort of standard, andI have an outbound click as
one of my goal conversions.
And in this case, thisis a website that I have
one of my other projects,which is a podcast for
first time home buyers.
And it actually has a lot oflistings, but it has links out
to the podcast on differentnetworks like your Apple.
(09:03):
, podcasts or Spotify, and Ilike to track to see how many
people are clicking onto thator what pages they're going to.
I do run Google adsto this as a test.
I do run Facebook and Instagramads as well, and I'm able to
see when people have clickedon those and come here.
but really this is99% of what I need.
(09:25):
I'm able to filter by time.
And by the way, guys, it's.
And lightweight, and that'spretty much all I needed.
Now, the main reason I startedlooking for an alternate is I
wanted something really easy.
I wanted to know wherepeople were coming to for
one of my pages on my site.
(09:46):
And so I went to thatpage here in this example.
I went onto Plausible,and I'm gonna look
over the last 30 days.
So I go and I click the url, orI could type it in as a filter
and I choose last 30 days.
And it tells me the topsources, the locations, the
devices, and how many goalconversions I had from that.
(10:07):
And guess what?
That's the information I needed.
Because what I wanted tobetter understand is where
people were finding that page.
Were they finding it froma Google search in this?
It was actually coming fromsome Reddit posts, , for me to
find that in GA four requiredme to pretty much create a
custom report just to findthe source for those pages,
(10:31):
It was cumbersome because Ilike jumping back and forth.
Okay, I looked at that.
Now I want to see who else waslooking, what other pages did
they go to from those sources?
And it required me tocreate several custom
reports within GA four.
And I realized I wasspending more time creating
customer reports as I wasresearching than actually
getting information outof it and realized, It's
(10:54):
not gonna get any better.
I'm not using this foran e-commerce platform.
I'm not trying to taketens of thousands of people
that visited in one dayand create user journeys.
I wasn't trying to tracka hundred types of events.
I have a verystraightforward website.
I know what my goals are andI realized that GA four is an
overkill for what I needed.
(11:15):
And when I started usingplausible and installed it,
I realized that for what I'm.
It actually is thefastest approach.
And what's kind of neat isI can own all of this data.
It has very few settings,but it has just what I need.
I am able to implement it.
In this case, it's on aWordPress site and it's either
(11:38):
a few lines of JavaScript ora single plugin that I drop in
there and tell it what the ideais of my account, and that's it.
It's ready to go.
It couldn't be easier.
It does have search consoleintegration, and so that
can also allow me to pullkeyword data from Search
(11:58):
Console, so I could see that,.
It does have theability to email me out.
Reports a weeklyemail, monthly email.
Or if I'm getting somekind of traffic spike,
it also has a singlepermanently delete button.
So if I decide I'm done,I don't want this data
out there anymore, I candelete and it's gone.
(12:19):
I don't have to worry aboutthat being in some kind of
database or anything likethat for years to come.
That's gonna beused for advertis.
It's very easy to shareand invite other people.
To the platform so that they canhave visibility into the metrics
and with their WordPress plugin.
(12:40):
It actually will takethe analytics dashboard
from their site and it'llactually implement it onto
the WordPress admin section.
And the last thing I canimport existing data from
my Google Analytics account.
Now, I didn't do this becauseI actually decided that I
wanted to start fresh and at apoint I actually had these both
(13:00):
running side by side becauseI want to see if there were
any data discrepancies, andI was pretty happy with the
data that it was providing me.
and as I'm using the interface,I'm reminded again, it has
real time, which is great.
I can see what's goingon on my site, right.
It has the data for today, andhere's the other thing, because
(13:20):
it's my own data, my data isnear real time, so it's gonna
show me pretty much up to theminute where in analytics,
sometimes it's delayed fora couple hours or maybe even
almost the whole day, dependingon what time of day it is.
One of the other issuesthat I was coming across
to was data sampling.
So data sampling iswhen an analytics tool.
(13:43):
It takes a subset ofall the data to show
or visualize the data.
Plausible doesn't do anydata sampling by default.
The stats in the dashboard area hundred percent accurate data
of what happens on your site.
Now, there are some dashboardviews that have a lot of data,
and if there's more than 20million page views, right?
20.
(14:04):
They do some limited datasampling to make the dashboard
load faster, but they donote that they do collect
and store a hundred percentof the data no matter how
many page views you have.
And they do have a statsAPI that always has
completely uns sample data.
So you could create yourown dashboard if you wanted,
(14:25):
that didn't have any samplingif you are over that 20
million mark that you need.
Again, these are allthings that GA four just
doesn't cut it for me.
Another thing that peoplehave asked about is custom
goals and events, and there'sa ton of types of custom
goals, page view goals, customevent goals like measuring
(14:45):
button clicks, purchases,subscriptions, form completions,
clicks on videos or audioelements, things like that.
All of those are available.
There's maybe a little bitmore, uh, set up as far as
the way these go than maybein your standard analytics
you have to add a little extrascript for your implementation.
But aside from that,It's actually really
(15:07):
pretty straightforward.
It does a great job takingUTM codes and making sure
that that's in there.
It does a great job ofintegrating search console,
knowing locations, the typesof devices that are available,
and allowing you to filter yoursegments by your audience type.
And it actually does a reallygood job of being able to,
in the interface, being ableto filter by page type by
(15:30):
URL using different typesof filtering and wild cards.
So again, there's just alot that this tool can do
for such an inexpensive andeasy to implement solution.
I really highly suggest you giveit a shot because this might
even be something that sitsnext to your GA four upgraded.
(15:51):
And you use it for your quickstats, your daily checks,
where maybe GA four, you haveto have a round because you're
using it with Google AdsNow, I haven't used this
on an extensively hightraffic site, and I don't
know if I would, but for thepurposes of what I'm doing,
this is an excellent tool.
I really think if you'vegot something, maybe it's a
(16:13):
personal blog, maybe you've gota small little e-commerce site
or something like that, andyou're, you're tired of Google
Analytics or GA four just seemscumbersome for what you do.
You know what, give this a shot.
Even if you just installedon there, I think they give
a 30 or 60 day free trialwhere you could throw it
on there and see all of it.
You could do a self-hostedversion as well.
But it's definitely somethingthat I would encourage you
(16:34):
to try out and maybe haveit sitting side by side.
And I do find that I'm reallyhappy with the interface.
It's really fast, and I'm ableto get the information that I
need without waiting throughmenu, after menu, after menu,
or creating custom reports.
So give it a shot.
Let me know what you think.
All right guys.
Thanks for listening.
Have a great day.
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