Google analytics is widely used by website owners and bloggers, to track website and users metrics such as number of daily visits, top visited pages and more. As to April 2022, it’s used by over 35 million websites worldwide. Another source states that out of all websites using an analytics product, 85.8% use Google Analytics.
So why would you look for an alternative of a popular tool such as Google Analytics? We’ll cover several reasons in this post, and suggest other alternatives, which may be a better fit for WordPress website owners and bloggers.
Why you should stop using Google Analytics
- It only provides metrics and numbers, but no visuals. You can’t see what your users are doing and how they are using your website.
- It’s owned by Google, the largest ad company in the world, so you’re actually trusting them with your users information, and your website information.
- It’s on overkill for most bloggers. It offers over 150 menus and submenus, while in most cases you’re interested in just a few simple metrics.
- You must disclose to your users that you’re using Google Analytics, because of GDPR laws and other privacy reasons. So it’s a privacy burden.
- When you show cookie consent popups (as you should with Google Analytics), you’re damaging your users experience with your website.
- It’s free – and when a product is completely free, it means your website and users are the product, and their information is used by Google to build their products, which is something to keep in mind.
- For privacy reasons, Google Analytics can no longer show you important information such as the actual keywords your users used to find your website and blog posts, so some of the information is practically useless.
- Google Analytics is widely blocked by common Ad Blockers, which means you’re not really getting accurate information on your website visitors.
What you should look for in a WP Analytics product
- Super easy and simple to use.
- Allows you to track important numeric metrics such as daily visitors, top blog pages.
- The product should auto-generate insights for you – for example, where is best to place your Call To Action (for example, subscribe to email list banner) in your blog posts?
- To learn how your users are using your website, it should allow you to view your users session recording, while masking all private information to keep their privacy.
- Well, you should probably look for a tool that was built around 2022, and not in 2005 (cough, Google analytics).
So if you’re looking for a WordPress analytics tool which is not Google Analytics, we invite you to try out Visualime for free. It’s not a Google Analytics alternative, but rather a whole different approach for WordPress Analytics. It’s simple, easy to use, visual and to the point.