The simple answer: If you’re a small business or individual with ethical values it’s definitely time to ditch Google Analytics.
Google Analytics is the industry standard in web analytics software, with over 28 million websites using it to track their visitors. However, it has become increasingly apparent that Google’s data collection practices are anything but ethical, leaving many website owners to question whether or not they should continue using it. Ethical Consumer also rates Google a very low 5 out of 20.
What’s so bad about Google Analytics?
Everybody loves free software until they realise that much of that software is not actually free. You’re just paying for it in a different way, and when it comes to tech giants like Google, that means data.
When you, the website owner, install Google Analytics on your website, you’re giving them free rein to track a staggering amount of data about your visitors. This includes not only the pages they’ve viewed on your website but where they live, age, gender, and what they spend their time doing on their phones.
While that doesn’t sound so bad on its own, when Google pieces together the information that you gather on your site and combines it with what it’s harvested across the 28 million other sites using its software, it gets a bit scarier. Now Google knows about your personal life. It knows about that new job you just got, and it knows that you’ve moved to a new house recently. It even knows if you’re expecting a child or if you’ve just received a devastating medical diagnosis, and all this information is for sale.
Google has come under fire numerous times for its shady tracking practices, including secretly tracking the phone locations of Android users and illegally collecting personal data from children through YouTube, which cost them a hefty $170 million settlement with the FTC. They even have a special Wikipedia page dedicated just to their privacy violations.
This has left a bad taste in the mouth of consumers, but Google mostly ignores their grievances. What Google can’t afford to ignore, however, are other tech giants who see Google’s missteps as a way to gain market share.
The fight to protect your data and privacy
The result of this data harvesting has pushed many end-users and even web browsers themselves to disallow tracking by default. For website owners, this means that the data they are trying to use to optimize their websites is incomplete.
It’s estimated that 58% of tech-savvy audiences block Google Analytics by default, and the numbers are higher for Firefox users (88%) and Linux users (82%). However, the most punishing move of all comes from Apple, which has made it clear with their iOS14 update that they will protect users from unethical tracking practices.
Apple controls over 50% of the smartphone market, taking the demand for privacy out of the hands of niche tech audiences and into the mainstream. This move was enough to cause Google to panic ever so slightly, abandoning IDFA tracking over the fear of losing iOS audiences, but their newly proposed solutions aren’t any more ethical, just skirting the rules to keep harvesting data.
All this being considered, what’s a privacy-concerned website owner to do?
Enter Plausible: An ethical alternative to Google Analytics
If you’re tired of allowing Google to harvest you and your visitor’s data, then Plausible is a great alternative to consider. Here’s why it’s better than Google Analytics.
No annoying cookie pop-ups, it’s GDRP, CCPA, and PECR Compliant
Unlike Google Analytics, Plausible does not collect any personally identifiable information (PII). Instead, they use a more privacy-friendly method involving the visitor’s IP address and their User-Agent. These data points are then anonymized so they can’t be traced back to the end-user.
In addition, all data is aggregate only. That means that instead of zeroing in on individual users, Plausible helps you to track overall website traffic and trends. This is much more respectful of your visitor’s privacy, and it’s much more useful to you anyway. Instead of data bloat, Plausible provides you with actionable metrics you can use to see how visitors respond to your content.
Plausible also does not track across devices, websites, or apps, and any data it captures is isolated to a single day. This means that in addition to not collecting personal data, it does not follow your visitors across the web to invade their personal lives. All of this means that a GDPR warning is unnecessary because your website never collects the kind of information data protection laws are concerned with.
Plausible isn’t blocked by default like Google Analytics
More and more third-party browsers such as Firefox are blocking Google Analytics by default, and while it’s impossible to prevent everyone from blocking your tracking scripts, Plausible is a good deal more effective than Google Analytics in this regard.
100% Your own website data
Unlike Google Analytics, Plausible does not sell or share your data in any way. Everything that is collected is owned by you exclusively. If you use their hosted services, data will be collected and securely stored on their servers in the EU, powered by European-owned cloud infrastructure, affording you and your visitors the benefit of the European Union’s robust privacy laws and protections. If you ever decide you want to stop using Plausible, your data will be permanently deleted at your request.
Auditable open-source software
Plausible is open-source software, and you can view the code for yourself fully on Github. If you’re not technologically inclined, this means you can audit the entire source code of the software to verify it’s what it claims to be. This kind of transparency is refreshing since a lot of analytics software is closed-source, including Google Analytics, leaving you to just trust that the developers are being honest with you. With Plausible, you can verify their claims with your own eyes.
They also have a public road map and are open to feedback from the community, allowing you and other website owners the opportunity to help shape the future of analytics on the web.
The software is lightweight and won’t slow your site down
Google’s tracking script will add about 45.7 KB to your page load and will even flag as a problem on its own PageSpeed Insights when testing your site but Plausible’s tracking script clocks in at under 1KB.
If you were to simply swap Google analytics to Plausible and you have 10,000 monthly visitors, you can save 4.5 kg of CO2 emissions per year by switching.
Check how your website is impacting the planet here: websitecarbon.com
It’s super easy to install and has a WordPress plugin
Plausible can be easily installed with a single line of code placed in the header section of your website. However, they’ve also got a super easy-to-use WordPress plugin if you don’t want to mess with the coding of your WordPress site. If you do need some help setting it up, just get in contact.
Analytics made simple
Google Analytics does give you a lot of data, but are you even using it? Plausible’s goal is to provide only the most valuable and actionable data to website owners. Their simple interface is a welcome change from the overly complicated and clunky layout of Google Analytics.
With Google Analytics, all of your data is hidden in sub-sections, making it very frustrating to navigate the dashboard. Even if you have a good deal of experience with analytics software, it’s a pain, but it’s a nightmare for less tech-savvy business owners who don’t want to make analytics their full-time job.
Plausible’s interface brings your most useful data right to the dashboard, including your unique visitors, your bounce rate, visit duration, traffic sources, and your top pages, everything that most websites will get the most value from.
However, if you need more than that, Plausible also supports easy-to-set-up and intuitive goal tracking so you can monitor your email sign-ups, file downloads, and conversions more easily. This allows Plausible to be as simple or as complex as you need it to be.
They aren’t harvesting and selling your data
Unlike other analytics tools, Plausible is not profiting from your website data. They also do not have investors and are entirely self-funded. This is important because it removes conflicts of interest and helps them maintain the software’s integrity.
So, how do they make money? Well, while the software is completely open-source and free to use if you install it yourself on a server, you also have the option of using their hosted version. So, if you’d like to support the project, the best way is through a hosted subscription. They also donate 5% of their revenue to environmental causes, so you’re helping the environment, too!
In short, Plausible is a fantastic piece of open-source analytics software and is something I’m always going to recommend going forward, and you should give it a try today.
