De-Googling my life #3: Finding better website analytics

Google as a company is synonymous with the Internet. But the company that once declared a motto of “Don’t be evil” is now very much drawing on the power of the dark side to maximise its profits and limit competition.

Now that a US court has found that Google illegally monopolised Internet search, I feel it is time to de-Google my life.

Across a series of guides, I’ll be sharing my journey to remove my reliance on Google. I’ll compare alternatives, test them out and try to find the best alternatives for my needs.

Part of the challenge of breaking up with Google is that it permeates every aspect of your life. As someone who has been working in digital publishing since 2008, there has barely been a workday in the past 16 years I haven’t opened up Google Analytics.

For most of that time, I actually liked using Google Analytics. It was intuitive, offered plenty of great data quickly and easily, and was super easy to set up on my websites.

But that all changed a couple of years ago when Google launched GA4.

GA4 was – and still is – a painful, counter-intuitive, substandard piece of crap software that people only continue to use because it is free, and it seems overwhelming to change platforms.

No longer a platform for publishers, GA4 is designed for marketers. More specifically, it’s designed for marketers who spend money on Google Ads. It’s a platform optimised to show marketers how to optimise their ad spend (which often leads to spending more on Google Ads).

If I sound cynical, it’s because I am.

Fortunately, GA4 being so ridiculously bad is an opportunity to reassess what you want, or even need, from an analytics platform. Not to mention, it gives you the opportunity to simplify the whole data collection and privacy policy of your website’s visitors.

Because even though you probably know it, I’ll say it again. Google Analytics is a free tool because you are Google’s product. You are not its customer.

While you’re using GA4 to track your website visits and the success of your last marketing campaign, Google is hoovering up that data (anonymised, of course) for its purposes.

Back when Google’s motto was “Don’t be evil”, the benefit of being able to see detailed information about your customers was probably worth it. But these days, I personally feel like the sacrifice is too great.

So what are the Google Analytics alternatives?

The good news is that there are plenty of alternatives to GA4. The bad news is that you’re most likely going to have to pay for them.