Why I still hate Google Analytics and what you can use instead

How much do you care about your website traffic? If the answer is, I kind of care about it, then you might have noticed a lot of people talking about Google Analytics this week. Long story short, Google changed over to a new version of analytics called Google Analytics four. They announced this change a few years ago, but as of this week, the previous version of analytics is no longer available to use.

It's a great time to check in on your website analytics. Make sure it's still tracking the way you expect it to, and to consider whether it's time to switch to a better tool. In this episode, I'll share why Google Analytics is so popular. A few alternatives if you hate it as much as I do, and what to look for when choosing your website analytics tools.

I'm Lex Roman, and this is the Low Energy Leads Show.

As we're talking about Google Analytics and other alternatives to website analytics, I want you to just pause and think about if you even care about website traffic. A lot of times people will think that data is just good for data's sake, right? More data is better, and I don't actually think that's the case.

You really wanna know, like, how am I gonna use this information? What is it for? So here's some things to ask yourself to confirm that you actually do care about your website traffic. Just because you have a website doesn't mean that you have to have analytics on that website, and some website builders come with built-in analytics, which might be enough for the occasional question that you have about your website.

So the reason to actually think about your website tools to think about Google Analytics and other website analytics tools. In my mind, it comes down to three things. The first thing is if you have a lot of landing pages and offers, so if you're running different landing pages, you're sending people, like maybe you're doing podcast guesting or you have different courses that you're offering, you might wanna track how people are getting to those different pages, which pages they're going to.

The second thing is if you're transacting through your site, If you are running orders through your site, website analytics matters a lot because you can see where people dropped off on their way to purchasing. And the last thing is, if you blog a lot or if you care about Google search, I put these things together because in general, blogs go right hand in hand with Google search.

So if you're doing a lot of writing on your website and you care a lot about Google search, then you're gonna care about your website traffic and you're gonna wanna know more about it. You're gonna wanna know where those people are coming from, the search terms they're using, and how they're navigating around your site.

So I'm gonna assume that since you're listening to this episode, you care about your website traffic. Let's talk about why Google Analytics is so popular. Why has it been the go-to for so many of us? For so many years? Google Analytics has been around since I think around 2005, so it's a little bit less than 20 years old, but it has quickly risen to be the most popular, most ubiquitous web analytics tool and actually app analytics tool out there.

Here's some of the reasons why Google Analytics is so popular. Google Analytics is free. People like free. Um, I think that there's still not a clear sentiment from the majority of internet users that when something is free, it means that your information is being sold. Or your customer's information is being sold.

So in this case, Google is using our information to piece together comprehensive pictures of us around the internet that they can leverage in their ads products. The second reason is that it's from Google. Google is a name brand. So people are drawn to name brands, they recognize it. So simply Google is a dominant tech company and that is why a lot of people gravitate towards their products.

And lastly, Google makes search. Google and search are the same thing. Google is the main player in the search space and since many website owners want to be showing up in Google searches, they are drawn to choosing Google Analytics. So you might be going, Lex, why do you hate Google so much? It's sounds like pretty okay, right?

I've been using it. It's fine. Let me tell you why I think Google Analytics sucks. I've been talking about how much Google Analytics sucks. For many years. When I worked inside app companies, we used more robust tools than Google Analytics, and the main reason why is that Google is really complicated. The number one reason I hate Google Analytics is that it is from Google.

So Google is. A well-known bad player in the tech space. They do a lot of really harmful things. So in general, I am a proponent of independent or nonprofit or more ethical tech companies. When we can get away from big tech, I think it's advantageous for us to do so, and I think we wanna support an internet that is more widely held, not held in the hands of the few.

The second thing that sucks about Google Analytics is that it uses cookies. So you're probably now pretty familiar with cookies with in the introduction of things like the GDPR and California's privacy acts. And so cookies track people at a level that they're mostly unaware of or were previously mostly unaware of.

And what cookies do is they've put together a picture of your internet behavior. Now, a caveat to this is that that's true of most analytics. Whether or not people are using Google Analytics, it is not however true of the tools I'm gonna show you today. Most of the tools I'm gonna show you today are cookie lists, so they do not set cookies in your browser, and that makes them GDPR compliant and compliant with a lot of privacy laws in other countries as well.

The main reason though that I really hate Google Analytics is that it's super convoluted. It is by far the most complex analytics tool out there. It is actually pretty challenging to get an analytics tool that sucks as much as Google. Like, I don't know who they're putting on the design team over at Analytics, but it is bad.

It is really hard to use. It does not work outta the box. And I think this change that they've most recently made from the version many of us were using to what's known as Google Analytics for is even more complicated than what we were looking at before. So while they were trying to make it a little bit more customizable for us, it actually made it work worse out of the box.

And it takes a lot of effort to make Google Analytics. Actually readable, Google's free, and it's probably already installed on your website if you have a website. So why switch? Why bother switching? My deciding factor is this, if you want the info about who's using your website, how they're using your website, where they're going, where they're coming from, but you cannot understand where to find this information in Google.

I think you should consider a switch, and once you see how possible it is to get that information, how easy it is to get that information outta these other tools, you're gonna wanna pay a few bucks a year to make sure that you can see this information about your website. Okay, so what else are we checking out?

I've compared Google here to three other tools you could use. Plausible, fathom and Persh. All three of these tools were designed to be a competitor to Google Analytics, an alternative to Google Analytics. All three of them have a privacy mission, so they were really developed and sort of like forced into market or created out of a need from the GDPR compliance from the new move towards transparent cookie alerts.

So things like those cookie banners that you see. Out of that work globally in different countries, these tools have emerged. So in the past, like if you've been building websites for 10 years, if you've had websites for longer than five years, let's say, you probably didn't have that many alternatives to Google Analytics that made sense to pay for.

But now there's a lot more opportunity in the space. There's a lot more tools that you can be trying out in terms of how people are navigating to and around your website. So if you're watching this on video, you'll see I have a grid here of some of the things that you might wanna look at when it comes to your website.

We talked earlier about wanting to look at things like landing pages. People were viewing where people were coming from, so the sources of your website traffic. And we also talked about Google search. So if people are using Google search to get to your website, you might wanna know what are they searching to get there.

Let's talk about how Google stacks up first on these counts and why. I think it's really a convoluted choice when it comes to website analytics. Technically, Google is tracking. I. All of the information that you need to understand about your website, but they've just made it really buried and abstract in their interface.

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I don't use Google Analytics for the podcast. I use plausible, so I haven't set this up at all. There's no customization happening here. This is the default out of the box view of ga. You can see by default it shows me day by day traffic, which is great. That's pretty basic functionality for any website tool, but then everything else that shows up by default is not that useful.

It's a bunch of different settings and sort of empty boxes. And down here you'll see sessions. And it'll say Sessions by default channel. And so what that's trying to communicate is where my traffic is coming from. But instead of just saying, your traffic is coming from Facebook, your traffic is coming from Google.

Google has instead abstracted that and used labels like referral. Which means other websites on the internet. So all other websites on the internet are going into that category, organic social, which means Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, et cetera. And so I just don't think that's an insightful view. You can of course, customize that, but they've made that all sort of challenging by default, and you really have to get in here and, and set up your reports the way that you like them and sort of understand what Google's trying to communicate.

For you and then you know, sort of ignore or hide things that you don't find that useful. Like I don't find countries that useful. I'm more interested in cities. So you can adjust everything that you're seeing in Google, but it just takes a a while to sort of understand what they're trying to do. They overcomplicated it because what they really wanted to do was serve app developers and so, The reason that it doesn't make a lot of sense for website owners anymore is that it was really created with app developers in mind.

Another weird choice that Google has made here is that they've made it pretty impossible to connect Google search terms to your website behavior. So, If you see that people are coming in from Google it, it actually is really convoluted to figure out what they're searching to navigate that, which is again, a super weird choice given that they're both, it's all coming from them.

This is all their ecosystem. So just kind of speaks to the silos within a big organization that the Google Analytics and the Google search teams are totally separate. They've made that really hard to use. There are a couple advantages to using Google over the other tools we're gonna talk about today.

And so I just wanna show you those real quick. One of them is that Google offers what's called a path exploration. So what that means is when people start on your homepage, Let's say they start on the blog, you can see where they navigated to on your site. So you can see, oh, they're coming in from the blog and then they're going to my services, and then they're making an inquiry.

So you can see how people are clicking around on your site, which might indicate, you know, whether or not calls to actions are working, or whether or not you're providing clear pathways through your site. Of course, you can see now that I've loaded up what that path view looks like, that it's really complicated.

Everything in Google. Requires a little bit of a learning curve. You'll need to read some articles about how to set up this funnel. And I'll be honest, it's not gonna be that insightful if you're running a website. This is again, made for app companies, so you know, for the general website owner, you just don't need this level of information about your website.

It's not going to illuminate that much for you. So, It's cool if you're like really a data ahead, then you can get in here and geek out over where people are going on your site. But a lot of the standard page view level metrics are gonna show you enough information. The second advantage Google has is that they do track people across their devices.

Now, this is a, is a two-sided coin, right? As a website owner, maybe you wanna know that Sally is using her phone and her computer to navigate your site. You don't want that counting as two visitors cuz it's just one person. But it's also, it gets to the heart of the privacy issue, where the way that they do that is by tracking all of us at a really deep and creepy level.

So again, it's an advantage a little bit in the data realm, but you know, at what cost is the question. So Google does that. None of these other tools will do that because of their privacy mission. I just wanna pause here and say that if you like Google Analytics and you find it intuitive, by all means continue to use it.

I just don't wanna have to spend so much time learning how to use their interface, learning how to get the information that I want out of it. So when I learned about some of these other alternatives, I was over the moon and happy to pay a few bucks a year to just have a lot more ease in understanding how people were using my site.

I shared earlier in this episode that the three other tools we're gonna look at today are plausible, fathom, and persch. You'll notice when we have a look at these three tools that they all kind of look similar. They're definitely keeping an eye on each other, and I think it really comes down to what your preference is and also the price point.

They are a little bit different in price, but they're all pretty affordable tools. If website traffic matters to you, When I have a look, first at Plausible, plausible is the website analytics tool that I use. I think their UI is really nicely done. So you can see here that you get a single report view.

This is what I love the most about these three tools. They don't put a bunch of things behind tabs. They just load up what you need to know. So the things we talked about earlier, what pages are people coming to on your site? Where are they coming from to get to those pages? How long are they spending there?

And you might also wanna track campaigns. So if you're running ads or you're running podcast promos and you wanna see, oh, these people came from this specific place, you can use something called a U T M link and that'll load really nicely into plausible, and you can also set up goals. So we talked about earlier, maybe there's a specific page you really wanna make sure people are reaching, or a page that loads after a form submission.

You can set those up just by adding the page path. You just go into your settings and you say, if people visit slash register, please show me those as a goal. And plausible actually recently introduced funnels. So you can see how people are navigating through your site in a specific case. Like for example, if you have a freebie and you wanna see how many people are downloading the freebie off of a blog page, aside from the single report view, which again makes it so easy to load and understand how your website is working.

One of my favorite things about Plausible and Fathom and Persch do this as well, is that you, if you see something in your analytics and you wanna know more about it, You can click through and it will filter the entire dashboard to highlight. Now you might say, why isn't Google Analytics doing that? And that is a great question for their team.

But let's just have a look here so we're implausible. I'm gonna click on Twitter. So this is people who came to our website from Twitter. Now I can see more detail about that channel and I can see what the top pages are that they came to. So where did they land? You can also go the other way, so you can start from a page you care about, like register, and you can see the top sources that are going into that page.

You can also look at entry pages, so that means where are most people starting on your site? Not always the homepage. Sometimes they're starting on another page and exit pages, which shows you pages where people are kind of dead ending on your site. Another thing that's really great about Plausible is when people are coming in from Google search.

You can integrate your search console with plausible, so it will show you the actual search term people use to get to a page. And again, you can click on a page and see the search terms that are leading to that page. So it just makes it really easy to piece together that data, the journey from Google, search your site.

In one single dashboard, plausible has given you everything that you need in order to understand how your website is performing, how your campaigns are performing, and where your traffic is coming from. Fathom, you'll notice is really similar. They have a one page report that loads up where you can see the pages people are going to, where people are coming from to get to those pages.

Devices, browsers, countries and goals. You can also send U T M parameters into fathom and all this stuff will load up for you really nicely. Fathom also has one click filtering, so if you click on Google as a source, you can see where people traveled when they came from Google. So Fathom is really pretty similar to plausible.

I just thought plausible as UI was a little bit nicer. I like the little icons. I like how the filtering works and the way that they laid out their report just a little bit better, but it's a little bit Six have one half dozen of the other. Moving over to Persh, you'll notice again, Persh is set up really similarly to the other two tools.

You have your unique visitor count on the top. Your pages people are visiting refers specific pages you wanna highlight as conversion goals, location keywords from analytics and devices. So, All of the same information is loading in all of these three tools. It really comes down to your preference for how you want to read this data out and also on price.

That's really what separates these tools. I think the one thing that Plausible has that Persh and Fathom don't have yet is the funnel view, but I don't know that I would make that a deciding factor because again, on a website, like there aren't that many funnels. You're really just going page to page I I don't know that this is that insightful.

I always like to track things from the end. So if you know, if you're having an issue with people signing up for something or coming from a certain page, you can usually figure that out in just the page level. Visit data. So, all in all, I think the tool that you choose really comes down to your preference on pricing, your preference on ui.

Which tool do you think is the most intuitive to use? You can try each of these tools out. Each of them has a free trial and you can also check out their live demos on their websites to see how they work. For many years, website owners were stuck with Google Analytics as their main option. So it's cool to see many players entering into the simple website analytics space.

If your website is an important hub for your business, check out Plausible, Fathom and Pirsch. I linked them in the show notes and they all have tools to import your Google Analytics. If you make the switch, I'd love to hear what you think about this episode. Leave me a voicemail at lowenergyleads.com. You can also take charge of your lead generation every week with the Low Energy Leads Newsletter, where I share tips on staying booked with less effort.

If you're experimenting with how to find your best clients on repeat. I'm excited to share with you a new event that I'm gonna be hosting throughout July called The Growth Gym. Join me Fridays at noon Eastern on LinkedIn and YouTube to learn how to make smarter bets with your marketing. Get on the Low Energy Leads Newsletter to make sure you're notified about those.

Until next time, remember to keep your energy low until you know the value will be high.