Google Analytics is undoubtedly the biggest contender in the market when it comes to web analytics and reporting. But despite the many positives of Google Analytics, it is not always the best solution for all use cases. Yes, it is free, but it has its own share of drawbacks too.
If you have tried measuring your website’s or blog’s performance on Analytics for a while, you must have come across problems like incomplete data. There are also privacy concerns in sharing your website’s data with one of the world’s biggest tech giants.
To add to it, Google Analytics lacks some of the advanced functionalities that many other web analytics software offer today. The user interface is also quite complex and you need to spend a generous amount of time learning it first.
If you are measuring sponsored content, ecommerce or paid social programs, we highly recommend using Pressboard Studio. It's custom built to handle content-based advertising programs. However, if you're looking for a more general-use analytics platform, here are a few very useful Google Analytics alternatives you can try.
Google Analytics alternatives
HubSpot offers a CRM software that has marketing analytics, reporting, and dashboard tools. The tools offer data on traffic sources, lead conversions, lead engagement, and much more. HubSpot offers valuable insights and suggestions for the entire lifecycle of a campaign, offering analytics on campaign performance and conversions, from beginning to end. You can also create custom reports and views to show the data that matters most.
The platform also has numerous other tools including SEO, Social Media, Ads, CTAs, and more.
HubSpot offers several free tools as well. But the paid plans for Marketing and Sales products that include analytics start at $800 per month and $450 per month respectively.
FoxMetrics takes web analytics one notch higher by storing all your data in a data warehouse and generating reports via SQL. By allowing you to access your data through SQL, it allows you to create specific queries. So you can reports with the exact information that you need, instead of the standard reporting that most other tools provide.
FoxMetrics helps you identify your most successful campaigns and marketing methods to increase your ROI further. It also offers single customer views, that collect data about every action a single customer takes so that you can gain some actionable insights on high-potential leads. None of these features are available with Google Analytics or most other popular tools.
There is a lot more you can do with FoxMetrics. It has a free plan and paid plans start at $299 per month for 1 million actions.
Mixpanel is a slightly unconventional web analytics software that goes beyond just measuring the number of views on your web pages. It focuses more on the actions taken by users on the site to understand user behavior. The tool lets you create user flow maps to see how users navigate through your products or content and identify where drop-offs are occurring.
Real-time reports on user behavior from Mixpanel can be really useful in lead nurturing and engaging users through messages at the right time.
Mixpanel has a free package as well as paid plans starting at $25 per month.
Woopra is an analytics tool that focuses mostly on customer journeys from end to end. The tool tries to understand user actions to visualize their journey across multiple touchpoints. This helps in better user engagement, retention, and segmentation. Woopra also offers easy, one-touch integration with more than 50 other products including Google Ads, HubSpot, Salesforce, and more.
Woopra helps with real-time actions based on triggers activated by user behavior. For instance, it can send your sales team a message on your integrated messaging app as soon as a new user signs up. The user interface is extremely easy to use. You can migrate existing customer data from other platforms to Woopra seamlessly.
The core plan is free and the paid plans start at $349 per month.
Matomo is a one-of-a-kind analytics tool that offers you features you will not find in any other web analytics tool. Matomo also positions itself as a better alternative to Google Analytics. It claims to offer more data privacy than Google Analytics.
The diverse features that the tool offers include web analytics, heat maps, A/B testing, video and audio analytics, and much more. Further reinforcing their position as an ethical web analytics tool, Matomo lets you host the platform on your own servers too if you are concerned about sensitive information being leaked. You can opt for both on-premise or cloud solutions with Matomo.
There are both free and paid plans. The free plan for the on-premise solution comes with limited features and more features can be added with an annual fee for each.
Conclusion
If you are willing to put in enough time and effort, Google Analytics may prove to be a useful web analytics tool. But it still has some major roadblocks that are bound to pose challenges now and then. From data privacy to incomplete data to complex user interfaces, several issues make Google Analytics a dicey choice for many applications. These alternatives offer almost all the features you get with GA and even more in most cases. Go ahead and experiment with these new tools to feel the difference.
