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Originally Posted On: https://www.bignewsnetwork.com/news/272777996/five-alternative-tools-to-build-up-your-analytics-monitoring-from-scratch

 

Tracking every visitor to your website is necessary these days if you want to increase your conversion rate and optimize your earnings. Usually, most webmasters go with Google Analytics when they intend to do so. Here I’d like to describe a few other options you can choose when setting up your website analytics from scratch.

Website owners use web analytics reports to analyze their site’s behavior and provide valuable insight into how visitors arrive, what they want to read, and how visitors convert into customers.

It won’t be a secret that Google Analytics is the most common choice of website owners for tracking traffic and user information. According to a study by W3techs, Google Analytics is used by 85.8% of all the websites whose traffic analysis tools were known. This is 55.6% of all websites.

Analytics can also be helpful in providing website owners with valuable customer data for further marketing activities. It can be used to run targeted ads by the website owners themselves or even third-party companies.

‘Google Analytics (GA) is a popular web analytics tool, but it’s far from being perfect when it comes to respecting users’ privacy.’ — Erin @ Matomo

In this article, let’s consider a few alternatives to the most common approach of building web reporting with Google Analytics.

 

Google Analytics is not the only choice

 

Unfortunately, Google Analytics collects a lot of personal information about users. This is why it is essential to weigh all pros and cons before using it for your web analytics and monitoring.

Google Analytics collects user data from every website that has its code installed. This allows advertisers and tracking companies to collect valuable information about users’ activities and preferences.

Even with the help of ad blockers and other trackers, Google Analytics can still collect details about a user’s IP address and user agent string whenever they visit a site that uses the GA network.

This information is usually enough to identify a user’s specific web activity. There are various debates about whether this type of invasive tracking is legal. In Europe, several governments have already banned the use of this type of tracking.

Despite the various laws that have been put in place to protect users’ privacy, many websites still ignore the requirements of the law. Some users are also becoming more concerned about the privacy of their online activities and the companies that collect this data. They’re avoiding sites that use Google Analytics.

Note: By default, Google Analytics is not compliant with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). It is still required for website operators to make the necessary changes to ensure that their tools comply. For instance, they need to obtain end-user consent before collecting and storing their data, update their privacy policy, and remove or anonymize their data in GA settings.

 

Finteza

 

Finteza‘s pen portrait system allows you to visualize your audience in a way that’s easy to understand and doesn’t violate their privacy. It breaks down the data collected by various sources to create a personalized view. With the ability to combine multiple audience samples, you can easily create reports.

Finteza allows you to evaluate your traffic for bots, scammers, spammers, etc. You can better protect your website and recognize bad traffic sources.

Also, with the help of an automated funnel, and source tracking, it is easy for you to optimize your online presence.

With a graphical interface, you won’t have to spend hours just analyzing the data. It lets you know about the traffic sources, traffic growth, and so on at a glance. That way, even if you’re new to web analytics, this tool can help you understand the data of your website or app easily.

 

Clicky

 

Clicky is a good choice if you’re looking for a web analytics tool that offers you a heat map. Besides that, it automatically filters out the bot traffic, giving you more accurate data.

By default, it is privacy friendly; therefore, using this analytics tool, you won’t have to worry about integrating any other warnings for your visitors.

It provides you with the visitor and action logs in a detailed manner. That is why, if you want to optimize your campaign, you can do so.

An additional feature of this web analytics tool is that it allows you to monitor the uptime — so that you know instantly if and when your website goes down.

 

Hubspot

 

Most of you know Hubspot as a CRM tool. However, most webmasters don’t know that it also offers web analytics solutions.

The platform offers you a dedicated dashboard for reporting. Through this dashboard, you can view the analytics and create various reports for gaining insights and making presentations if needed.

HubSpot integrates web analytics with the CRM database. That way, you can keep track of multi-touch points that generate revenue and directly use these analytics for making marketing decisions.

 

Piwik PRO Analytics Suite

 

Piwik PRO Analytics Suite is another web analytics platform that allows you to measure the visitors across your website and apps. It provides excellent data security. Besides that, it does not intrude on the privacy of the visitors.

The advantage of Piwik PRO is that it allows you to track the entire journey of the visitor. That way, it is easy to understand the weak points in your sales funnel and which visitors are converting the best.

It allows you to measure various KPIs and handle the deployments accordingly. That way, you can make quick decisions to ensure that you can better optimize your website and apps to generate more revenue.

 

Microanalytics

 

Microanalytics is famous for its user-friendly interface. Also, it is compliant with most tracking rules and regulations in Europe.

Real-time analytics ensures that you can strictly watch the visitors to your website. Apart from that, it provides a simple graph to view all the data. Consequently, it becomes easier to know whether your website is growing or stagnating.

If you want to use the API of this tool to integrate it with any other dashboard, you can also do that. That way, if you use third-party software for measuring KPIs and want to use your website analytics for the same, you can do that easily.

While this tool might not offer you in-depth analytics, if you’re looking for a simple tool that measures the basic analytics of your website, you can certainly go with this one.

Getting the information that you need from your visitors doesn’t mean that you’ll be selling their data to advertising firms.

In this article, we’ve checked different tools that can help you collect detailed data on your users while preserving their privacy. These tools don’t require external infrastructure and can be integrated in a day. The choice is yours!