Jason Packer - Google Analytics Alternatives: A Guide to Navigating the World of Options Beyond Google

IT'S AN INTERESTING TIME to work in analytics. As web and digital analytics have matured and attracted more attention over the last decade, there's also been significant technological and regulatory change. I think of web analytics as an accidental industry, one that began as a generally ignored offshoot of IT that's grown to be an important part of marketing, product, and development.

Web analytics remains new and ever-changing, evidenced by the lack of a consistently used name or definition within the field. What kind of analytics is it? Web? Digital? Product? Mobile App?

Google Analytics (GA) has been the predominant analytics tool since its launch in 2005 and is so entrenched, it's become synonymous with the term "web analytics." Google has also helped move the field from its roots in IT towards marketing integrating GA into its larger advertising technology stack and focusing functionality on marketing analytics.

If the first age of web analytics was the era of log file processing and Webtrends, the second has been client-side JavaScript and Google Analytics.

However, on July 1, 2023, this era will come to an end, as Google Analytics Universal Analytics (UA) will no longer process new data. Six months after that, access to historical data within UA will also disappear. This abrupt end to 18 years of contiguous data has upset many people and brought into question Google's long-standing dominance in the field.

In this guide, we'll look at some of the most popular alternatives to Google Analytics and create a decision-making framework to select a new solution. Instead of declaring a single best solution, it'll inform you of the available options and how to choose between them.

Even though this is a guide to GA alternatives, we will approach GA both as a baseline for comparison and as a potential solution itself. You may find GA4 is the right solution for you, but my goal is to help you make that choice in an informed way.

I come at analytics from a technical perspective, so this guide will be oriented towards technical details more than business concerns.

You also won't find any big lists of feature comparisons. Instead, I look at the point of view that each tool comes from and its most appropriate use cases.

Giant feature comparison matrices are helpful, but they can also be misleading and cause choice paralysis. Just because a feature is available doesn't guarantee it'll be able to solve the particular issue you have. The vendor's idea of what checks that feature box may not align with how you envision that feature. Additionally, those comparison lists become outdated very quickly, with features and pricing changing even from week to week.

We'll go through a series of Universal Analytics alternatives, review their pros and cons, and compare them to each other. I'll do my best to highlight features that I think are most representative, but we will not go deep into implementation details. I also treat GA4 as one of these alternatives, endeavoring to look at it with fresh eyes rather than in the shadow of UA.

The choice at hand is between GA4 and its competitors, not UA. UA can provide us with context for our comparisons, but that's all. Many people in the industry (myself included) hoped Google would somehow find a way to continue the functionality of UA, but they've given no indication of this, so we have to proceed assuming UA's days are numbered.

Tool choice is only part of the equation of a successful analytics implementation. No solution will meet your needs perfectly it's about finding the best fit and then putting in the time to learn, customize, and implement the tool. All too commonly, companies abandon Tool A for Tool B because they think the former isn't right for them, but in reality, they simply failed to use it well.

The background context we will go over in Part One of this guide is not only to help with tool selection, but to provide a better understanding of the paradigm the tool works within. It's my belief that this deeper understanding will also help to better utilize whichever tool you pick.

Chapter 2 - The Product Space

OUR FIRST STEP IS to list the potential Google Analytics alternatives to evaluate. We seem to be moving into an age where no single tool will dominate the market, so it's important to identify all the possibilities rather than blindly relying upon one market leader.

This is a difficult task, because the web analytics space is incredibly crowded with tools all vying for your attention and a spot in your tag manager. GA is currently the most popular solution, but there are a multitude of other options so many, it's impossible for me to evaluate them all (sorry to disappoint if you were hoping for a 1,000-page book).

The famous ChiefMartec industry map (available at https://martechmap.com), which you now need an electron microscope to read, lists 120 vendors in the "mobile & web analytics" category, but there's certainly more than that! Many lesser-known options (such as PostHog, which we'll evaluate later) are not included on the map. Plus, solutions that should be in that category aren't (e.g., Simple Analytics is a web analytics tool but is listed under "Dashboards & Data Viz").

We're starting with more than 120 possible solutions. But with seemingly every article and product review site listing a different group of purported alternatives, how do we proceed?

I imagine the first thing many people (including myself) would do is Google Search for "Google Analytics Alternatives," implicitly trusting Google to give us an unbiased opinion on how to replace their product. As is typical with this type of search, there are some good results, along with plenty of junk written solely for SEO.

You'll see a number of vendors (e.g., Semrush, Hubspot, and Leadfeeder) with their own lists that just happen to feature their product at number one. Hat tip to their content teams, but those tools aren't GA alternatives. Some lists also include items that are in the same space but are not web analytics tools (e.g., session capturing, SEO tools, etc.).

So, before we identify possible alternatives to GA, we need to define what GA actually is and the space it occupies. GA has a ton of features that allow it to be compared to a number of different types of tools. However, just because GA can do rudimentary heat-mapping doesn't mean we should consider a heat-mapping tool like CrazyEgg or Hotjar a GA alternative. Similarly, GA can monitor site speed via real user monitoring (RUM), but that doesn't make a web performance tool like SpeedCurve or New Relic a GA alternative.

Many of GA's secondary features are limited in scope and functionality. GA4 attempts to improve the tool's focus by jettisoning many of the poorly implemented legacy features. This narrows what GA4 can do, but in a good way, I believe.

By our definition, an "alternative" is something that can replace a significant amount of the GA core functionality