Google Analytics 4 Alternative - Plausible Analytics

In this episode of The Opinionated SEO, we discuss an alternative to Google Analytics, specifically for those who don't want to switch to GA4. We introduce one of my favorite alternatives, which is a lightweight and open-source web analytics tool that is fully compliant with GDPR, CCPA, and PECR - Plausible Analytics.
https://plausible.io/

Here are some key takeaways:
1. Plausible is a simple and intuitive alternative to the complex interface of Google Analytics.
2. With Plausible, you own 100% of your website data, and there is no need for cookie prompts.
3. Plausible's script is more than 17 times smaller than Google Analytics, making it a faster and more efficient option.
4. Plausible is fully compliant with GDPR, CCPA, and PECR, and does not share data with third-party advertisers.
5. Plausible offers real-time data and custom goals and events, making it a great alternative for those with small to medium-sized websites or personal blogs.

Transcript

Phil: 0:00

Hello everyone and welcome to the opinionated s e o. Today I wanna talk about Google Analytics alternatives. So we all heard GA four is happening basically in three months, and you've gotta switch over from GA three Universal Analytics. Well, what if you don't want to, and here's the thing, if you aren't running some of the newest Google ads, types of advertising, you may not need GA four. If you are like me and you've got a couple dozen sites out there that just need the basics of analytics, you don't need to get too crazy with, uh, user journeys and things like that. Maybe a more lightweight approach is the way to. So today I want to talk about one of my favorite alternatives, which is called plausible. All right, so I'll read their two sentence opening. Plausible is intuitive, lightweight and open source web analytics, no cookies, and completely compliant with gdpr. C C P A and P E C R made and hosted in the eu, it works great. Here's the thing that I really like about it. First of all, no cookies, meaning you don't need that cookie bar on the bottom unless you're actually using cookies for something else. The other thing, it's less than one kilobyte. It's something like 40 times smaller than Google Analytics. so I want to go through a couple of the kind of Google analytics verse plausible when you're going back and forth and they've got a whole website. You go to plausible.io and see this for yourself, but I thought I would just kind of go through it a little bit. Their number one thing they say is, Google Analytics is complex, plausible is simple. And when I first installed it, I really felt like it's almost there. I maybe need one or two things. And after going through the documentation, it actually had that and it was very easy for me to set up and I'm extremely happy with it. So the main thing they say, It's a set it one time really, and it just starts collecting the data and you really don't need much more than that. There aren't any layers of navigation menus. You don't have to create custom reports. Pretty much everything is right there. And the other thing I really like about it too, which is their number two point is you. Own the data, right? So a hundred percent of the ownership of your website data, your privacy of your visitors, all of that is there. And they have a self-hosted version that you could put on your own server. It is open source, so you can have it set up, you can see all the source code, make sure you're happy with that, and having that completely saved. They have a cloud version, which is super easy to set up and install. And by the. This is $9 a month for up to 50 websites, and I think 10,000 visits, something like that. But we're talking when you start getting into 10 or 20, $30 for, you know, tens and tens of thousands of visits, you're pretty much not spending that much money. But there's something to be said about the fact that it doesn't send any of your data to third parties. None of this data is shared with advertisers. All of the data is yours. And it's fully compliant with pretty much all of the data privacies. It's also open source, and it's available in GitHub so you can go through it, have your developers look at it and feel pretty confident about what kind of data it's actually collecting. It's been a big shift where people are caring about their privacy. And with the advent of so many ad blockers, we're just seeing more and more people, very privacy focused. Being able to say that you aren't tracking people through cookies, seems to be a selling point for a lot. Now when we're talking about compliance and privacy regulations. Gdpr, c, cpa, pcr, There's something to be said about making sure that you are not accidentally collecting data on people when it's actually a liability for you to do so. the Austrian and French data protection authorities have decided as of January of 2022 that the Google Analytics implementation violates gdpr. That can be an issue if you're doing anything outside of the us, but let's be honest, even here in the States, I'd much rather if I don't need that data to not have it. So that's the other thing. I don't need to have gdpr, C C P A P, ECR R, or Cookie prompts, unless I'm actually collecting cookies outside of Google Analytics because I'm using plausible now. Let's talk about. The actual size of this script, plausible analytics script is more than 17 times smaller than the Google Analytics script, and more than 45 times smaller than the recommended analytics integration using Google Tag Manager. Okay? So think about that. I mean, this is a one kilobyte file. Compared to like a 40 to 50 kilobyte file. It may not seem like a lot, but remember that can't be cashed because that has to get that unique information every single time and it's a separate server. So it's just that much more of a call. And I think we've all seen that on page speed insights and it says you're calling out to third party tools and hey, it's Google Tag Manager, it's Google Analytics. You're like, this is Google itself saying, hey, you shouldn't be doing this. And in a sense, This is a way that you could work around it. 85% of all websites have Google Analytics on it. So think about that. One company can pretty much track 85% of websites. That's. Pretty scary to me actually. They're the largest advertising company in the world, and they have the most data because of that, and so I'd almost rather not be giving them that much information. Remember, analytics script is also blocked by people who are using uBlock Origin, Firefox and even some other browsers are completely blocking Google Analytics. Plausible isn't part of the ad tech industry. It doesn't track any of your personal data. A lot of these blockers aren't blocking it, so you may actually get more data.. You're probably also thinking, why should I have to pay for analytics? Right. Well, and you know the old story, if it's free, then you're the product. Well, yeah, that's exactly what it is. I'm actually happy paying my$9 $19 a month to a service that's open source that gives me the data that I want, and I know that it's not going towards advertising , my user's. Isn't being sold, it's not being shared or being utilized by third parties. And that's a really important part because a lot of my sites are actually lead gen type sites. I'm trying to bring people to my site. I don't want someone else to have them now grouped into their advertising audience because they visited my site. I wanna keep that data to myself. And so this is one of the reasons why I like this as an alternate, , I want to talk a little bit about what's actually in the interface, what kinds of things I can do. So I'm gonna just jump into. My setup and just let you know the basics of what I have on here. So so setup. A minute, and if you have WordPress, it's kind of neat. They have a plugin, which basically is the smallest, lightest weight plugin I've pretty much ever seen. You put a little code in, hit a button, and it's basically set up. You don't have to really do anything else. In the initial interface, I've got unique visitors, total visits, total page views, views per visit, bounce rate, and visit duration. Every single one of these I can then filter on. I've got sources, my top pages, locations. Devices and I have goal conversions. And in this case, what I want to do is maybe I want to look at top sources. I can set that as a filter. I can do my top pages and I could look at top entries, top exits, or just in general Top pages, locations. I could do countries, regions, or cities, devices. I could look at browser. OS and the size. And then goal conversions can also be set up. And they have a pretty, they have a couple that are sort of standard, and I have an outbound click as one of my goal conversions. And in this case, this is a website that I have one of my other projects, which is a podcast for first time home buyers. And it actually has a lot of listings, but it has links out to the podcast on different networks like your Apple., podcasts or Spotify, and I like to track to see how many people are clicking onto that or what pages they're going to. I do run Google ads to this as a test. I do run Facebook and Instagram ads as well, and I'm able to see when people have clicked on those and come here. but really this is 99% of what I need. I'm able to filter by time. And by the way, guys, it's. And lightweight, and that's pretty much all I needed. Now, the main reason I started looking for an alternate is I wanted something really easy. I wanted to know where people were coming to for one of my pages on my site. And so I went to that page here in this example. I went onto Plausible, and I'm gonna look over the last 30 days. So I go and I click the url, or I could type it in as a filter and I choose last 30 days. And it tells me the top sources, the locations, the devices, and how many goal conversions I had from that. And guess what? That's the information I needed. Because what I wanted to better understand is where people were finding that page. Were they finding it from a Google search in this? It was actually coming from some Reddit posts, , for me to find that in GA four required me to pretty much create a custom report just to find the source for those pages, It was cumbersome because I like jumping back and forth. Okay, I looked at that. Now I want to see who else was looking, what other pages did they go to from those sources? And it required me to create several custom reports within GA four. And I realized I was spending more time creating customer reports as I was researching than actually getting information out of it and realized, It's not gonna get any better. I'm not using this for an e-commerce platform. I'm not trying to take tens of thousands of people that visited in one day and create user journeys. I wasn't trying to track a hundred types of events. I have a very straightforward website. I know what my goals are and I realized that GA four is an overkill for what I needed. And when I started using plausible and installed it, I realized that for what I'm. It actually is the fastest approach. And what's kind of neat is I can own all of this data. It has very few settings, but it has just what I need. I am able to implement it. In this case, it's on a WordPress site and it's either a few lines of JavaScript or a single plugin that I drop in there and tell it what the idea is of my account, and that's it. It's ready to go. It couldn't be easier. It does have search console integration, and so that can also allow me to pull keyword data from Search Console, so I could see that,. It does have the ability to email me out. Reports a weekly email, monthly email. Or if I'm getting some kind of traffic spike, it also has a single permanently delete button. So if I decide I'm done, I don't want this data out there anymore, I can delete and it's gone. I don't have to worry about that being in some kind of database or anything like that for years to come. That's gonna be used for advertis. It's very easy to share and invite other people. To the platform so that they can have visibility into the metrics and with their WordPress plugin. It actually will take the analytics dashboard from their site and it'll actually implement it onto the WordPress admin section. And the last thing I can import existing data from my Google Analytics account. Now, I didn't do this because I actually decided that I wanted to start fresh and at a point I actually had these both running side by side because I want to see if there were any data discrepancies, and I was pretty happy with the data that it was providing me. and as I'm using the interface, I'm reminded again, it has real time, which is great. I can see what's going on on my site, right. It has the data for today, and here's the other thing, because it's my own data, my data is near real time, so it's gonna show me pretty much up to the minute where in analytics, sometimes it's delayed for a couple hours or maybe even almost the whole day, depending on what time of day it is. One of the other issues that I was coming across to was data sampling. So data sampling is when an analytics tool. It takes a subset of all the data to show or visualize the data. Plausible doesn't do any data sampling by default. The stats in the dashboard are a hundred percent accurate data of what happens on your site. Now, there are some dashboard views that have a lot of data, and if there's more than 20 million page views, right? 20. They do some limited data sampling to make the dashboard load faster, but they do note that they do collect and store a hundred percent of the data no matter how many page views you have. And they do have a stats API that always has completely uns sample data. So you could create your own dashboard if you wanted, that didn't have any sampling if you are over that 20 million mark that you need. Again, these are all things that GA four just doesn't cut it for me. Another thing that people have asked about is custom goals and events, and there's a ton of types of custom goals, page view goals, custom event goals like measuring button clicks, purchases, subscriptions, form completions, clicks on videos or audio elements, things like that. All of those are available. There's maybe a little bit more, uh, set up as far as the way these go than maybe in your standard analytics you have to add a little extra script for your implementation. But aside from that, It's actually really pretty straightforward. It does a great job taking UTM codes and making sure that that's in there. It does a great job of integrating search console, knowing locations, the types of devices that are available, and allowing you to filter your segments by your audience type. And it actually does a really good job of being able to, in the interface, being able to filter by page type by URL using different types of filtering and wild cards. So again, there's just a lot that this tool can do for such an inexpensive and easy to implement solution. I really highly suggest you give it a shot because this might even be something that sits next to your GA four upgraded. And you use it for your quick stats, your daily checks, where maybe GA four, you have to have a round because you're using it with Google Ads Now, I haven't used this on an extensively high traffic site, and I don't know if I would, but for the purposes of what I'm doing, this is an excellent tool. I really think if you've got something, maybe it's a personal blog, maybe you've got a small little e-commerce site or something like that, and you're, you're tired of Google Analytics or GA four just seems cumbersome for what you do. You know what, give this a shot. Even if you just installed on there, I think they give a 30 or 60 day free trial where you could throw it on there and see all of it. You could do a self-hosted version as well. But it's definitely something that I would encourage you to try out and maybe have it sitting side by side. And I do find that I'm really happy with the interface. It's really fast, and I'm able to get the information that I need without waiting through menu, after menu, after menu, or creating custom reports. So give it a shot. Let me know what you think. All right guys. Thanks for listening. Have a great day.